{"id":185,"date":"2005-11-23T03:35:00","date_gmt":"2005-11-23T10:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gregwhitephoto.com\/blog\/?p=185"},"modified":"2009-09-08T17:25:37","modified_gmt":"2009-09-09T00:25:37","slug":"saigon-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gregwhitephoto.com\/blog\/2005\/11\/saigon-and-more\/","title":{"rendered":"Saigon and More"},"content":{"rendered":"

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11-23-05
Hi all. Sorry It\u2019s been so long since I\u2019ve written. I\u2019ve been to Nha Trang, Hoi An, Halong Bay and am now I Hanoi, trying to sit still for a few days and REGROUP before my Vietnam visa expires and I am forced to fly off to Laos. Let\u2019s see, where do I start? So in my last posting from Dalat I whined about finances a lot and promised to write about Saigon. I\u2019ll avoid whining about money this time. Saigon is a big city \u2013 over 8 million people call it home, but somehow it feels small. Perhaps this is due to the fact that compared to any city in America, it feels squashed together. I\u2019m not sure how to explain how densely populated this city is. There are motor scooters and people everywhere. Walking across the street required a strong will and a deep faith that every motor scooter driver careening directly at you will, at the last moment, swerve around you. It\u2019s almost best to just close your eyes and slowly…steadily..walk\u2026across the street. Riding on a motorbike is nearly as frightening. This was the first place since I left Bangkok that I was too chicken to rent a scooter. It looks like suicide to me. However, somehow all but a few people do it every day without accident. I was befriended by several local college students who took me out to the local hangouts, cheap dinners, and bowling. It was a great time. Only one of them could speak English in sentences that I could, with effort, comprehend. But the difficulty in having deep conversations was easily compensated with the feeling that I was really experiencing Saigon the way the Saigonese do. At least, the way the college-aged Saigonese do. They had almost no money, but they insisted on paying for everything. On our last night together (I went out with different combinations of them for 3 nights), I was giving a chime as a gift from one of them. It was so sweet. They were really great kids. Well, they certainly looked like kids. Vietnamese people look about 10 years younger than they are. And as you can imagine, I tower over everyone. Cau. That means tall in Vietnamese. I hear that word a lot when I am walking down the street or through markets. I am now conditioned to hear it as if my name was just spoken, so I always turn my head when I hear it\u2026because I know who they are talking about. This always makes them smile, because they suddenly realize they\u2019ve been caught talking about me. Then they say something else in Vietnamese to me, expecting me to understand\u2026and of coarse I don\u2019t. My Vietnamese is limited to about 10 words, unfortunately. Saigon really comes to life at night. There are little plastic chairs and tables that come out and cover the sidewalks, make-shift kitchens consisting of a burner and a big pot of something yummy, along with a big bowl of cooked rice are set up everywhere as soon as it starts getting dark. The tables are sized to be perfect for a very small child. The \u201cchairs\u201d a laughable little boxes of plastic not much larger than a shoebox. Sitting in one for long periods of time is guaranteed to make you sore. However, the food you get from these little street stalls is great. Strange meats wrapped in banana leaf. Cow? Pig? Dog? Pig I think. Dried squid. Pho\u2026delicious noodle soup with fresh sprouts and basil and thin slices of meat. Bia hoi. This means \u201cfresh beer\u201d. It\u2019s brewed locally, every day, and is meant to be consumed that night. Anything not sold is dumped. A big glass is 1000-2000 dong… about 7 cents. It\u2019s cold and very light, lemony, and delicious. Cheaper than bottled water. Vietnamese, the language, has 6 tones, and if you use the wrong tone, even if you pronounce the word perfectly, you will be stared at as if you were speaking gibberish. It\u2019s frustrating. I\u2019ve really given up trying at this point. I have better luck just pointing, gesturing, and often\u2026being completely misunderstood. To hear them speak, you would think that they are all yelling at each other. The all sound like they are pissed off, even if they are just talking about the weather. I think it\u2019s partially because the tones that are required to be understood make them have to emphasize words by saying them harder or louder than other words\u2026so they sound so serious and angry even when they are just chatting. It\u2019s so strange. Anyway, I only got to hang out with a few other local people who spoke limited English, a couple of women from Nha Trang. We met one afternoon on the beach and ended up going out to dinner and walking around the town. They were a lot of fun, but the next day I met a bunch of fellow tourists on a snorkeling tour boat which turned out to be a big party boat. Everyone got smashed on free Dalat wine and danced to the crappy live band on the tiny boat. There were about 10 westerners \u2013 I was, as usual, the only American, and about 30 Vietnamese. They made us look like timid pussies. They were jumping around in their undies on the \u201cdance floor\u201d, having a great time while we just stood back and laughed. I met Nada and Marc on the boat. We were all heading to Hoi An so we ended up meeting again there. Nada moved to my hotel and we ended up spending several days together in Hoi An. That\u2019s another story. What happened when I met Marc and Nada was this: I stopped mingling with the Vietnamese and started mingling with people with whom I could speak to easily. So my immersion in the culture sort of shifted to outsider again\u2026but the trade off has been to have two new friends that I\u2019ve shared really great times with as we traveled together. We are all actually sharing a big room tonight. Marc is leaving for India tomorrow, and I will be heading to Laos in a few days. Nada is heading to Bangkok and then to Australia. So we are all parting ways for what may be a very long time \u2013 perhaps never meeting again\u2026but I know I should never say never. So, tonight we are going to go out and get drunk in Hanoi. This means I need to stop writing. I still have so many more stories to tell! So next time I need to talk about my adventures in Hoi An and Hue with Nada and then our rendezvous with Marc in Hanoi, and the adventures we shared in Hanoi and Halong Bay! It\u2019s so hard to keep up! Tonight more adventures will pile up on the old ones!<\/p>\n