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What's it like to live here on a day-to-day basis? It's the early morning sounds of food-sellers patrolling the alleyways: "bread for sale!", "fresh mangos today!", that heralds the start of another day. From there the crescendo of activity outside my window increases steadily. That's one thing that sets living here apart from back home: life here takes place in the street, that's where the action is. Houses front right on the alley, and normally the front of the house is completely open to the passing traffic; it's perfectly normal to walk down the street and look right into somebody's living room where the family is eating dinner or watching TV.
I do spend a lot of time hanging out in the Internet cafe. It is quite a scene. Those who criticise American teenagers for their sloth would be either gratified or horrified to see the Vietnamese kids doing the same stuff; chatting with their buds, playing pointless games, watching music videos. Ah yes, youth is wasted on the young!
There are things I miss about the US. I do love the Western landscapes: Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming, Arizona, the big land, being able to see 100 miles. I miss driving 75mph for 8 hours, just staring out the window, daydreaming. Burger King. Baseball on TV (here, soccer is king). Amazon.com: English-language books are too expensive and hard to get here. However, technology has shrunk the world in a most impressive manner: you drive to the airport, plunk yourself down in a seat on a Boeing 747, take a nap and watch a couple of movies, and presto! in half a day you're on the other side of the planet. I e-mail and chat incessantly. Telephoning over the Internet has become reasonable in quality, so I regularly call Mom on the farm outside Cincinnati. |
Day-to-day concerns are pretty much the same everywhere: get up, take a shower and get dressed, get something to eat before commuting to work, think about the the new project, daydream about the coming weekend. I rent a room in a house the 3rd district of Ho Chi Minh City, about 2 miles from the heart of old Saigon. The family rents rooms to foreigners to make a few extra bucks, rent is $100 a month. It has a refrigerator, bathroom, and an air conditioner, which I rarely use, as the temperature tends to be pretty moderate year-round. I have no TV, I get most of my news off the Web now, and I get my Web access at a local Internet cafe, costs 25 cents an hour. If I want to watch something like soccer then I go to a bar or restaurant, then it becomes a social event. Actually, darn near everything is a social event.
I rent a motorcycle for $80 a month; with a 110cc engine, perhaps motor scooter would be more descriptive. The government restricts anything bigger than 150cc, which is fine because you really don't need much here and it puts everybody on about the same level. Traffic in general is a pure mayhem! Certainly from a personal safety standpoint it is the single biggest concern. People do just about anything they want, the only rule is to expect the unexpected...and not run into anybody. At first it is pretty intimidating. Lane dividers, hah! Traffic lights, mere abstractions. But there's a definite Zen to Saigon traffic, after all nobody wants to run into you either. After awhile it becomes second nature.
I eat snacks in my room, but never cook for myself. Why bother? I eat at Vietnamese restaurants every day. The food here was one of the the real pleasant surprises when I first came here, and it is a real joy. Occasionally I get a fix of KFC or a cheeseburger, and I did retain my traditional fondness for Peanut M&Ms, other than that it's all local cuisine. The food is cheap, if I spend more than $2 or $3 a day for food then I'm splurging.
It's a noisy place! But the energy grows on you, you become conditioned to the stimulus.
If you want to get to know people, you have to do the same things they do. You eat their food, you sleep in their houses, listen to their music. Vietnamese absolutely love it when you approach them on their own level. Truth be told though, the corn-fed white-bread boy turned Native fairly early in the game.