The host family was really treating me well. Plates of fruit, meals delivered to the little sitting room, smiles and offers of help. It was really tempting to just take a day off and succumb to their charms. So, I did. It had been 12 days of go go go, but this was a nice opportunity to just think and write and to eat chunks of dragonfruit.
Hanoi had been a wild landing (exciting and vital) with day trips that extended into overnight trips, and Cambodia had been emotional and inspiring, so maybe Saigon was going to be the comedown.
Several folks I'd run into throughout the trip had told me how nice it was and how at home they felt here. Nice? Groan! Homey? Groaaaan! That plus the shopping-mall-like entry didn't make me want to run out and see it. I slept in. I wrote a little and read a little.
At one point, I came across an amazing, large, pink cathedral. It was awesome, and the hot-pink exterior was so excitingly out of place. There was nothing of interest around it, so that made it feel like a surprise or reward for poking around.
I called it the Barbie Dream Church.
One issue I have in general when I travel is an inability (or unwillingness) to really sound out and memorize "difficult" street names. Part of that is an acceptance that getting lost is part of the fun.
I glance at them, make a shortcut nickname and then usually do ok. Sometimes, though, I just can't remember the actual name or articulate to locals what I'm looking for.
An example here was Dong Khoi Street. I called it Donkey Lane and Don Quixote Blvd. in my head, and figured since it's one of the main drags, the most tourist-centric street in the city, that I'd be able to find it without a map.
But I forgot the real name and had to draw a picture of a tank to get a cab driver to take me to Reunification Palace.
This was the headquarters for the Americans during the Vietnam War, and after we quit, they smashed the gates with a tank, kept the tank in the front yard and left the building abandoned. It's a symbol of their victory.
It kind of just looks like an old Sears.
It's at one end of an enormous park area in which I saw hundreds of folks strolling around in nice clothes, drinking coffee in to-go cups, holding hands, picnicking and just generally having a pleasant Euro-style weekend. It may as well have been St. Paul, Minnesota.
The street vendors had carts!! None of the old Hanoi run-after-you-with-a-basket-of-shrimp action here. None of the Cambodian touts offering one thing and sneaking you around the back to deliver another. Just, safe accountable transactions.
Insert coin, receive yawn.
The park opens up into a large plaza dominated by a fairly large and definitely uninteresting Christian church surrounded by Popeye's Fried Chicken, Coffee Bean & Leaf, and Dunkin Donuts. Who won the war again?
More like Zzzzaigon.
I wasn't unhappy, just sort of disengaged and uninspired. Walked around for a few hours, checked out the old post office, the only legitimately exciting interior, and looked for some magnets.
I wondered if having looked for work the previous day is what broke the spell. Was I mentally home? Were my cares starting to seep into my thoughts? Or was this just too...nice of a place?
Grabbed a coffee and headed down Donkey Street toward the river.
Some cool vendors along the way selling boxes of soldier's stuff from the late '60s. Uniform patches and more engraved Zippos. One read "If you got this lighter off my dead ass, I hope it gives you the same luck it gave me."
Another said, "If you have problems, kill the enemy. No more problems." on one side and the worst bootleg scrawly, scrawny Mickey Mouse on the other. When I flipped it and saw the Mickey, I doubled over laughing. The vendor saw me, so there was no way I was going to get a good price on it.
To get a fair price or a bargain you have to act like you're disgusted and only buying something to have it disposed of properly. "This belongs in a Dumpster. I'm taking a tour of the landfill later, so I'll take it off your hands and drop it there for you."
Out of boredom, I let a guy shine my shoes. I wish I'd let the "Ugly shoe! Ugly shoe!" guy in Hanoi do it. He gave me some paper sandals to wear while he worked.
His jealous buddy came over and critiqued him in Vietnamese. He took the completed (black and shining!) left boot and glued something that looked like cardboard to the sole. Uh oh. Then he put a soft insert inside.
He did the same with the right boot (oh, how it gleamed!)
