I was up at 2:30 this morning. From my last trip, when I impulsively decided to go out for a walk at that hour and had a big adventure, I knew I should treat the first few days of jet lag as an opportunity to see things, literally, in a different light. I’ve actually been looking forward to it. Ilene, not so much, so I went out alone.
I was on the street by 3 a.m., sneaking through the lobby past the clerk and the doorman who were catching up on their sleep. When I returned later, they were still asleep, but the door was chained closed with a padlock, and I had to wake the doorman to open it for me. At breakfast later, I intend to look for a back exit in case of fire.
Across the street a café was open, and I took a sidewalk table there. There were plenty of people at the other tables, apparently just off their late shift. I later figured out that there must have been a back room, because people started coming out of the restaurant like it was clown car. It was all young people, tipsy and embarrassed. They boys were dressed in tight white Dolce and Gabana jeans and the girls were in skirts you wouldn’t think you could drive a motorbike in, but they all hopped on their vehicles and headed off. I ordered a hot coffee and a fresh fruit plate—watermelon, pineapple and several other fruits I didn’t recognize—and sat there with my paperback until the tables started getting folded up and the waiters made a pantomime that they were ready to sleep, and I paid the bill.
I walked mostly through the grounds of the Reunification Palace, which is at the end of our street. At each of the entrances was a kid in a military uniform sleeping upright in a plastic chair. The park was filled with people exercising—doing unfamiliar stretching routines, middle aged couples playing badminton, someone using a hula hoop, lots of people walking. Old men walk backwards for some reason. Jogging is uncommon. It would be a pleasant place to jog, but even at that hour it was crazy humid. Young couples were making out on the benches. In the trees--varieties I couldn’t recognize--there were strange bird cries like from a movie about the jungle. I could see small bats flitting under the lights, and on cement walls there are always a few small reptiles like salamanders chilling out.
Out on the streets, the city has hardly slowed down at all. Very early you come across seemingly random spots in the sidewalk where some kind of distribution of goods is happening—a dozen people sorting stacks of morning newspapers for delivery, or the same thing with vegetables, or buckets full of bloody meat, or pots of hot soup. A man in charge will be pacing around through the vendors making notes on a small pad of paper.
There is a lot of delivery going on at that hour. One common vehicle is a kind of homemade motorcycle truck. It’s like a wooden flat-bed cart on two rubber tires bolted to the front of a motorcycle, and they speed like crazy. I’ve seen almost every kind of building material except steel beams carried on these, and it seems like all of Saigon’s construction boom is delivered one small load at a time on these trucks at 4 a.m.
I was back at the hotel at 5 as it started to get light. Tomorrow I suppose I’ll be an hour closer to a proper sleep cycle, and I’ll see what the neighborhood is like at 4-6 am instead.
--
Robert
The typical breakfast here is Pho. (pronounced Fuh). When you arrive, the plate of mint, salad greens and basil is already sitting on the table, along with limes, and hot peppers. Your order either beef or chicken and you get hot a broth with some more meat added in to cook in it at the last minute. It has chives, etc. in it. You add in the sprouts and greens, crunching them or tearing them up as you go to release the flavor, dunk them in soup, squeeze in lime juice and toss in the peppers. There are also bottles of plum sauce and hot sauce to squeeze in. That's about $1 most places. A shot of coffee, hot or iced, with or without condensed milk, is about 60 cents. We've been getting ours at a sidewalk stand on the corner where the cab driver's hang out early in the morning before they hit the streets. I eat most of the greens and soup and have a few bites of beef, building up my tolerance for it. (It sits heavy in my tummy after so many years of vegetarianism.) So far I haven't had any chicken.
