Angkor Wat July 26, 2011

 I like Cambodia. When we crossed the border and it took the officers all of  three minutes to glance at my paper work and slap a visa in my passport (after inquiringly amicably about how I liked being a teacher in Vietnam), I had a feeling this would prove to be a laid back sort of place. And it is. I hardly ever have an exchange with a Cambodian person without them chuckling, even if I am refusing to ride in their tuk tuk or telling them that their dried mangoes are too expensive.  

Being shamefully ignorant of Asian things (and never having seen Tomb Raider), I hadn’t heard of the Angkor Wat temples until I arrived. But they are a pretty big deal – easily on par with Macchu Picchu, almost up there with the Pyramids. People come to Cambodia just to see them. And, after having spent a full day wandering under the benevolent stone gazes of giant mossy buddhas with my mouth hanging open, I can understand why.

Angkor Wat is a city of temples built in around 1000bc. I spent eight hours there and only saw about five temples. There are far more, and some people buy passes that last days, but it for me it was better to soak in the sublimity in smaller doses. One of the coolest things about Angkor Wat is that it is located in forest threaded with streams and ringing with the calls of songbirds, so you can kind of get an idea of what it must have been like to go there back when the city was first constructed. It is still a very touristy place, don’t get me wrong, but there were moments when I spotted an elephant trudging along in the distance and imagined I was in a different time.

Some of the temples are gigantic and remarkably well preserved, and some of them are in the process of being swallowed back up by the jungle. I’m just going to finish this post up with a few pictures, as I think trying to describe them myself would be an exhausting and futile exercise. But take my word for it – they are pretty damn amazing.

PS: If you are interested in another take on these travels, Clara’s blog link is http://clara-keepingitreal.blogspot.com/

Laos, or Bits of It July 24, 2011

Our time in Laos ended a little sooner than we had planned, basically due to poor planning/geographic knowledge. Our delightful bus journey ended in the capital city, Vientiane, which is very near the Thai border. We had been planning to high tail it to one of the charming French colonial towns in the north according to lonely planet at first opportunity, but a certain hesitancy to get on another bus for fifteen hors, and the fact that Vientiane was shockingly quiet and mellow for a capital city and had a lot of nice coffee houses, kept us where we were. When our roommate at the hotel, a girl we had met in Hanoi, said that she was going to the Four Thousand Islands in the south, we decided that this sounded pretty exotic and tagged along.

 For those of you who are like me and never glanced at a map carefully enough to realize Laos is a landlocked country, the islands are in a river, not in an ocean. A huge, brown, fast moving  river that I came close to falling into several times whist disembarking rickety boats with sixty pounds of luggage dangling off my shoulders. I’m not sure if there are really four thousand, but the two that we were on were pretty small. And more rural than anywhere I had been on the trip so far. The roads were all narrow and unpaved, various farm animals wandered around freely, and the housing situation was limited to wooden bungalows on stilts, teetering over the river. The bungalows weren’t terrible – the bed was large and had a mosquito net, and the nightly rate was about the same cost as a cappuccino – although I had been hoping for accommodation that didn’t involve trooping across the road and through the neighbor’s yard to use the toilet.  

 

The islands themselves were pretty in sort of a rural way. Once you left the little bungalow neighborhood, most of the landscape seemed to consist of miles of delicate green rice paddies glistening under the sun.  The island’s claim to fame is that it is home to the rare Irrawaddy dolphin, which I never even saw a satisfactory picture of, much less poking its head out the murky drown river as I leaned over the porch rail of my bungalow in the morning. Clara and I spent our second day there walking through the rice paddies for miles in search of a waterfall which was supposed to be worth seeing we were too cheap to pay a tour boat to take us there. We did eventually find it, and I dutifully took photos, although it seemed to be more like particularly aggressive rapids than an actual waterfall.

