Down in the Delta

Well, it’s been the end of a long day, although not nearly as long as it’s been for our driver. We got going early this morning, and I thought I would have ten more minutes than I ended up having, so I had to skip breakfast. We left at 7 am, and it really only felt early because I couldn’t make myself go to sleep last night. The lights were out, I was in bed in my usual sleeping position (left side, semi-fetal…), my eyes were closed…and my head was just buzzing. I don’t know how long it actually took me to fall asleep, but I know how long it felt. I put my alarm on the other side of the room to make sure that I’d actually get up.

I also had a long day yesterday, which probably contributed to the brain buzz – more wandering around the city after work stuff was done, and I’m delighted to say that my Christmas shopping is mostly done! I was in this one store, and I picked up a little wood carving that was cute, and asked the sales girl how much it was. She said 160,000 dong, which is about $10. I put it back down, not because I thought $10 was such a terrible price, although it was too high, but because I wasn’t all that interested in it. She then began to bargain with me. “How much you want to pay? I give you discount!” and I said “no, thank you, I’ll just look around a little more.” One thing about shopping here, and if I’m remembering correctly, Taiwan was the same, the sales girls will spring to their feet the second they see you, and stay within two feet of you the entire time you’re in the shop. It actually really drives me insane, as I like to browse. But I understand that it’s the way things are done here, and they’re just being attentive – fair enough. This particular girl, however, took customer service to a whole new level. She started to sing to me as I walked throughout the store. I am not making this up. I had to try really hard not to giggle, and I almost bought something just for that. But I decided that it would be that much harder to avoid laughing, and since I wasn’t all that interested anyway, I thanked her for her time and left the shop.

Another thing that reminds me of Taiwan is seeing things in English that make no sense, but that people will buy because it’s got English lettering – kind of like how Westerners like things with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean characters. Well, walking through this one market, I was surrounded by stalls and stalls of bags, clothes, fabric, etc. Everything you could imagine. And even, some things I couldn’t have thought of, like a t-shirt featuring Mickey Mouse saying “I love Vincent! How fun to make and have love friends!” Then there’s “Happy Shop”, where the people don’t look all that happy, and “Beautiful Store”, which isn’t all that beautiful, to be honest.

I must conclude that Vietnam is the hot vacation spot for the Australian crowd, because you can’t swing a pocketbook without bumping into a group of Aussies in Ho Chi Minh City. I ran into a nice couple from my mom’s hometown of Newcastle and had a nice little chat as we looked over some jewelry, and the place where we ate dinner was also brimming over with Aussies. Particularly some strapping, young Australian men. I must go back and explore my roots a little…

This morning, it was really cool to – okay, I just need to take a moment and share with you that I just saw a gecko dart up the walls of my room. It’s true that geckos are friendly little things that eat bugs and such, and I certainly don’t object to them on principle, but I’m not sure how I feel about a hotel where lizards are part of the décor. (Or are they amphibians? I can’t remember – I think they might be.) Well, I’ll call him Gary. It’ll make things less awkward.

Moving right along.

As I was saying, it was really cool to drive out of the city early this morning. We were weaving our way through the southwest corner of the city, through a couple of wholesale markets. I saw people stacking fresh eggs into crates, piling up fruits, vegetables, and meats into carts, all set to move out into the city to sell over the course of the day. I love seeing that kind of thing – the stuff of everyday life. It’s all well and good to play in the tourist areas, and I’m a big fan of that myself, but it’s also fun and interesting to see how real people go about real days, when their reality is so different from yours.

We made our way out of the city into the Mekong Delta region, which is a very lush, fertile, colorful place. The primary color is green – the almost artificial, plastic green of flooded rice fields, the yellowish green of banana trees, the emerald green of the bamboo trees, and the green palm and bamboo trees that sway in the breeze above all of it. As in Pakistan, the women typically dress in very colorful, festive-looking clothes, so you see these columns of brilliant color, capped off by a conical woven hat, in the middle of rice fields as you drive by. Because the water table is so high in this area, they have to bury their dead above ground, so you also frequently see gravesites that are set up off the ground on a concrete slab, usually in pastel colors. One thing that’s interesting to see as you drive around is the houses. About half of the houses are little one-, two-, or three-room, simple concrete buildings, but they’re painted in pretty, soft colors, have tile floors that go out to the verandas, and generally look like nice little bungalows. But they’re situated next to little clusters of dirt-floor huts woven out of palm leaves from walls to ceiling, so it makes for a strange contrast. I’d be curious to know if there’s a story behind that. The government buildings are also not what I would have expected - they’re all painted a nice, buttery yellow color, with red clay tile roofs, and actually look like cheerful little buildings. Somehow that doesn’t jive with the images in my head of modernist, Communist architecture. However, they blend nicely with the tropical landscape, and I’m glad that it’s not what I expected.

