Posts Tagged ‘Vietnam’
Tête-à-Tet, And Various Other Miscellanea
I’ve now been abroad longer than I ever have before, by about two weeks and a few days. No homesickness, per se — the opposite, in fact — although I do miss friends and family, naturally, and I would happily murder a random stranger if I thought it would make a proper burrito spontaneously spawn in my general vicinity. I’ve finished the CELTA successfully, and have partied like a rock star (which is easy to do in Sai Gon) this past week with my fellow CELToids and Tet revelers, both foreign and local. As I write this Tet, as the Chinese or lunar new year is called here in Viet Nam, has more or less wound down — businesses are reopening and the streets, while still not as crowded as normal, are getting busier. And I’ll probably spend a nice, quiet Saturday night tonight reading a book (actually it is now officially over, and I did spend Saturday night at “home” reading).
This is going to be a long, meandering post, as there is much I wish to reflect upon for my own edification. Between meeting so many different people, the borderline insane intensity of the CELTA and the borderline insane intensity of the ensuing celebratory debauchery – I’m too old to be watching the sun come up several days in a row, dammit – I feel the need to unburden my mind and make some sort of linear sense of it all, if that’s possible. I’ve crammed more living into the last six weeks than I’m accustomed to – and I think that’s a good thing (although I probably overdid the debauchery a bit, but what the hell) – but now I need to step back and ponder things.
Plus it’s a good excuse to loaf all afternoon in a café, not that one needs an excuse to do that in Viet Nam, as café culture is flourishing here (thank you French colonialism) even as it fades away elsewhere — kind of ironic, that. In fact, loafing in a café is what I was doing last weekend in the picture above, recovering one steamy afternoon from the second of several post-CELTA all-night revels. What you see on the left is the sublime taste of nirvana that is Vietnamese iced coffee with sweetened condensed milk. When it is served traditionally like this, you have to wait until the coffee stops dripping from the grounds suspended above the glass, and the anticipation is sweet, sweet torture.
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DWA: The Boy Who Lived
So, I took my life in my hands today and took my first ride out of District 1 solo, all the way to District 7, which sounds farther than it is. It is actually only a few miles — about 5 or 6 kilometers, according to my cyclo driver friend Den. But the only option I had for a route was on major thoroughfares — imagine 3 or 4 lanes of road clogged with motorbikes and the occasional smog belching bus or truck, and the odd cab (and taxi drivers here drive like they do all over the world). Then consider the fact that this is Southeast Asia, where the rules of the road are different and largely unwritten.
Oh, and I forget the odd pedestrian and street vendor pushing their cart along the road.
In fact, you see people doing things all the time that would get them killed in a place like the U.S. But here, everyone does it and everyone expects it, and it works. The trouble for someone like me is, understanding is one thing, putting it into practice is another. For example, you’ll often see people running lights here, and turning left into oncoming traffic — but sussing out when you can do such things and when I can’t is where things get tricky. I suspect it’s just that I’ve been conditioned for years not to do such things; my instincts are the exact opposite of the locals. Furthermore, often times when I react to a situation and ride defensively, it’s usually the wrong thing to do — it’s much better to placidly ride on like the Vietnamese do, and let the other guy doing something crazy just do it.
She Was Looking Out For My Dong
So I’ve been in Viet Nam a week, having spent most of that in the backpacker section of District 1, Ho Chi Minh City, which is pretty much an international circus — fun, but rather crazy. I’ve turned down so many touts, xe om drivers, ladies of the evening (and in some cases ladies of the afternoon) and various other peddlers in the neighborhood so often that half of them just look at me and smile and wave and don’t bother with the sales pitch. The other half shake their head and look away in frustration and disgust; it’s inconceivable why a rich American would want to walk somewhere when has a choice to do otherwise.
But I guess I’m like Larry Darrell in Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. I’m content to loaf in the corner cafe with my books and interior monologue; no I don’t need xeroxed pirate copies of the latest Dan Brown opus or Lonely Planet Laos; I don’t need my shoes shined or my sandals repaired. No, I don’t need a xe om ride somewhere. A massage? No thanks, I don’t need a massage with or without a happy ending. Yes, I’m sure she’s very lovely and very young, as you say, but no thanks. No, I don’t need “boom boom” either. Yes, I’m sure she’ll do everything, but no thanks, no boom boom today – some other time, perhaps.
