Bottom's Up

Can I interest you in a nice cold beverage?

1. green tea	7. green herbs	13. wintermelon
2. green orange	8. herbal tea	14. grass jelly
3. tamarind	9. orange	15. soy milk
4. passion fruit	10. lychee	16. root beer
5. bird's nest	11. passion fruit	17. pink guava
6. aloe	12. tamarind	18. soursop

One of the things I like to do in foreign countries is to check out packaged goods to see how they're different from home. I'm not sure any of our vending machines offer eighteen different types of drinks. I usually see only five or six flavors in ours. And some of these cans cost 7000₫, which is around 35 cents.

Of course, there are things in the vending machines in other countries that you'd never expect to see in a vending machine in the states. I've seen ones that dispense beer, hard alcohol, umbrellas, iPods, and underwear. Just in case you run out, I guess. This particular vending machine sells bird's nest drink. But that's a very popular beverage all around the world. And based on this price tag, it's quite affordable here.

Provender
- breakfast: xôi thập cẩm
- lunch: miến gà

India + China = ?

Indochina: aptly named, not clearly defined.

I feel like its time to delve into the details of Indochina's history, location, and demographics. But first, an exploration in etymology. This is what I found for the origin of the word Indochina, from the Online Etymology Dictionary:

"1886, from Indo-, comb. form of Gk. Indos "India" + China. Name proposed early 19c. by Scottish poet and orientalist John Leyden, who lived and worked in India from 1803 till his death at 35 in 1811."

I think the late Leyden was not so much reflecting on the region's proximity to India and China. Rather, his poet's soul may have recognized the historical influence on the region by the two dominant adjacent civilizations. Much of their influence remains to this day. From the west, the Indian kingdom introduced Buddhism to all three nations, scripts based on Sanskrit to Laos and Cambodia, and Hindu temple architecture featured in places like Angkor Wat in Cambodia. And the eastern contribution, mostly adopted by Vietnam, includes Chinese script and vocabulary,  architecture, and world-views such as Taoism and Confucianism, the latter of which shaped Vietnam's social, political, and moral standards.

Leyden was not, and could not have been referring to the unified Southeast Asian territories of the French Empire known as French Indochina. He was long beyond this world when the French colonized Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam between 1858 and 1893 (1).

It seems the "conquistador's trinity"--gold, glory, and God--was at the core of the occupation. Catholic missionaries have ramped up efforts to save souls in SE Asia since Father Alexander De Rhodes started fussing around with the Vietnamese written language in the 17th century. Incidentally, De Rhodes's Romanization of the Vietnamese language marked the beginning of the end for both traditional Vietnamese and Chinese scripts in everyday usage. Another reason for French interest, the Indochinese region produced the kinds of commodities that enticed the European market, commodities like coffee, tea, wood, and labor. As my brother says, Vietnam is rich in resources, so it's a small wonder why a European power would want to claim it. Glory, well, that goes to the victorious.

So the French took over the three countries by seizing Vietnam by force, granting Cambodia protection, and receiving Laos by cession from Thailand. Occupation didn't sit well with Vietnam, and for years France was met by hostile Vietnamese resistance. The Japanese took over the region during World War II, and gave it back to France afterward. France maintained a tenuous grip on the region until it gave up possession as part of the Geneva Convention in 1954. That was the end of French Indochina. The region has been known as Indochina ever since.

Where is it?
There doesn't seem to be a consensus on what Indochina is. The most consistent definition I've seen is that the region is composed of three countries: Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. This definition seems to be a holdout term from the region's days as a French colony. Our oft-cited open source internet reference expands the region to include the countries of Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar, and Singapore.

Indochina sits on the convergence of three tectonic plates: the Eurasian, the Indian-Australian, and the Pacific plates (2). As a result, there's a spine of mountains that runs from North to South. The big mountain range is the Annamese Cordillera. The Mekong River runs the border between Laos and Thailand, then cuts through Cambodia plateaus and then the coastal lowlands of southern Vietnam where it fans out into nine channels and dumps into the South China Sea.

Who's there?
Four-hundred years ago, people didn't move around much. Granted, you had large immigration movements from time to time, such as the movement of Viet and Han people into the southern Vietnam in the 17th century. But generally, people died in the villages where they were born. There wasn't as much getting around to be done as there is today. So it would have been easier back then to qualify who was where. Nowadays, I imagine it's quite a bit like herding cats. Everybody's moving around, and it's hard to say where anyone is from anymore. But let's give it a try, shall we?