After island life got old, and after realizing we were way closer to the border with Cambodia  (the last country on our hit list) than we thought, we decided it would be futile to head north again to see the rest of Laos, and instead booked a bus to Siem Reap. So Laos turned out to be a bit of a bust, since we ended up staying there less than a week in total. Although I can’t say I feel one way or another about it, that is probably my own fault, and I certainly have nothing against it.

The Bus Trip from Hell July 18, 2011

Clara and I are now in Laos. But it wasn’t easy.

The bus trip from Hanoi to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, is more than twenty hours, depending on the road conditions and the driver. We knew when we purchased our tickets that it wouldn’t be a fun trip, but we’d been on sleeping buses in Vietnam before and they weren’t so bad -they had bathrooms, air conditioning and enough space for a fairly small person, anyway. But this trip would be nothing like we expected.

Let’s start the journey in Hanoi, where, after arriving at the tour office at 5pm as we were told, we are told to follow a man on a motorbike. Following someone through the narrow, chaotic streets of Hanoi is hard enough when that person is NOT on a motorcycle and making no effort to slow down enough for people on foot dangling with heavy backpacks. We followed this fellow to several more tour offices, where he collected a following of tourists who seemed similarly confused at being asked to follow a man who spoke no English on foot through the city. Finally, he herded us all onto an overcrowded shuttle bus, which was to take us to a larger bus station outside the city. We all assumed things would look up once we were free of this guy and on the big bus to Laos. But our troubles had only just begun.

Upon arriving at a closed car dealership on the side of a highway about a half an hour outside Hanoi, our usher had us disembark, and then proceeded to divide us into different groups. This was a little strange, since the majority of us were headed to the same location in Laos. Someone mentioned that is was like arriving in a new place and being sold into slavery – “you guys shall labor in the mines, and you all serve in the master’s house”.  Eventually, the usher herded the others down the street and out of sight, inexplicably leaving me, Clara, and five other girls by the car dealership.

We ended up waiting about an hour (the bus was supposed to have left an hour before,) before our guide returned and had us get into another shuttle, which dropped us off further down the highway, under a bridge, with no bus in sight. After ordering us to stay put, he zoomed away on his motorbike.

It was getting dark by this point. We were attracting a crowd of curious onlookers, some of whom ventured to ask us what we were doing under a bridge  on the side of the road with all of our possessions. I kept thinking, this is exactly how hapless foreigners get robbed and kidnapped. Mindlessly following the sketchy directions of someone they don’t know.    We decided to call the agency we’d bought the tickets from, who, after about twenty minutes of phone tag, simply told us to wait for the man to reappear.

And reappear he did, at nine pm, three hours after we were supposed to have left for Laos. He waited down the road from us, perhaps noticing that our eyes were all shooting daggers. When a bus finally lumbered into sight, he ordered us to get on. I was about ready to hail a taxi back to the city and forget this guy by that point, but we did as he said.

My first thought upon entering the bus and being confronted by the sight of approximately a hundred Laotian men surrounded by mounds of boxes and luggage was, hell no. This was nothing like the other sleeper buses we had been on, and was clearly not the bus we had bought tickets for. But something compelled me to climb aboard (ok, so it was Clara poking me in the back.) The aisles were completely piled with luggage; we had to clamber over it to reach the two last seats in the very back of the bus.

It should be noted that sleeper buses are bunked with two levels, and the seats can be laid more or less flat. The worse location on a sleeper is in the very back, were the seats don’t recline all the way and are in a row of five, so that you don’t even have a margin of space to yourself. Clara and I were in the very back, crammed in a row with three men roughly twice our size.

I hate to return to this offensive analogy, but do you remember reading about slave ships in history class? About how the poor souls were laid out in cramped rows in a dark, hot, smelly cargo hold with no bathroom and how the swaying and bucking of the ship made it impossible to sleep? That’s all I’m going to say about that.

I will spare you the details of our twenty hour journey, but the good news is that we did arrive in Laos with visas in hand and our luggage and sanity more or less in tact. The worse part is, we will probably have to repeat the experience several more times before our travels are over. I will try not to think about it too hard.