The Mekong River splinters into a million little canals and tributaries, which help to keep the land irrigated and fertile. The upshot of this is that I can’t count the number of bridges and ferries I’ve been on today. They run continuously, and as they pull into the dock, you pile on with all the people on scooters, on bicycles, and on foot – cars, or anything with more than two wheels, are definitely the exception. Once you dock on the other side, the ferry attendants try to direct traffic and say who should get off first to make getting off as orderly as possible. It’s cute that they try. I think their time would be better spent getting out of the way.

There are a few bigger towns/small cities in the Delta region, so we’ve tried to plan our trip so that we’ll be staying in those places at night. The first more cosmopolitan place that we visited, meaning that it had a traffic light, is a town called My Tho, pronounced “mee toe”. After evaluating our likely future options, we decided that this would be the best place to stop for lunch, as options later on were likely to be scarce. We pulled into a restaurant aimed primarily at the tourist crowd and settled down for a nice lunch along the river. I politely turned down the fish soup, which had a very large fish head boiling away with all the veggies and spices, but the veggies and rice noodles that I had were very tasty. They had a little stand with a sign over it that said “Great Balls of Rice”, which made me chuckle, and I took a picture. Well, that was before I saw the staff arrive and start to prepare these great balls of rice. My roommate Marie often has her mother bring back rice balls from a deli on Staten Island when she’s there visiting family, and I have to admit that I love them – very tasty little concoctions involving rice, cheese, breadcrumbs, and a deep fryer, all in a little piece of heaven the size of a small orange. I had to take another picture upon witnessing what they were producing, because the “great” may have also been referring to taste, but it definitely referred to the size of these gargantuan things. I have never seen a rice ball the size of a cantaloupe or kickball before today, and if I weren’t so full, I probably would have had a Homer Simpson moment (“Mmm….rice balls”). However, the knowledge that I would have to sit in a car over miles and miles of more project roads this afternoon kept me from asking if they had a “to go” bag.

We got back on the road, and I have to admit that I dozed a little, finding myself in the throes of a post-lunch food coma. Since we’re driving the entire length of the project roads that have been identified so far, we are going off the tourist path by quite a bit, and there’s a lot of looping and weaving to do to cover everything. It’s been fun, though, to see these out-of-the-way places. Every stretch of road is covered by people on some form of two-wheeled transport. As we get farther from urbanized areas, the mode of choice appears to be bicycle. It’s funny to think how some Americans will spend hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars, on bikes, bike shoes, bike shorts, high-performance cycling jerseys, and all that other stuff, to bike a few miles on the weekends, when your average Vietnamese person in a rural area looks at a bicycle as an efficient way to get from point A to point B. The thought of spending what little money they have on special shoes or shirts for biking would be absurd. Of course, I can’t even begin to think how someone would explain the Atkins diet to a population with phenomenally low rates of obesity and heart disease that subsists largely on rice.

The fact that I was feeling tired wasn’t particularly notable, but when our driver, Mr. Tan, said that he was feeling tired, we decided that it was time for a coffee break. We pulled over to a little café (I use that term loosely) by the side of the road, to get coffee for the driver and coconut juice for the rest of us. I have discovered that I really don’t like coconut juice. I like actual coconut, but the juice (not to be confused with coconut milk) is a bland, sweetish substance that doesn’t taste like much of anything, until you add a little sugar and some lime juice. And even that does little to improve it. This café was, as most are, a small family-run establishment, and the owner was sitting around with some of her friends in the corner, talking and passing the time, with her daughter asleep in a hammock, a jumble of arms and legs as she took her afternoon nap. I had the chance to chat a little with Mr. Tan, who is a very nice man. His family has always been from southern Vietnam, and his brother fought in the South Vietnamese Army. His brother subsequently left the country by boat in 1977, and resettled in southern California. Mr. Tan has never been to the US, but he wants to visit and see his family. I know that things like plane tickets are much cheaper if you buy them here, but it’s still a lot of money, so I hope that Mr. Tan can go one day.

We finally rolled into our hotel for the evening, located in the town of Vinh Long. It seems nice enough, although I’ve noticed that hotels in Vietnam want to keep your passport while you’re in town – I think they need to report to the police that they have foreigners staying there or some such thing. I, however, don’t like having my passport sit in an unlocked drawer in a hotel lobby. It makes me uncomfortable, and you really never know when you’ll need your passport. The place I’m staying in Ho Chi Minh City gave it back when I said I’d pay for everything up front, and this place let us collect it after dinner tonight. I’m not trying to be difficult, as I know they just have a job to do. But yeah – I don’t like having my passport sit in an unlocked drawer in a hotel lobby.

We had a nice dinner at a Chinese restaurant in town, and even though it’s only 8:30, I’m hoping to be in bed soon. We drove around today in amiable silence most of the time, so I’m hoping, then, that the noise inside my head from last night has had time to sort itself out. There’s tons of street noise outside my room, but I imagine that will fade once I get settled into bed.