In Cambodia, almost all of the people speak Khmer, an Austroasiatic language, which, like Vietnamese, is monosyllabic and tonal. The rest of Cambodians are made up of Chinese and Vietnamese diaspora, as well as Cham and Khmer Loeu peoples. Vietnamese, another Austroasiatic language, has much of its vocabulary borrowed from Chinese. There are 54 minority groups in Vietnam, each with a distinct language. In Laos, about half of people speak Laotian, yet another monosyllabic tonal language, although Laotian is in the Tai language group. The other half of Laos comprises speakers of various ethnic minority languages.

That about wraps it up for this post. This was probably a hard one to enjoy. If you followed along this far, you win a prize. Maybe a potato.

1. "Indochina." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 10 Jun. 2011. http://www.britannica.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/EBchecked/topic/286431/Indochina.

2. "Southeast Asia." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica, 2011. Web. 10 Jun. 2011. http://www.britannica.com.ezproxy2.library.arizona.edu/EBchecked/topic/556489/Southeast-Asia.

Provender:
- breakfast: leftover cháo, omelette and stir fried veggies
- lunch: cà ri bò with organ meats and baguette
- dinner: pumpkin pizza at Boomerang Cafe in Tân Phú

A New Horizon

Today marks the eighth post I've made since I resurrected this blog for the trip to Vietnam. Eight posts in as many days is practically a milestone. To compare my blogging now to my efforts two years ago would show an exponential improvement--a lion to a mouse. I began this blog to document my experience in East Asia from June 2009 to May 2010. In the entire year I spent studying abroad, I posted eleven entries--not even once a month.

This blog used to be titled Riffing China. In fact, the old title is still in the URL. I think I'll leave it there as a reminder of this blog's beginnings. The title had emerged through conversations about how I was going to document my travels and keep in touch with people at home. My sister was the one who suggested the word "riffing." It turned out to be the perfect word. It captured not only my pledge to produce thoughtful responses to the sights and events I experienced during my travels, but also carried a personal touch because, hey, I play guitar. When I think of riffing, I think of creative expression, melodic illustration of thought or emotion, with fingers dancing on a fretboard to tell the story of life through song. I think it's an awesome, inspirational word and I'm grateful for her suggestion.

To me, the word choice of China is as meaningful as the idea of China is complex. Together with the word riffing, the title reflects my goal to learn and write about one of the world's oldest and most influential civilizations. It was also meaningful because I realized I knew almost nothing about China but had many assumptions and associations. Five years ago, all I knew about China was the red flag with five yellow stars, the Communist influence on Korea, and the cultural influence on Japan that included the plow, chopsticks, and written language. I knew there were one billion people living in China, with a one-family, one-child policy. I knew US citizens have a ridiculous love-hate relationship with inexpensive Chinese-made imported goods. And really, that was about it. Without knowing the gravity of the error, I had consolidated everything Chinese and placed it under the umbrella of the People's Republic of China, or PRC. It wasn't until this study abroad experience that I first learned there are actually two nations called China: the PRC and Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China.

My old definition of China as a country was just tossed out the window. How can China be a country if there are two of them? While I was in Taiwan, I was enrolled in a program called cultural immersion, where we spent 13 hours each day talking in only Mandarin. We were instructed in manners and social norms. We learned about history, about social identity. We started to understand China as being an idea that reflected a global culture that is exceptionally diverse, even among Chinese provinces. To say China is not to say Ireland, or Italy. It's more like saying Europe, in the sense that both comprise various regions that are unified by a sense of common identity.

Defining China as a culture, not a country, was the beginning of my journey. Everywhere I studied, indeed everywhere I traveled in Asia, the influence of Chinese culture was extensive. It's the culture of China--the language, the values, the history--that I explored during my year abroad, because Chinese culture is dominant in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore where I studied, and yet so different in each. Chinese culture is also greatly influential in Malaysia and Indonesia, two other places I went.