Hanoi and a Couple Surprises July 18, 2011

Truth be told, I was a little nervous about going to Hanoi. Not that I feared for my life or anything, but I’d heard that Northern Vietnam tended to be kind of unfriendly to Americans. Not that I expect everyone to love me, but still. Does “kind of unfriendly” mean throwing stones at me or just not smiling when giving me change at the store?

Turns out people in Hanoi were just as friendly and polite as people in the south. Aside from a donut vendor trying to overcharge us by about four dollars, we had no problems. The main reason we were in Hanoi wasn’t to hang out in the city, anyway; it was to see nearby Halong Bay. Other than Ho Chi Minh’s face, Halong Bay’s mystic limestone islands are the quisessential image of Vietnam. Countless people every year shell out wads of cash to float among them in rustic looking wooden boats housing a few cabins, and that is where Clara, me, and a few other American girls spent two days, along with a guide and a seven person crew.

Halong Bay

It was overcast and misty when we set out on our voyage, drifting over the still waters of the bay in-between the strange, fog-threaded limestone islands. We asked our guide what had caused these oddly shaped, free-standing cliffs to form, but the only explanation he could give us  involved a myth about either a giant turtle or a dragon (I can’t remember which). So I’m not sure of the geology behind the limestone islands, but they were pretty cool.

We made two stops on our trip. One was to take a walk through a cavernous limestone cave located in one of the islands, and one was to kayak through another cave into sort of a grotto -  like a crater in one of the islands, encircled by tall, rocky walls trailing with lush vines and delicate trees. No pictures – I didn’t want my camera to get wet.

The other stop was to the “surprising cave”, which was enormous and full of odd rock formations, highlighted tastefully with an array of neon lights.  It was called “surprising” because of the shapes you could supposedly see in the formations.

Surprising enough for you?

While this cave was pretty impressive, I must digress back to Hoi An for a moment to mention another one that we visited. This one was a cave  that our bus to Hanoi stopped at for a half an hour. I feel like it deserves some attention, because I really liked it, even though it wasn’t in our guidebook and seemed to be more of a roadside attraction that a worthy tourist destination. After paying about 75 cents, we passed through the mouth of the cave, flanked by murky pools of water with stone hands reached out of them. As we moved through caverns and passage ways, different grotesque, menacing statues leered at us from the shadows. Things got even creepier as we descending narrow, slick stairs – in every crevice and hollow, someone had placed a horrific stone statue, including a man getting eaten by a frog, a woman getting tortured by demons, and a large group of people being pursued by skeletons. It was like descending into the underworld. I assume the only reason the nasty statues were there was for the amusement of tourists, but I have to admit, I was very amused.

One of many carvings of people being eaten by things

But back to Halong Bay. We anchored in the water to spend the night before heading back to the city in the morning. Since there were only five of us, we soon became bored as night fell. The Vietnamese “crew” noticed this and invited us to join them. Turns out, one of the crew member’s friends had a birthday, and since there were so few tourists on the boat, he had decided to invite a few of his friends along for the ride for a little party. This is something they could get in big trouble for, so perhaps that was why they plied us with beer, rice vodka and freshly caught fish. It is safe to say that we didn’t mind.

Halong Bay was mystic and beautiful, and I’m very glad I saw it. However, embarrassing as it is to admit, I almost enjoyed the roadside cave of spooks more. Just proves that Vietnam is a country full of surprises.

Hoi An July 14, 2011

There are several reasons I am very glad I decided to spend my travel time in Vietnam instead of one of the other nearby worthy tourist destinations.  For one thing, it can be done very cheaply – even though Clara and I have been both known to drop more money than we should on imported treats things like Ritter Sport and Mambas, the combined cost of transport, food and lodging has remained delightfully on the low side. We rarely pay more than five or six bucks for a fairly nice hotel room. For another thing, there are way cooler places in Vietnam than Saigon, and I am glad I have had a chance to see them before getting out of the country. Hoi An is one of those places.

