Chợ

We spent the morning in the chợ, or market, starting with a breakfast of broken rice from a corner stall. Food hawkers beckoned passers by. Kittens stretched and pranced after a long, bountiful night of scavenging for fish scraps in the alley. Lottery sellers meandered through the dark walkways, chanting of tickets for sale. Shopkeepers prepared for the day, opened their stalls, lifted metal gates, pulled down tarps, and hung their wares to sell cloth, kitchenware, dried foods--all manner of sellables.

Markets in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, and now Vietnam all look pretty much the same. The market is generally compartmentalized into specialties, so in one area are the household goods, in another area is clothing, and prepared food in another, and then a wet market for produce, meat and fish. One difference in Vietnam: you can buy fresh noodles at the market, whereas in Hong Kong you went to a noodle manufacturer.

I was outside, taking a picture of the market alley, when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I turned and faced a man who pointed at my phone, then threw his hand in the air. It looked as if he was tossing an imaginary frisbee. I thought he was telling me to toss the phone. I smiled, and shook my head. He became insistent, said something, pointed and threw his hand again, and I realized the message. "You keep flashing that thing around, someone's gonna drive by, grab it out of your hands and disappear." I thanked him in my clumsy Vietnamese, then walked off to find Lữ, who confirmed the message.

I hear a lot of warnings about dishonesty and danger in Vietnam. Don't put your wallet in your back pocket. Don't take out your money in public. Don't drink the water. The volume of these cautionary tales is overwhelming. And the crazy part is, it's the Vietnamese themselves who do the warning. It would be one thing if I heard it all from crazy, paranoid foreign tourists who don't care if they disparage the people of a disadvantaged country. It's another thing completely to hear these things from that country's people themselves. That's what they believe about their own people. And it's rather disheartening to hear they believe so.

I can't help but empathize with the feeling of guilt for the actions of one's own people. On the other hand, however, the fact that the Vietnamese conscientiously give these warnings tells me that they really do care, that the state of things bothers them, that they realize it's not supposed to be that way.

We left the market and walked home in the late morning sunlight, past souvenir shops, busy intersections, and university students, office workers, and laborers taking drinks by sidewalk food stalls. We ourselves ducked into the shade of a shop on the street right below our apartment. In the early morning the lady sells breakfasts of noodle soup, but by 10 am, her customers drop by for frothy cups of blackest-black coffee and bottled soda poured into glasses with ice. Looking around the shop, I noticed that almost everything besides the walls and floors was red, mostly due to Coke paraphernalia, with posters, pennants, a red refrigerator, all labeled with the soda brand. But also, all the seating and tables were red plastic, a red lunar calendar hung next to a doorway, a pole-mounted Vietnamese flag with its yellow star crossed the red flag of the old USSR, and a couple of propaganda posters exclaimed communist ideology. Not to be outdone by all the color in the room, the coffee itself stained the ice cubes red. Yet among all the red, Lữ had the green tea. (Sidenote: the Vietnamese word for green, xanh, is also used to describe blue; so technically, you could say it was blue tea.)

After the drinks, we got home to find out that Mike's scooter had a flat. So we walked the bike down to the corner, where a pair of criscrossed tires indicate that the shirtless old man will fix your innertube for you. But he was already working on a bike, and pointed to the corner across the street, where a woman in head-to-toe dark clothing and a nón lá took care of us. She propped up Mike's bike, pulled the tire off the rim, muscled out the tube, patched it, wrestled it back in, and filled it up with air in the time it took Lữ to chat with a fruit vendor to about a football-sized fruit called soursop.

Later in the evening, she blended up the soursop with ice and condensed milk to make a delicious smoothie. But I was already asleep. I don't think it was a crash from the coffee. Perhaps jet lag finally caught up with me. By 4 o'clock, I was in bed. All together, I slept for about 18 hours, or 16 hours with interruptions. Must have needed it.


Provender
- breakfast: cơm tấm
- lunch: bún chay
- snacks: bưởi, vải, chuối, mãng mầu xiêm