In establishing Riffing China, I had pledged to riff ecstatic about my experiences with Chinese culture. It was a pledge I hardly lived up to. Eleven posts is insufficient to document a two week vacation in a land of exceptional beauty, exotic culture, and food of limitless tastes and flavors, let alone an entire year in six countries. Like so many good intentions, efforts to write blog posts fell by the wayside.

In my defense, I'd like to think I put the time not blogging to good use. In Taiwan and Singapore, I spent more time studying than ever before, mostly because I desperately needed to; although, I learned a great deal about ethics and communication. And in Hong Kong, I lived a rich life of travel, arts, and social activity that would never have been possible at a more challenging university. The same can be said for my brief stays in Bali, southern Malaysia, and Guangxi, China--I lived in the moment and lived well. Yet my experiences were largely recorded only by my (tenuous) memory. The blog doesn't even mention Malaysia, Indonesia, or even the week I spent in China. Riffing China could be best summed up by one term: fail blog.

So a reimagining is in order. In a saccharine poetic cliché, the old blog burned and has become reborn as Riffing Indochina. This new iteration of riffing will record life in Saigon, travels within Vietnam, and trips planned for Thailand and Cambodia with Mike and Lữ. Furthermore, this blog will also serve to breathe life into new opportunity, a second chance to contemplate and record my experiences during the year studying abroad. My time here so far has already presented numerous parallels that I can't wait to share in further posts. After all, the cultural landscape of Vietnam is largely a result of exchange between the Việt people and the Southern Chinese throughout history. In particular, I am passionate to learn about how and why the two cultures have an overlap of cuisine, written and spoken language, and ontology. It's fascinating to me, and I wish to share with you what I learn. Please comment, criticize, contribute. In the meantime, check back from time to time, because this will continue. I will be reminded of old experiences as I have new ones. I will reflect on them both. I will riff.

For who? Well, for you, I hope.

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

Dr. Livingstone, um, I presume...?

Ever notice something out of place, like an elephant in a duck pond, or a kazoo in a symphonic orchestra? Yesterday in the bustling urban landscape here we saw a character from some cartoon jungle expedition brought to life. The three of us were settling in to a streetside snack of cool, sweet chè from a sidewalk vendor, when this crazy guy walked by us. Bespectacled and mustachioed, he wore a pith helmet--that's right, a pith freaking jungle-stomping helmet--and sported a thick wood cane to accompany his three piece khaki suit and spats. It was marvelous. He could have been Rudyard Kipling. I fumbled for the camera, but he ducked into a tailor, removed his helmet, and hung his cane on a table. I was disappointed to see the image in all its displaced and anachronistic glory was gone.

We contemplated how bizarre an image he was as we sat there on plastic stools and spooned mouthfuls of deliciously sweet soup en route to our digestive tracts, meanwhile hoping to catch a another glimpse (and perhaps a photo) of our real-life Dr. Livingstone if and when he would reemerge from his tailor, when a bus pulled up to the vendor. The driver asked the lady for two cups, which she prepared for him straight away. For some reason, this seemed perfectly natural to me; but Mike observed a clever juxtaposition. "Could you imagine if that ever happened back in the states? The bus driver taking the bus through drive-thru?" Actually, that would be awesome.

We were still chatting about this, that, or the other, and almost missed our brave explorer, pith helmet and all as he slipped out of the tailor's shop and into the back seat of a brand-new, sporty SUV, which seems to be the vehicle of choice for brave explorers on safari. The SUV sped off into the streets of the city, presumably in quest of greater glory and more suitable tailors.

That night, Mike kicked some unidentified thing onto the ground behind my back. I turned around, not to look at what it was, but to look at him, and saw he had one of those come-play-with-me puppy dog faces on. He picked up the thing, and it looked like the feathered part of an arrow rammed into a stack of pogs (How's my metaphoring?). So we went outside and kicked it around. The owner of the house came outside and joined us. He was funny, cause every time he kicked it, he made a hooting shout like the one Super Mario makes when he jumps. The game was fun, with each of us trying, and failing, to kick the shuttlecock (now now) to the others.