A street in Hoi An

After leaving Da Lat and spending a couple nights in a coastal town I can’t remember how to spell (nice beaches and ok snorkeling,  but not worth writing about), we took the bus to Hoi An. We were mainly interested because the town had a section that was a UNESCO World Heritage site, which, it was rumored, didn’t allow motorbikes. We had to see such an oddity for ourselves.

Other than its well-maintained,  UNESCO –worthy colonial architecture, Hoi An is known for tailoring and silk lanterns. Were you to visit, you wouldn’t need me to tell you that to guess as much. Every street is lined with tailor shops with rows of colorful silk dresses and suits hanging off their doors. It is probably a good thing we didn’t have enough time to get anything tailored, because I was sorely tempted (I did manage to buy an obscene number of nightgowns, however.)  The only thing that outnumbered the shining pattern scarves and clothing were the round silk lanterns, which are hung from every doorway, tree, and lamppost, bobbing in the balmy breeze like luminous jellyfish. At night they lit up the whole town, and with the lack of artificial light from cars and motorbikes, it was like being in another world, or another time.

A shop selling silk lanterns

Old covered bridge

Clara and I poked our heads into a few impressive old houses and pagodas as while we were in town as well, but I think the thing that I liked most about Hoi An was the simple pleasure of taking a stroll (not a hasty, paranoid darting scuttle, which is usually what I adopt on the busy streets of Vietnamese cities,) but a real stroll, peacefully absorbing my surroundings. If I ever return to Vietnam, I would definitely put Hoi An as my first choice destination.

 That’s incense in a temple we visited. I want those in my house.

Another thing I want in my house. Birds are very popular pets in Vietnam.

On the Road Again July 5, 2011

I have only been out of Saigon for a few days so far, but it feels great.  As our bus began to climb through the lush  green hills outside Da Lat, a “honeymooner’s” town in the northern highlands, I felt as if a weight had been removed from my shoulders. I never realized how on edge I felt living in such a sprawling, chaotic city until I arrived in a place where there was actual sidewalk space and I could cross the street without appearing as if I were making a suicide bid.

One of the waterfalls we saw on the hike.

 Clara and I decided to herald in our first day of traveling with by doing the most exciting outdoor activity we could find. We decided on “canyoning”, which actually means rappelling down cliffs and waterfalls in Da Lat’s mountains, since there are no actual canyons around that I am aware of. We drove a few minutes outside town and hiked down into the cool (what a novelty to feel something other than oppressive humidity!)  forest in the company of two Vietnamese guides and four enormous British guys. A wide, clear stream/river ran down through the center of the mountains, and we spent the day walking along it to various rappelling spots.

 

Rappelling is basically like rock climbing in reverse. You have a rope and a harness and walk/jump backwards down a rock face. I was a little nervous at first, since I hadn’t done anything like that since the age of twelve, but after I got the hang of it I had a blast. We started out on easier cliffs before moving on to the big finale – a long, slick waterfall that plunged into a deep pool. I had some reservations about this, particularly after watching everyone else go before me and get knocked over and tossed around by the heavy, gushing fall. Sure, I was attached to the rope, but what if I got knocked down into the crashing water and couldn’t pull myself up again?  It seemed a ridiculous task, the more I thought of it – people really aren’t meant to walk backwards down waterfalls.  But I didn’t want to be the wuss of the group, so I did it anyway.  I ended up with a slow, but effective, method – I concentrated on keeping  an unflattering, but well balanced football player’s splay legged stance, and let the water slide my feet over the slick rock. Towards the end you are supposed to let go of the rope and jump backwards into the pool at the bottom.  My courage has limits, so my final plunge was more a fall (after shaking my head furiously and shouting “No!” to the guide who ordered me to jump). I got out of it with nothing worse than a little inhaled water.    

 

Trying very hard not to fall on my ass.

