Same Same.

Vietnam:

 

Firstly, I know I haven’t been responding to everyone’s emails in a timely manner lately: I still love you, I just can’t manage my two free days on the ship well… Hopefully in China I’ll have a reliable internet connection and will probably have nights free since my mom’ll be meeting me there and I don’t think we’ll be going non-stop sightseeing and bar hopping together like the last few sleepless countries. This whirlwind tour of Asia is exhausting. I seriously get maybe two or three hours of sleep a night for five days at a time amidst +100 degree heat and humidity you could swim in. Not that I’m complaining or anything, I’m just looking for a bit of respite in China.

 

Anyways – about Viet Nam. I feel like Viet Nam was a really different feel than the rest of the countries we’d been to so I’m going to do my write-ups a little differently:

 

The best of Viet Nam:

- Finding a tailor the first day to have a dress made for the ambassador’s ball.

- Eating delicious Pho.

- Cheap, cheap, cheap, pirated dvds.

- 25 dong (like a dollar and fifty cents) for three draught beers and a shot at Eden’s.

- Finding people who were as a general rule, very sweet, and not at all resentful and angry towards Americans.

- Tutti Fruitti frozen yoghurt that came in flavors like taro, mango, kiwi, tart, vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry. With toppings like oreos, fruity pebbles, grapes, rambutan, jelly, and dragonfruit, it was probably the most delicious thing I ate in all of Viet Nam.

- The most beautiful religious ceremony I’ve ever seen.

- The best manicure of my life. For two dollars.

 

The worst of Viet Nam:

- The tailored dress doesn’t fit well at all, despite three separate fittings.

- Everything was a lot more expensive here than the last few countries.

HORRIBLE, SHADY, TERRIBLE TAXI DRIVERS. Far worse here than anywhere else; worse I’ve ever been in any country I’ve ever visited.

- Incredibly aggressive vendors lacking any kind of charm or humor like other countries I’ve haggled in.

- Really good pho, but in general, the least exciting or overall delicious food of any country.

-absolutely insane traffic unlike anything I’ve ever known. Zero traffic lights or direction either, so that to cross a busy street everyone is just expected to walk one purposeful step at a time and expect the oncoming throngs of traffic to swerve around you. DANGER.

- The hottest port we’ve ever been in with some of the worst pollution. So much so that my cough came back with a ferocity.

 

We spent five days in Ho Chi Minh, or Sai Gon, but really it felt like a lot less. Not as much happened, I wasn’t completely immersed and captivated with the port city like I had been for the last few ports… Days melted together and even though I’d wake up at 8am to try to see as much of the city as possible before the midday heat really kicked in and made me want to kill myself, it felt like I was only half-alive and dragging my feet the whole time. Allie, Cassie, Amy, and I went to Ben Thanh (I’m probably spelling that wrong) market in the middle of town, bought wigs, had gold wires replaced for the earrings I bought in India, bought presents for people back home, and got very claustrophobic and angry. Of all the markets I’ve ever been in this was by far the hottest and most crowded. Not even with tourists, but it seemed a hole in the wall the size of an average half bathroom had 4 or 5 people working in it. I’m sure I’m being a little hard on Viet Nam but it was definitely my least favorite port – maybe it was just because I happened to hit a wall in my trip because we’ve just seen and done so much. Maybe it was because I just let a few bad experiences sour my overall feel for the city. Or maybe it was just because I’d been holding it to a higher expectation since the two ports before Vietnam (India and Thailand) have been my favorites so far.

 

We wandered around a lot and I got some gifts from one of the numerous wood handicrafts shops that are all around the city, was fitted for my dress (pale yellow 50’s style cotton day dress. I wanted something conservative that I could wear in ports and over and over and could dress up to wear to the ambassador’s ball), and then we walked to the war remnants museum. On the way there we passed a woman selling really tiny puppies in a metal cage. It was at least 95 degrees with humidity and they didn’t have any water – when I asked the woman selling them how much they were (that tiny calculator I brought with me has been by far the most valuable thing I could have packed) and she said 1700 dong. Or one dollar. If we hadn’t already been yelled at and told not to bring animals on the ship – I heard a particularly gruesome rumor that they drowned a smuggled pocket monkey in a sink – I would have definitely bought all of those poor adorable puppies.

 

The war remnants museum was crazy. I’m glad we saw it but it was definitely hard to stomach at times… Babies and fetuses deformed by agent orange preserved in glass cases, photographs of hacked apart bodies and strips of flesh pulled apart, the well a family hid in and then were massacred beside… It was like visiting the holocaust museum but instead of being a Jew, I was a Nazi. I was sickened and guilty for all the really really terrible and awful war crimes they documented Americans doing. It was so surreal seeing all this paraphernalia for a war I have no real concept of. It was never taught in any part of my public school education and all I ever knew of it came from movies which would have never gotten away with showing the horrifying images I saw in that museum.