Heck, most of the working girls now ride up to me if they see me walking down the street at night (I’m big enough and tall enough that I must be a foreigner), hop off their motorbike, walk up to me, begin their sales pitch, recognize me, laugh, mock me — “ah, you go with me ’some other time!’” — and hop back on the bike and ride away. I should add that most people here looking to make a buck off foreign tourists are actually pretty easy going. I always smile when I refuse and say “no thanks” — I’ve even learned to say it in Viet — to show that there’s no hard feelings and no loss of face, and almost always, the smile is returned and they back off (plus it’s cute when the working girls act all pouty and sad). Sure, there’s a few that push the hard sell (and I confess there have been a few lovelies I’ve been hard pressed to say no to), but they are the exception rather than the rule.
If Only Graham Greene Were Here With Me …
But I don’t think he would recognize the Saigon I’m coming to know.
So, I’ve been here three days and a few odd hours, and I’m still trying to wrap my head around what I’ve experienced of Ho Chi Minh City a.ka. Saigon. I’ve tried a couple of times now, but there is just too much going on — the food, the history, the people (both the lovely, amazing Vietnamese and the 20-something backpacker crowd, not to mention the assorted goofy tourists), the sing-song language (which I find alternately soothing and fetching when women speak it and amusingly odd sounding when men speak it), the omnipresent motorbikes, the city that’s awake and partying to the wee hours and yet awake and moving before the sun — it’s too much to absorb and elucidate effectively in such a short time.
We should also bear in mind that I arrived on the weekend of celebrations for the calendar New Year (Tet, the lunar new year celebration here, isn’t for a month or too yet). In short, I landed in the middle of a huge party/circus. At least that is what it felt like. Or perhaps I fell through Hunter S. Thompson’s looking glass (this is what it felt like my first night here, wandering around). Furthermore, I know that what I’ve seen of Saigon so far — District 1, essentially — is not representative of the city as a whole, much less of Viet Nam (from what I gather Hanoi, for example, is very different — as much as Atlanta is from New York, or LA from San Francisco, for example).
So I guess for now I’ll stick to an interior monologue for now. Getting ready to come here was even more overwhelming than what I found on upon arrival; who would have thought getting rid of all of one’s worldly possessions would be so hard? It turned out to be exceedingly difficult, and even involved getting screwed over by a charitable organization (not to mention T-Mobile). For the rest of my life I’m going to do my best not to acquire anything more than what I can carry on my person. Stuff = complication, one way or the other. No baggage of either the physical or mental variety is my motto for life.
You’re Gonna Move Where to Do What?
It’s been interesting to note people’s reactions when I tell them I am moving abroad indefinitely, namely Vietnam (yes, I finally decided to say to hell with it all and take off for parts unknown — to me, at any rate — as my heart has been yearning to do for four years now). It’s an interesting reflection of people’s personalities and their fear, knowledge (or lack thereof) and prejudices. Having moved around a lot in my two decades as a more-or-less adult, and having traveled a bit abroad, it hasn’t been surprising, what some people are harboring inside their heads when tell them I’ll be moving to Saigon/Ho Ch Minh City at the end of the year with no specific plans to return in the immediate future. But that’s not to say it is not still an interesting and sometimes amusing window into people’s thoughts.
When the subject of your departure comes up you expect inquiries into why you are moving and when, of course. You expect people that have traveled there or similar places to share their own experiences, discussing the merits/drawbacks to moving to such a place and living in such a culture. These are generally the responses you get. But sometimes the people you least expect are the ones that have excellent advice or otherwise worthwhile observations to make about your destination or its culture, having been there themselves, or having had friends that have visited there or are even from there. Still others surprise you with envy — people you might not expect are harboring dreams of far-away lands and exotic cultures.
Then there are those who offer the odd non-sequitur or reveal a typical bias, the kind that boggles the mind that it still exists in this day and age. Those are the ones that are the most amusing.