We stopped at a couple other spots along the stream, including a natural waterslide, and an 11 meter  jump into a deep pool. Since the 11 meter jump necessitated having to get a running start to leapt clear of rocks, I opted to climb down and do the 7 meter plunge instead. Which I think is still pretty damn good, considering that I am not the type of person who likes  jumping off of things.

The big jump. I’m the one hesitating in the top right hand corner.

Just as I was getting tired and thinking longingly of a shower back at our hotel, the guides announced that there was one last little cliff to rappel. He said it was a short one and would be easy. After the waterfall I felt pretty confident in my rappelling abilities, so  I approached it with no trepidation. It should be noted that you can’t really see what you are going to be climbing down until you are harnessed up and leaning over the edge. Rope firmly in hand, I leaned over the edge of the cliff to see an uneven rock face that sloped inwards, ending not in a nice little swimming hole or on solid ground, but in a powerful, rushing waterfall. They had to be kidding. But the guide just laughed and told me to go. It turned out to be the most difficult of all our climbs, and basically getting pushed under and swept downstream as soon as I hit water wasn’t exactly pleasant. However, it was also pretty exhilarating. Me and Clara decided that the canyoning tour was a great way to start our trip with a bang, and even though I am still shaking water out of my ears, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out to be one of the highlights of the trip. Sometimes you’ve just got to shake yourself up a bit.

 

Getting drenched.  It was NOT as fun as it looks

Culinary Meditations and What Else Has Been Up July 3, 2011

Phu, Vietnam’s signature dish. I shamefully haven’t tried it. It is just too hot for soup.

Since we both have less hours this month, me and Clara have been spending a lot of our free time doing what people come to Saigon to do: eat, shop and get clothes made.

If you take a peek at your Lonely Planet’s Saigon section, you will notice that there are about thirty pages devoted to restaurants and three or so  to sights and activities. I can concur that this city doesn’t offer much in the way of tours and museums, but there are quite a few good eating options, ranging from urns of soup attached to the back of a bicycle to linen tableclothes/multiple sets of forks affairs. I have to admit that I haven’t been particularly adventurous when it comes to street food. You just never know you are going to find a bird fetus or a sea slug lurking in what looks like a regular fried donut. When it comes to eating, nothing is sacred in Vietnam. Snakes, lizards, rats, cats, dogs –  even really expensive soup made out of a sort of spittle-formed bird’s nest – all make regular appearances on menus. Every day on the walk to school I pass what I like to refer to as “dog butcher’s alley”. Once I saw them making a live delivery. They were jammed in a cage balanced on the back of a bike.  Maybe that is the reason you don’t see a lot of strays in Saigon.

When it comes to street food, I prefer to stick to produce and bahn mi, or baguette sandwiches. You can pick them up everywhere for about fifty cents and can choose from a variety of toppings, including scrambled eggs and dried squid. Beats the hell out of subway.  You can also find chay stands,  or vegetarian food, pretty much everywhere. About seventy five cents gets you soup and a plate of rice, various stir-fries, and fake meat (some of which is designed to look like eggs or pigs or chickens).

Usually when I go out to eat, it is to one of the international restaurants in District 1, or the foreigner district. It is quite a ways from my house, but it is nice to go somewhere that I don’t stick out like a sore thumb. Although the places in District 1 are considerably more expensive than the little open air restaurants in the rest of the city, you can still get a very high quality meal in a fancy restaurant for well under ten bucks. I spend more than that at Waffle House back home. So life in Saigon does have its perks.

