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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.
When I’m not walking or riding on my friends’ scooters, I get around Saigon by means of the xe om, the omnipresent and omniannoying-until-you-need-to-use-one scooter-taxis. “Xe,” I am told, means “vehicle” and “om” means “hug”, which is an adorable if entirely misleading depiction of the experience. I’ll be buying a cheap used scooter in the next couple of weeks, so not many more vehicle hugs for me. In the meantime, I took a moment to consider the many means of transport I have used over the last six months (I’m sure I’m forgetting something):
Car; bus; ferry; canoe; rowboat; longboat; slowboat; raft; cable car; bicycle; trishaw; tuk-tuk; sangthiew; cyclo; pick-up; minibus; truck; plane; horsecart; horseback; stagecoach; ox cart; locomotive; elevated train; monorail; subway; motorcycle; scooter; elephant.
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