Our taxi ride from the airport was straightforward, the usual anxiety present but unwarranted, thanks to our research and Marianne's advice. Marianne Wilms is German, and teaches kindergarten here for a company based in Germany. The taxi was metered, about 80 cents/km. There are about three companies that are considered safe and reputable; we had a later experience with one of the others. At Marianne's building we figured out how to get past the barricade and rode to the 13th floor, to a comfortable apartment beyond the financial reach of the average Vietnamese person.
We looked out over a bright city much like S. American cities. It grew organically around the original streets and neighbourhoods, jumbled up with no clear grid pattern. There is constant honking from motorbikes and cars all day and most of the night. There are hardly any bicycles. The motorcycles outnumber the cars perhaps 200 or more to one, more than I've ever seen in any other city. They flow like schools of fish but also cut in and out and across each other like the clowns on mini-motorbikes in a circus. There are paint lines for lanes, but they're only a suggestion. The rule is that you should fill any spot ahead of you that's empty. People on the right have the right of way, just like sailboats...and if you bump the person in front of you, you're automatically at fault, so when a motorbike squirted blithely into a narrow space in front of our taxi, the taxi braked hard to avoid bumping it. Traffic lights can also be ignored, although they are usually not; but I never saw a traffic cop pull anyone over. There are traffic cops who stand at some intersections and direct the traffic flow, however.
The motorbike is unquestionably king in Saigon. If the people drove cars this city of ten million people would be locked in perpetual gridlock. Pedestrians tread carefully. Our new young friend Tam Nguyen taught us to cross the street, which is rather like staying still on your feet in a stampede of cattle. When you cross the street as a pedestrian, you move slowly and with clear intent, catching the eyes of the bike riders to make sure that they see you. You try not to jump or move unpredictably or erratically. No-one ever hits you, and the motorbikes rarely hit each other, or the odd car, truck or bus that moves slowly and stolidly along through the traffic. They simply flow to the right or the left, wherever there is an opening for them. They are completely opportunistic but non-aggressive. They slow down when they must, but they never stop. No Canadian can even imagine riding a bike like every man, woman or child can here. If they pull up to a light and stop, it's like Satan's Choice is in town, but you can't fit a sheet of paper between the bikes. Then they all move forward smoothly at once, and no-one so much as brushes his neighbour. But if an old lady on a bicycle accidentally gets stuck crossing in their path as they traverse the intersection, they flow smoothly around her on either side, letting her cut across the pack, and not one of them would dream of flipping her the bird for getting in their way.
During the day the sun is very bright, the buildings clean and colourful, and fairly new. A lot of construction has happened since the war, so the buildings are not old, although so many men were killed that it was a struggle to develop and to pass on the expertise needed to reconstruct and run the new society. Teachers and intellectuals were in short supply; young people were sent to other countries for teacher training. A person might own a house on a narrow lot, and wish to build upward, without first acquiring the neighbouring lots, so many of the taller buildings are very narrow. Air pollution is no worse than on "heat alert" summer days in Toronto. From the 13th floor we saw lots of rooftop gardens, stainless steel water tanks rather than plastic ones, and excellent solar water heaters.
Deborah said, "The commerce is astounding". Every narrow building seems to have a store on the ground floor, and a family living above, and all the stores are crammed with inventory, with a vast amount of wealth locked up in stock. There is no barbed wire, and there are no armed guards protecting any stores. The government is a communist one party system with an all-powerful central committee, but the country is not very socialist - few people have insurance for homes or motorbikes, and if you get sick you'd better have family to take care of you while you are in the hospital, to feed you, lobby for your care, and make sure people don't steal from you. Old people without family simply have to die, and then they will be carted away, but if they are dying on the street, no ambulance will pick them up, and no welfare system will provide for them - at least this is what we have been told so far.
Photos of some of our first impressions are here.