  Clara and I have been biding our time until the end of the month, when we intend to spend all the money we made teaching on a rambling tour of Southeast Asia. I have actually been enjoying work  more this month, partly because  the end is in sight, and partly because I have been assigned my first little kid classes ( most of my other students are middle school aged or teenagers). That means the class is only a luxurious two hours as opposed to three, and is only on the first floor pa most of my other classes are on the fifth and sixth floors, which can be exhausting if you are the kind of teacher who always forgets the CDs or the markers and has to run back down to the break room about three or four times on average. Anyway, these little guys are six to nine years old, seem to get a huge kick out of me for whatever reason, and are about the cutest things I have ever seen. They frequently run p to me waving their  proudly completed worksheets and jabbering in Vietnamese and are perfectly content to spend a half an hour cutting and pasting in their books or playing hangman. I think I might have lasted longer as a teacher if all my classes had been like this. Despite the adorable factor, though, I will still be pretty damn glad in two weeks when I teach my last ESL class ever (well, depending on the economy back home).

On Being Teacher: Or, Why Did I Think This Was A Good Idea? May 31, 2011

 I am pretty sure I was not made to be a teacher. Or at least not an ESL teacher in Saigon.

Don’t get me wrong, I have some great, smart, funny students (and some complete little bastards.) I have found myself impressed, amused, and moved by some of them. But for the most part, I don’t like this job and do not feel  that I am particularly good at it. My favorite part of the day is going home. Alternately, if you happened to see me dragging on my stuffy teaching clothes and preparing to leave for school, you’d think I was heading to the gallows. Sometimes, before one of my particularly trying classes,  I even have to knock back a drink before I step out to give myself a little encouragement (only before the night classes.) I am pretty sure most regular teachers don’t feel compelled to do that.

I didn’t get a job here until about a month after my arrival – only one school ending up expressing an interest in interviewing me, and fortunately, they ended up taking me before I had the chance to waste too much money out of my own pocket. VUS is a language school with more than ten campuses scattered throughout the city. I teach classes at two different campuses, both located in a district about a half an hour’s walk from my house. I was hoping they would plant me with a class of little kids and that would be it (they are less intimidating that professional adults, less obnoxious than teenagers,) but I have students from ages 7- my parents’ age.  I teach at night during weekdays and most of the day during the weekends.  Since I had taken my “TEFL” course (a month-long course that results in an ESL teacher’s certificate) a couple years before but never used it until now, it has been hard for me to get back into the swing of things. I have got to admit, I find teaching exhausting. It doesn’t help that all the classes here last a monstrous three hours – that is a ridiculously long time to ask someone like me to be energetic and cheerful. 

I enjoy some of my classes. The younger kids, while extremely hyper, are generally adorable and are curious and excited about everything, which helps to lift my spirits. I always tell them to pick “English names” because I can almost never remember/pronounce their Vietnamese names. My favorites so far are “Black Frog”, “Fernando Renaldo”, “Enya”, and “Cookie” (all boys, incidently!) 

Sometimes I feel like the younger guys pick up on things a lot quicker than my teenaged and adult students, most of whom would rather talk on their cellphones than pay attention to me when I am feverishly trying to explain the formation of irregular past verbs. Those night classes can be rough – it is after 9, we are all tired, most people have given up listening to me, and all I want to do is throw up my hands and walk out. Of course I don’t do that. I paste on a smile, stick it out for the last hour or so, come home, pull out the three-dollar rum and watch House until I decide that teaching isn’t so bad after all.

Motorcycles May 9, 2011

*This is google’s pic, not mine. But it’s a pretty common sight.

I’m sitting outside a coffee shop and have just witnessed the second taxi/motorcycle collision in the span of an hour, on the same street.  After the first accident left a motorcycle mangled on the ground and the driver in a fetal position in the middle of an intersection surrounded by a knot of curious onlookers, I asked my lunch partner in alarm, “Where are the police? Isn’t someone going to call an ambulance?”

Bea chuckles at me and stirs some more sugar into her coffee. “It’s way more expensive to get the police involved,” she explains. “If someone is hurt in an accident, it is usually settled on the street how much to pay for hospital bills. It’s actually less expensive than to just give money to your family if they kill you.”

She goes on to tell me about an incident where a truck hit a girl a few months before, and then backed over her to make sure she was dead. Cheaper that way.

