Still in Vietnam. Reading through what Michelle wrote, it seems like we had an okay time. But for some reason Vietnam was my least favorite country. Probably the rain and the tours. The one thing I really enjoyed was the monkeys. Even if they were caged or chained. I could usually persuade the owner to let me play with the monkey. This usually involved having the monkey pick nits out of my hair, while I did the same for the monkey. The monkeys where starved for physical attention. Sad.

Subject: Ahhh…I love the smell of fish sauce in the morning

Date: December 11, 2000

Greetings from Vietnam, where women wear matching top n’ bottom pajamas all day long, where ear cleaning is an entirely public affair (using this long copper wand thing), where crossing the street is an extreme sport, where nodding the head and smiling actually means “No Way”, and where caged animals (bears, birds, monkeys, snakes) are de rigueur. Oh yeah and where fish sauce is made. Most of Southern Vietnam smells of fish sauce, which is evidently made from toe jam, belly button scum and bat guano, with some fish parts thrown in.

Today is our last day in Vietnam, and Charlie and I have mixed feelings. We’ve been here for 3 weeks now, and we haven’t really gone far from Saigon. I suppose we sort of lost our momentum because of crappy weather and being sick. First we spent about 5 days in Saigon, getting our visas extended, then we went on a 3 days tour of the Mekong Delta, then we came back to Saigon, then I got sick and I stayed in the hotel for a few days in Saigon trying to recover, then we went to the fishing village of Mui Ne to see some huge sand dunes, then it pissed rain for 4 days straight while we twiddled our thumbs at the beach resort, where the main attraction was a 4 month old monkey named “Tony Blair” tied up to a chair. Needless to say, we were all on suicide watch, including Tony. After that, we separated ways with Jen, and Charlie and I went to Dalat, which is a town in the central highlands of Vietnam, popular among Vietnamese tourists. The air was nice and the weather was lovely, and cool. We walked around the lake and noticed that even though it’s like 75 degrees there, people were literally wearing snow outfits, complete with full head wraps and ski boots. I guess it’s the coldest place in Vietnam, but it felt like Oakland on a warm day to us. We decided, after Dalat, to go back to Thailand so we could spend my birthday and Christmas on a beach, instead of in central Vietnam, where the weather is crap due to a typhoon off the coast of the Philippines.

I’m a little disappointed that we aren’t going to northern Vietnam, but not disappointed enough to actually go.

Some cultural differences worth noting about Vietnam are that people have no social taboos against touching other people—especially hairy westerners like ourselves. I have been amicably grabbed, slapped, pinched, pushed, prodded and poked. Charlie gets a lot of arm hair pulling (cuz people aren’t so hairy here, they can’t believe it’s real), and I shaved my head so everyone wants to feel my scalp. Also, people seem to work so hard here, hustling their butts off to drum up some business. Selling shit is not the calm affair that it is in the States. Walking down the street is like walking a capitalism gauntlet, with business people trying to get you to ride in their cyclo, eat in their restaurant, or buy their handicrafts. Also, as soon as westerners enter a cafe, the proprietors tend to crank up the loud 80’s tunes, for our benefit. Thanks! Because of this I always have bad 80’s tunes in my head, usually of the “easy listening” genre. Lionel Ritchie’s “Hello”, Christopher Cross’s “Ride Like the Wind”, Air Supply’s entire oeuvre. I must say I really miss music, and it was quite a mistake to not bring any listening device along on the trip, because we are subjected to cafe tunes which are typically the aforementioned hits, or Vietnamese pop, which is basically the same as the aforementioned hits, only in Vietnamese. We were lucky enough to witness two non-fatal traffic accidents, one that we were actually involved in. Talk about fascinating! Basically, whoever is bloodiest or whose vehicle suffers the most damage gets paid money. Everyone stands around in the street arguing (amicably) until someone gets paid off. No one calls the police because then the payer must pay them off too. Payment can be paid in local currency (Vietnamese dong), US dollars or whatever goods happen to be involved in the accident (in one case that we saw, a bag of rice was the preferred payment). No one cares whose fault it was, or what really happened, they just look around at the damages and come to an agreement about which party is worse off. Our accident was deemed our fault because we were not bloody, and we had to pay about $4 to fix the damage to the taxi we were in.

Most of the people we met were warm and friendly and loved practicing their English with us and were more than willing to help us with our Vietnamese. The sentiment we heard most was Vietnamese people’s forgiveness about what happened during the war, that they are hopeful for future relations with the US, and they do not dwell on the losses they suffered. Many people in the south also want to go to the US to visit family members, but can’t get a visa, or don’t have the money. I know sentiment in the north would be different and from talking to people I learned that Vietnam is still quite divided, despite the united image it conveys to the rest of the world.

This place comes in second, after Uzbekistan, in terms of being vastly different, culturally speaking. First off, there’s the whole communist thing going on. But after talking with some locals, I found that it’s actually a socialist republic. People still have to pay for health care, education, etc. The economy seems pretty capitalistic in big cities like Ho Chi Minh and Bill Clinton just visited a few weeks ago, so things are loosening up politically and economically. There are literally TWO Americans traveling here—me and Charlie. All other tourists are from England and Australia. I like the place ok.

That’s it for now. Hope you are all well!
Michelle