We spent our first day resting, overcoming jet lag and resetting our internal clocks. I had two naps that day. Marianne is a consummate host, generous and kind. She has hosted almost 40 couchsurfers - I called her the "traveller's angel". We spent one night playing cards together, and on our final evening with her, we went out to a favourite restaurant, the Lemongrass, then ducked into a nearby jazz club, the Saxn Art - saxophones heavily featured. It was packed, standing room only, so we stayed for four tunes and then returned home.
On the second day Tam Nguyen came to find us. We spent some time chatting and I helped her edit a writing practice assignment. She is preparing for her IELTS exam. Then she took us in a bus to District One where most of the tourists are, to see most of the attractions that tourists visit: the market, the famous Post Office building, Notre Dame Cathedral, City Hall (she called it the "Committee" building), and Commonwealth Bank to find the ATM. We spent a lot of time walking around trying to find an ATM that suited Deborah, in terms of cost, security (no outdoor street-side ones, thank you very much) and amount that could be withdrawn. We went inside the "War Remnants Museum" (previously known as the American War of Aggression Museum, or something like that). I was reminded of the horrors we saw on television in the sixties of the Vietnam conflict, the first war to be televised almost in real time. I recognised many famous photos, and saw the ugly effects of Agent Orange and related defoliants used in the Ranch Hand operation.
Tam ordered two meals for us, lunch in a market stall and supper from a street stall. The vendors poured beef broth into plastic bags, bean sprouts, noodles and various meats into other bags, and we created our own bowls of Pho with them.
On Saturday I began this first diary entry and photo album, but we had a long chat with another young German teacher from Marianne's school, Tomas. We slept in his room while he was away, but he came back to pick up some clothes. He's been here for a year. It's very important to spend time speaking with people who have a foot in both cultures, and can expound at length on comparisons and observations, and sometimes also explanations, of the new culture - especially one like this, where the language is impenetrable for us. We took a break to go out for lunch, and to check out a small local hotel. It looked clean and quiet, but there was a painting of a well-endowed semi-nude lady above the headboard. I'm guessing, like smaller hotels almost anywhere, the rooms aren't only rented for sleeping overnight.
In any case, we had been invited to stay at another home of a new couchsurfer host, Joe Truong. We went to his house, an apartment over a store, but we only lasted one night there. We discovered that it was over an hour from downtown even in a taxi during rush hour, and an expensive trip, relatively speaking. The home is "urban traditional", you might say. There were solid wooden beds without mattresses, only a thin bamboo mat over the wooden slats. My hip bones did not allow me to sleep well on that hard surface. There was a clean Asian toilet with a cold water shower. Access to the living quarters was via a steep and narrow spiral staircase. There was no air conditioning for Deborah's hot flashes. Dining takes place in the store, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the motorcycles on spotlessly clean and polished concrete. Their food was delicious. However, the distance from town, the lack of air conditioning and the difficulty in sleeping made us decide to move to the "backpacker hotel" district downtown, which is within walking distance of tourist attractions. We were sad to go because the family are truly lovely, and they appeared to wish that we'd stay much longer.
Joe told us that they'd had a previous guest, a German girl, who'd stayed with them for two months. She must have been working at something in the city, to stay so long in one place. I had to explain that Couchsurfers were really only supposed to enjoy a host's free hospitality for one to three nights, and that if we stayed so long in one place we wouldn't get to see Cambodia and the rest of Vietnam. We felt badly since they'd treated us to a lovely dinner and a nice breakfast, but it couldn't be helped. It just wasn't a practical place for us to stay. Still, we made new friends, and we helped Joe with a language study he was doing, isolating and finding meanings for idiomatic expressions in the movie Inception, which had subtitles. I promised to continue helping him as time allows. His sister Joey, in grade nine, also speaks English extremely well, with clear, precise pronunciation and well-articulated consonants. English is a compulsory subject in schools, but no-one else we've met of her age can carry on a conversation with us.
In our new digs, the "New York Hotel" ($20/night), we were able to research our incursion into Cambodia to see Can Tho, the Mekong Delta, Angkor Wat, Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. This hotel room has a lovely pastoral painting of a stone bridge lined with lanterns over a small river in the woods...and no buxom nudes.
Next diary entry: more First Impressions