I observe the next accident – this one a little less dramatic – with far less concern. It is not that accidents aren’t frightening, especially in a place where motorcycles pack the street s in a solid block and swarm up onto the sidewalks like schools of fish during rush hour (which actually lasts for about four hours),swerving around buses, people in wheelchairs, cyclists, and hapless tourists with hardly a blink of an eye.  But I generally witness at least a wipe-out a week. If there is no real harm done the downed party simply rightens his bike, dusts himself off and nurses his bruises at home, no big deal. But for someone who thought she would never EVER plant her ass on a motorcycle, and who used to have nightmares about merging her Mazda on 1.40 in North Carolina – the traffic has been one of my biggest sources of anxiety,  loathing and panic.  I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it.

It dosen’t help that my house happens to be off of Cach Mang Tang Tam, one of the most noisy, crowded streets in the city. Sidewalk space is almost completely taken over by parked motorcycles, street vendors, and piles of rubble, so more often than not I end up walking in the street in the same lane as bicycles, people wheeling carts of fruit, and other pokey traffic. At first I would startle violently whenever a motorcycle swerved within inches of me without so much as a warning honk, but I got used to it. Crossing the street, however, is something I will never, ever get used to.

Since the only time you will find a break in traffic is in the dead of night, traffic lights are completely ignored and crosswalks are viewed as odd markings on the road, crossing the street in Saigon is not for the faint of heart. The first time I did it – clutching my friend Clara’s hand, blinking and stumbling like a startled deer – I promptly resolved to spend the next few months on the other side of town so that I would never have to attempt such brash and brutal suicide ever again. Until I realized that the gym, the good restaurants and the grocery store were all across the street .

I spent a good while observing the locals cross before I attempted it myself. They achieve it by holding hand casually in the air and stepping in the thick of the traffic with the grim nonchalance of someone who has lost all hope. Yet, somehow, they always managed to get across. I had to try for myself.

The first time I  crossed by myself – during a daring solo trip to the grocery store – I think I stared helplessly at the wall of cars and taxis for about ten minutes before realizing that it wasn’t going to slow down in the next hour. Then, resisting the urge to shut my eyes, I held up a shaking hand, riveted my gaze on the opposite side walk, and stepped off the curb. About three motorcycles came at me but they all swerved without so much as a falter. I took another step, trembling and trying not to notice the cackling faces of the pineapple salesmen on the opposite sidewalk. The motorcycles swerved like rapids around an ungainly log. Maybe this wasn’t so bad afterall, I thought timidly, until I heard a massive roar like an air horn and looked up to see an enormous green bus bearing down upon me from the opposite lane like a bat out of hell.

Motorcycles can swerve but buses cannot. I came to an abrupt stop just as the driver cheerfully stepped on the gas and the bus blazed by within inches of my nose.  When I didn’t move on right away, numb from my brush with death, the swarm of motorcyclists slowed and shouted irritably, so I forced myself to continue the second half of my journey. When I reached the opposite curb, I had to resist the urge to kiss it. While I have crossed streets nearly every day since, I don’t think I have ever done so without making hysterical deals with God.

I would rather walk everywhere, however, than take the xe oms. But I soon realized that I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

Xe oms are small motorcycles in various states of disrepair, usually piloted by older men who park on street corners and recline on the seats with their feet balanced on the handlebars, idly reading the paper and smoking. As far as I can tell, they are completely unregulated; they only way I can identify them is when the drivers flap their hands at me and shout:  “Xe om!” or, if they know a little English, “Where you go? Ride!” I was appalled by them at first and informed Clara hotly that there was no way in hell I would never climb onto the back of a strange old man’s unregistered motorcycle. She then informed me that was how everyone got around, unless I wanted to pay 2-3 times as much for the less plentiful taxis.   Motorcycles it was.

The only conversations I’ve held exclusively in Vietnamese have been with xe om drivers. They generally go something like this:

Me (after showing him the address and waiting for the affirming nod): Hai muoi?

