Yangon, May 04, 2007.
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Too much to try and catch up on in one post. It’s been a hectic month for me here in Ho Chi Minh City. Yes: subtly, almost imperceptibly, I’ve stopped saying “Saigon” and have started calling the city by its gray and many-syllabled official name. Ho Chi Minh City. It’s just that I hear most Vietnamese say it that way. I don’t mean humorless party functionaries or war-hardened ideologues (not that I’ve met any), but just people I know, people who are too young to have ever called the city by any other name. Ho Chi Minh City. It sounded so alien and clumsy to me when I was first arrived, but say anything enough times and it starts to feel familiar, to become second nature.
I marvel at human adaptability. What’s in a name? What’s in a place? Time and again while traveling I’ve been struck by how easily one can get used to a new city, or a remote mountain village, or a beach, or an entirely new country, all the time meeting people and leaving people, being alone, being together. On the one hand there is an almost perpetual sense of dislocation, on the other, a remarkable capacity to latch on to things and make them familiar, to make a home of wherever you are. There is something very revealing about the human wiring in all this movement, I think.
And now, from movement to its opposite. Getting settled; working, finding a place to live, opening a bank account, riding a motorbike every day. Oh, how we get used to things. I buy sandwiches and iced coffee and bags of fruit and lotus-seed drinks (delicious!) from street carts without even getting off my motorbike now. I ride in monsoons wearing a blue plastic poncho.
Lan Anh Restaurant, Ho Chi Minh City.
District 8, Ho Chi Minh City.
Van Thanh Park, Ho Chi Minh City.
Mui Ne, Vietnam.
Mui Ne, Vietnam.
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