Archived post from our February 2007 trip
I've been here about a day and half now. As I drifted to sleep last night, I imagined a thread to tie together everything I might share here, but in the meantime I've been flooded with a million more images and I'm feeling overwhelmed. So, some random sharing . . .
-When you walk out of the airport here, there's a stange sensation of being a star on stage. The waiting area is outdoors, and the people waiting are kept back behind police barricades. At 11 p.m., there were a few thousand people there in a big semi circle staring at the door. When you emerge, it's just you with all those people looking anxiously to see if you're the one they're waiting for. It's incredibly noisy. Pretty soon, I hear Ilene calling my name from somewhere in the middle of the crowd, and the police point me down a cattle chute into the middle of it. I emerge at a taxi stand, where Ilene has a car waiting. It was a beautiful summery night. It was about a 20 minute drive into downtown, and I crashed immediately.
-We spent my first morning walking around to markets a little bit. The traffic is as crazy as they say. The smog is really oppressive. It's never quiet anywhere for a moment. Lots of sensory overload. Someone is trying to sell me something at every step. I'm surprised that people put their hands on my arms a lot as they try to get my attention. We stop every couple hours to sit and sip iced coffee and retreat from the smog. As alien as it all feels to me, I also recognize that I'm a somewhat touristy area, and there are lots of familiar comforts to fall back on.
-We had a nice dinner with some friends of Ilene's at a Korean place and then found a bar with a live band and had some desert. I'm eating a ton. The breakfast at the hotel is a great start to the day.
-Jet lag kept me from sleeping properly on the second night, and I was out of bed before 4:30. I went down the street to see the city at that hour. There was an occasional motorcycle, and people walking or jogging up the wide avenue. I found a 24 hour shop and got an emergency dose of chilled coffee in a can. I started exploring the side streets in the dark and watched the city wake up. There were a lot of people sleeping on the sidewalks. People started setting up their sidewalk food stands, chopping cabbage, firing up their charcoal stoves. I went through a street of market stalls that I had gone through yesterday in the daylight. Each stall is a lean-to with tin sheets and tarps, and there were people sleeping inside, but at almost 5 a.m. it was already getting noisy with motorbikes. At the stall where the spectacular displays of meat had been hanging yesterday, there was now several big tables set up and about 30 people gathered around in the dark chopping up huge quantaties of pork and sorting it into plastic buckets, which were then loaded onto motorbikes.
Eventually, "hug car" drivers -- men on motorbikes who give rides for hire, the passanger hugging them from behind -- started soliciting me. On a whim I decided to hire one for a quick tour of downtown. It was about 5 a.m. at that point. We settled on 30 minutes for $5, and he took me on a great adventure that took about an hour. The whole time I didn't see any other foreigners. We rode to Cholon -- the Chinatown of Saigon -- and he drove me by every temple and market and hospital he could think of. By this time, the streets were getting really chaotic, and every bit of sidewalk was being used by street vendors. On the way back, we came across a funeral procession -- the hearse was a kind of bus with ornamnetal wood carvings attached to it, with the casket high up inside so it was visible, and the funeral party followed on foot very slowly, all dressed in white robes, and behind them was an empty standard issue coach bus.
--After breakfast, Ilene and I went walking and ended up inside HCMC Notre Came Cathedral. While we were there, a wedding party came down the aisle. I guess if I stumble across a christening and a high school graduation, I'll have seen it all. We sat and watched for awhile. It was similar to a mass at home in many ways with some exceptions: The statues of the saints are all framed in neon. Under Mary, it says "Ave Maria" in blue cursive neon just like a beer advertisement. The priest gave a looooong sermon in the middle of the ceremony.
I'm having fun finding new things, but it's been physically wearing. The smog has me beat down and I occassionaly get a sense of vertigo, which I hope is just the after effects fo 28+ hours of flight. I'm looking forward to finding a quiet place to sit and write during the hottest parts of the days.