Driver (after scowling in outrage and shaking his head): Ba muoi!

Me (laughing as if I can’t believe what a jokester he is) Hai muoi!

Driver (after gesturing wildly and barking a few garbled sentences in Vietnamese to indicate the great length of the journey): Ba muoi!

This can go on for some time, depending on who gets tired first (it is usually me). For the uniformed, hai moui is 20,000 (or a dollar) and ba muoi is the equivalent of about a dollar fifty. The two most useful words in my sparse vocabulary.

Riding on the backs of the xe-oms, especially for a chicken like me, can be pretty terrifying. Some drivers are more careful that others, but most of them zoom cheerfully into incoming traffic and squeeze alongside vans and buses without any consideration for the knee caps of their trembling passenger. I’ve got to admit, it sometimes is kind of fun to ride on the back of a motorcycle when it winds through narrow alleys draped in flags and scattered with people selling every matter of fish, fowl and fauna, but for the most part I grip onto the puny handle on the back like grim death and always heave a sigh of relief when we finally jerk to a halt at my destination.

I am sure I will never come to terms with the traffic here. But, when I am back home again behind the wheel of my sturdy car and braking gently for pedestrians, I guess it will be kind of cool to say that for a few months I rode a motorcycle every day. If I don’t get killed or maimed before then, that is.

540/2/8 Cach Mang Tang Tam May 9, 2011

This is where I live. I can’t say it (I can’t say anything technically right in Vietnamese, actually) so I usually write it down and push it over the motorbike taxi guy’s shoulder.

I share a narrow, four-floor (kitchen on bottom floor, bedrooms on each of the next three) house with Clara and Bea, two other English teachers. It is right around the corner from a giant bar that seems to be a sort of Vietnamese version of Hooter’s, so right of the bat, it was easy for me to find my way home. We call it a fishbowl house because the entire front of the house is made of glass, which often gives you the impression of being on exhibit as your neighbors idle by gazing openly at the spectacle that is three foreign girls boiling their ramen.  Apparently, staring isn’t really considered rude here (different notions of privacy, hence all the glass doors), but I don’t think I will ever get used to it.  I have never felt more conspicuous in all my life.

Our street, Cach Mang Tang Tam, has got to be one of the most pedestrian-hateful streets in the city (maybe country?) It is long and always packed, going  through three or four districts, bending around a couple terrifying traffic circles, and I have only counted two or three traffic lights on the whole thing (a couple of which don’t work, the others of which are ignored.)   It should be noted that traffic in Saigon is like nothing I had ever seen before, and I thought I had seen some bad traffic. From about 6am – 10pm Cach Mang Tang Tam it is a constant sea of motorbikes, which the occasional truck or taxi lumbering through like whales in a school of fish. If you fancy hopping over to visit the pharmacy or purchase a tasty looking baguette across the street,  think twice – I usually end up deciding that I can get on without the aspirin or sandwich that day. Not that staying on just one side of the street is any easier. There are sidewalks here, but they are typically packed with produce, shoes and electronics laid out on blankets, mazes of parked motorbikes, little trays of religious offerings decorated with quivering sticks of incense, people working on the telephone wires, digging up the cement, or welding, and the occasional adventurous napper. I can’t say how many times I have tried to walk to the grocery store, and narrowly avoided a patch of wet cement only to have a pile of dead wire dropped on me from above. To say nothing of the volleys of cackles, shouts, stares, gestures and “Hellos!!” I typically attract, being white AND a girl (an oddity in these parts, to be sure.) 

I am used to our part of town by now – I have my coffee lady, and my water-apple lady, and my sandwich man, and my watermelon guy, who I regularly make rounds to. They all laugh at me and ask me things in Vietnamese and pre-anticipate my mimed requests. Sometimes it is nice to be able to step outside and immediately have my senses arrested in a way that I am sure I will never experience anywhere else. But sometimes I think the thing I miss the most about home – or anywhere else, for that matter – is being able to take a peaceful walk.