Where I am.

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.

I have haunts. I write in cafes like the one I’m in now, called Art Club, where the Vietnamese version of Stevie Wonder’s “Part-Time Lover” is playing as I sit next to a ceiling-to-floor waterfall (NB: the Vietnamese are really, really into fake waterfalls). It doesn’t strike me as much of a novelty anymore.

Work is interesting and extremely demanding and is the main reason I haven’t been keeping up with the site lately. My days are long and draining, but I’m getting used to this too. Much to say about school!—students and other teachers alike, it’s a trove of stories.

Looking for an apartment was more difficult and time-consuming than I would have guessed, but I’ve finally found a place I really like. I had been staying in a hotel, but last week I moved to a small studio above a clothing store, in kind-of fashionable District 3.

[Georgraphy sidebar: HCMC is broken up into several districts. District 1 is the heart of the city, encompassing the foreigner/backpacker area, the old colonial areas and the expensive hotels and stores of the downtown. District 3 borders District 1 to the north and there is an overlap of nice places to eat and drink and shop. Most of the rest of the city looks pretty much the same: lots of concrete, lots of colorful skinny buildings, endless storefronts, street carts, traffic. District 5 includes a sprawling Chinatown. District 10 is where my friend W. lives, wedged between Districts 3 and 5. She seems to be the only non-Vietnamese person in the entire district. There are districts named Binh Tan and Tan Binh and Binh Thanh. Across the river are Districts 2 and 4 and 7 and 8. There is no discernible naming/numbering system as far as I can tell.]

I really like my new studio. It’s about as homey a place I’ve been in these last 7+ months. The room is clean, the furniture is nice, I have cable, Internet, A/C, a DVD player & speakers, fake flowers, a writing desk, a couple of big windows. There are also some acrylic paintings hanging on the wall, one of which features a wide-eyed cat posed next to an overturned vase of flowers. These, I have just learned, were done by my landlord. The frames are really nice. Best thing is, I’m so close to work I can walk, an incredible rarity here in Ho Chi Minh City.

And so, here I am. Strange, not so strange.