Sick again.

I was laid up earlier this week, all coughing and feverish like some 19th century tragic heroine. After months of traveling Southeast Asia almost illness-free, I find Saigon taking its toll on me lately. Vietnamese people tell me it’s probably because of the changing seasons– from hot and rainy to hot and less rainy.

Personally, I’ve identified a few other factors contributing to my recent lack of robustness & sanguinity:

1. The air I breathe. The air quality here absolutely sucks. This is no surprise in a city of more than seven million people, all of whom are on their motorbikes right this second. I go outside with a Cambodian krama scarf wrapped around my face half the time. You think I am exaggerating about the motorbike traffic, but I promise you, it is the first thing you will notice when you come to Ho Chi Minh City.

When are you coming, anyway?



2. Lack of exercise. Apart from the couple of blocks to school every day, I don’t walk anywhere. Everywhere I go is via motorbike. I joined a gym a while back and ran on the treadmill a few times and sat in the steam room listening to men make business deals in Vietnamese, but my membership expired and I’ve been too lazy to go renew it.

3. Rooms full of high school students. I spend my days reading “The Raven” and Ray Bradbury stories in rooms crowded with nose-picking, disease-spreading Vietnamese teens.

I’m serious, they really do pick their noses–a lot. There seems to be a more, shall we say, vigorously tolerant cultural attitude towards it here in Vietnam, although no one will admit this explicitly. But I swear this is a real phenomenon. Unless, like some Poe character I am an unreliable narrator slowly losing my mind and the nose-picking is a kind of symbolic phantasmagoria representing…what? Essays are due a week from Monday.

PS I played my classes a recording of Basil Rathbone reading “The Raven” the other day, and now I’ve got a number of Vietnamese kids walking around saying NEVERMORE in deep-voiced, fake British accents.

PPS Another cultural hygiene difference: when you come to Vietnam and see a child of a four or five with a mouthful of rotting teeth, don’t be alarmed. In many cases, kids don’t start brushing until their adult teeth have come in. Nothing ruins a child’s cuteness more than teeth that recall the decaying arches of an ancient Roman aquaduct.

Or perhaps I merely caught some disease from the still-beating heart of a crocodile. In any case, I’ve decided to straighten up, fly right, exercise, etc. etc. etc.