I had arranged a price of fifty-thousand dong with the shiner. That's about $3. When I put the shoes back on, he asked for 880K dong, $40.
I was like, "You're going to have to shine this boot again after I pull it out of your ass."
They either didn't speak English very well or pretended not to. They started yelling at me and pointing. They wouldn't take the money.
I was like, "You amateurs wouldn't last three minutes in Hanoi," and put the 50K on the ground.
Finally, some action!!
Neither of them moved to pick it up. I walked away and weighed my risk factors and acceptable loss factors.
Going to jail? Fine. Getting stabbed? Uncool. Having shoe black swabbed on my AllSaints t-shirt? Completely unacceptable.
They both chased after me yelling. I kept walking past a boring opera house and toward a tour center. They caught up and got in front of me and one of them jumped up and down pointing at my shoe. He waved a piece of plastic in my face.
I realized he wanted those Dr. Scholl's things back. They were the secret ingredient that made the $3 shoe shine into $40. To give them back, though, I would have to take my shoes off. Would they grab them and escape to their secret, shining lair?
Risked it. Took off my shoe, held it tight, scraped out the precious, precious insert and gave it to the guy. Put the shoe back on before I did it again with the next one. Fine and fine. They fucked off grumbling, and I went into the tourist center to get an actual map.
Booked a tour for the Cu Chi Tunnels for the next day. I figured I'd spend the last day of the trip wriggling underground like a grub-boy.
Outside, a motorcycle guy was like, "Where you go I take!" and I was like, "No thank you," but he was ON ME. Where I went, he went. Couldn't shake him. Very aggressive. Almost no English. He went on sidewalks with me, down skinny alleys. "Where want go? Temples? Churches?"
I decided there was a kind of fading class here. The shine guys, this guy. These were dudes being squeezed out by the rapidly gentrifying city. Like, they couldn't speak English, so they weren't going to get a job at the Popeyes, and the hotels and tour services offered free shines and rides.
They had to be aggressive for the remaining few months they had in the city before some Vietnamese Guliani got them kicked out. He was the Saigonic equivalent of the dudes who used to "wash" your windshield with newspapers at stoplights.
So, partially out of feeling sorry for him and mostly because everything downtown looked like a dollar-store Vienna, I told him he could take me on a one-hour tour for $5. He lost his mind with happiness.
And, oh my god, did I have the best time. He just drove right out of the city, and we took pictures of the skyline from bridges and watched poor fishermen smoking and slowly tossing their lines into the brown water. Drunken locals waved hello from the grass.
I held him with my thighs and took photos while the bike sped through tunnels and past neglected statues. The pictures were all blurry garbage, but it was insane fun. One of the most dangerous and exciting adventures of the trip.
Not such a bad place if you get bored and risk a ride with a persistent creep.
Then he was like, "Time's up," and it really was. It was a magical hour of nothing but speeding along highways and stopping at the lamest "picture spots" on the map and having an absolute blast.
He ditched me at an old fruit market, and I watched a tiny dog sit with its eyes closed in front of an electric fan. Then I ate some pho at a hole in the wall and went home to nap.
I woke up to a knock at the door. It was the host's mother inviting me down to dinner. I went down in my jammies and she and I and the five year old ate soup with bitter greens and some kind of meatballs with bitter greens.
There wasn't a lot of English going on but a lot of smiling. The kid liked showing me the food in her mouth, and I liked flaring my nostrils at her. We cracked one another up, and grandma just grinned at us. She was watching a channel that seemed like a six-hour block of phone commercials.
Then the kid played We Wish You a Merry Christmas for me on the piano again. No vocals. I clapped, pat my belly to show I was full, and went back up to do laundry and take another shower. I had developed a two-shower-a-day habit in this not-so-bad town.
Nothing quite like marshalling one's visceral anger when you're 7,404 (I looked it up) miles from home. You've earned a free Zippo lighter!
ReplyDelete"pho at a hole in the wall" = Glory Pho Hole!