 

We found an adorable bakery called tout les jours that had sweet pastry dough wrapped around hotdogs with peppers and tomatoes and melted mozzarella melted around it – so, so good. Lots and lots of iced coffee. Vietnam has some serious coffee there, really concentrated and thick, but really good too. We found some really crappy fake north face jackets but much more north face backpacks which I didn’t really want since I have my fabulous big black backpack. However, I did buy a lime green fake chanel purse for 6 dollars at the night market. I heard fakes are a billion times better in China though so I’m really holding out until then.

 

So about these terrible taxi drivers… The first time was when we left from the night market after literally two beers to a popular club and the guy who drove us started his meter at the initial 13 dong. Then he blasted a popular techno song that we all sang along to, but I watched him click the meter ticker next to his steering wheel continuously until two blocks later we some how owed 120,000 dong. I told him to pull over and he suddenly didn’t speak any English  - so I motioned that I’d open the door while we were moving and was talking and kept saying “This is wrong, you clicked the meter, blah blah.” I gave him 40,000 dong, way more than he even deserved and he threw it back in my face and started shouting. Threw it straight at my face, screaming. What the fuck.

We tried to walk away and he kept shouting at me since I’d been sitting in the front and was the one to give him money. So then we added a dollar and kept walking. Then later that night we were coming back from Apocalypse Now; a big club and got a really shady cab driver who’d rigged his meter to speed up super fast; we ended up owing like 4 or 5 dollars for a 5 minute cab ride – unheard of for a regular meter. Then when we left we started walking in the port towards the ship when Allie realized she’d left her camera in the cab. A bunch of the motorbike drivers told us he was a known crook and that he’d be back at the club waiting for more students wanting to come back and that they’d drive her for a dollar each way. So she goes speeding off like some fast and furious shit – without a helmet. And I’m geeking out because she’d been talking about wanting to go on motorbike taxis before and I told her I was very worried about it. You know how nervous I am about all kinds of driving in general, much less in Vietnam, without helmets or seatbelts, when traffic is so congested and crazy. I wait outside the port terminal for her and one of the bike drivers comes over and chats me up until Allie comes back. He was sweet but a little creepy and kept saying, “both you and your friend shall cry yourselves to sleep tonight over this camera, yes?”

 

The last day we woke up early and took the free shuttle bus from the port into town (I still can’t get a straight answer as to who exactly provided this, but from what I understand maybe the Vietnamese government insisted that SAS provide us with free shuttles that run every 30 minutes from the port into downtown. Thanks guys for that!) We had arranged the day before for a cheap travel company to take us to the cao dai temple three hours away and let us check the whole thing out independently before on ship time of 6pm. We had an INSANE driver who within the first 30 minutes into our trip was pulled over by the police and given a $30 USD equivalent ticket – which he then wanted us to pay. We said there was no way we’d be paying anymore than the fifteen dollars each we’d already paid for the day, so he sullenly went to argue over his ticket for another 30 minutes while we were pulled over in a congested roundabout in the middle of town with the keys still in the ignition. It was very weird.

 

Once we’d finally made it to the temple though it was all worth it. It kind of sucked because we didn’t have an interpreter to explain to us what everything meant so it was pretty confusing, but still very cool. We took off our shoes outside and wandered around the brightly colored huge rectangular temple. There were poles with huge dragons wrapped around them, triangled symbols with eyes everywhere, and a pale blue ceiling outfitted with thousands of little gold stars. Towards the alter of the temple there were statues of Buddha, Jesus, and lots of other figures I didn’t immediately recognize. The Cao Dai are incredibly interesting, and I won’t go into too much of it here because I don’t honestly understand lots of it, and I’m worried I might give you some bad information, but definitely google it. It’s a faith with the kind of synchronicity and interesting history that makes Religion major’s hearts pitter patter. It was also probably the most beautiful service I’d ever seen. All the cao daists dress in white robes and dresses and sit together in lines, most of them very old people, behind men in brightly colored robes who look like they might be leading the service, but do nothing differently than the rest of the practitioners. They look like they’re meditating and then this collective light humming noise started, but it was so faint I wasn’t sure where it was coming from, until all of it rose into a legitimate song-like noise that grew louder and louder until everyone was singing, all kept in beat with what initially sounded like stringed instruments on some kind of jazz-scat weirdness accompanying an epileptic drum beat. Separately and initially it made no sense and nothing went together until they reached the singing part, when everything became this obvious ecstatic prayer. It was very cool.

 

            We grabbed some lunch and beer and hopped back into the van to head back to town then. At Monica’s suggestion though, our driver threw on some of his favorite music – scratched up techno that kept repeating something about sex on a beach as loudly as possible. This continued for 3 hours, which I slept through most of, but I woke up to Rocky looking like she was about to kill us all. Hahaha. We made it back on to the ship with lots of time though, and that was about it.

 

While lots more happened in this port, so much of it has melted together in a frustrated mess and my memory is notoriously bad considering how late I am writing this. Hopefully I’ll get the time to go back and add more to this post but I wanted to just get some things down in the meantime. Sorry guys!