You tend to keep your eyes in the air with that game, and looking up between the rooftops above, I saw an epic fleet of swifts--an enormous number relative to what I see in the mornings--as they flew about catching insects in the early evening, with a purple-grey sky threatening to unload a torrent any minute. The birds looked erratic, like they were frantic to eat as much as they could before the rain hit. That's when I realized they weren't birds. I quit the game, ran inside and up the seven flights of corian steps and up the ladder and was standing in the midst of a bat feeding frenzy. They were so close, I could hear their wings flip-flap and they tumbled and tossed in the heavy air, and the squeaking of their echolocation. I recognized at least 2 different species of insectivorous bats. Then another sound, like static, coming from the park to the northwest, and turning to look, I saw a downpour that was headed my way. I scrambled down the ladder and hit the patio deck under the overhang just as the rain reached the house. We spent the rest of the evening inside, dry, and quite content.


Provender
- breakfast: bánh cuốn and cà phê sữa đá
- lunch: gỏi cuốn and sâm bổ lượng
- dinner: home cookin' -- omelette, homemade pickled veggies, sautéed green beans and bean curd, and sliced tomatoes and cucumbers.

Status update:

1. Love the support and new followings, guys--thanks!
2. My green guitar broke. The bridge popped off the body right before the lesson. Like, as I walked through the door. Awkward.
3. Despite the technical setback, the guitar lesson went well, I think.
4. The Ho Chi Minh City Museum is worth a visit, at least to witness first hand exactly how little effort the government puts into maintaining it. The relentless deluge of red party propaganda on all the exhibits is just crumbly icing on the dilapidated cake.

Well, I'm happy to say I'm settling down nicely in the Saigon apartment, small and cozy as it is. It's interesting to compare my housing in Asia to where I just was in Arizona. My Hong Kong flat was exactly the same size as the closet in the master bedroom in Sahuarita. And the bedroom itself was no smaller than this whole Saigon apartment. The close quarters demands a fair bit of spatial economy. It kind of feels like we're living on a moderately sized boat, only sans briny air and tossing of waves. Lữ says that living in such a small space is good practice for when we live in New York together. I'm inclined to agree. Although, in New York I think I'll have my own room. For now, I've got a hide-a-bed that I plop down in the living room when it's time for shut-eye. They have their own room--but after they go to bed I have the rest of the apartment to myself, so technically I have the bigger space. Win! Heheh.

To describe the apartment, a picture's worth a thousand words; but let's see how far I get with a few hundred. The apartment is on the first floor, which is really just a case of semantics--the bottom floor is called the ground floor and the next is the mezzanine. You walk up two flights of stairs to get to the first floor, which makes this five story building seven stories in height.

The place is newly renovated, bright, and cheery, with eggshell walls and sandstone-colored tiles. A glass block wall sheds indirect daylight into the living room and onto blonde wooden furniture, which is where we install our butts to veg out in front of the flat screen t.v. that's mounted to the built-in shelving unit. On the other side of the couch is a small dining room and galley kitchen outfitted with the barest of necessities: a micro-fridge, a handful of utensils, pots, and pans, and a pantry stocked with the basics--fragrant Thai rice, finely ground Vietnamese coffee, spices. There's no oven, but there's a gas range, which is nice, although boiling the kettle puts a lot of heat in the room. But since the three of us can go outside to eat a whole meal together for a grand total of $2 dollars, we tend not to overuse the kitchen.

And then there's the bathroom, in which arguably the most important business is conducted. It's set with a pedestal sink, a glass-enclosed shower, and a double-flush toilet (small flush for number 1, and biggie for number 2; I can't for the life of me understand why we don't have those in the western US where water is so scarce). And! Not to forget, there's a certain spray fixture that deserves explanation; however, I'll save the details about that for a future post about water.

The last section of the apartment is Mike and Lữ's room, which has matching solid wood furniture and floor-to-ceiling curtains that drape across a sliding door to a balcony overlooking the courtyard below. On the balcony, our laundry drys on a rack, and a lotus plant with near elephant ear-sized leaves shoots out of a 10-gallon clay pot of water, mud, and duckweed. Lữ gets so excited to see how fast the buds grow--nearly an inch a day, at least.

The early morning view from
our rooftop presents an image
of the spires of the Notre
Dame Cathedral, the city post
office, and fleets of
diving swifts.

And further upstairs, ascending four flights to alight upon the patio. Then to climb the leaning steel ladder to the rooftop! With spectacular city vistas: to the northwest, the movie star's villa next door and the park on the other side, where people play badminton in the hours around dawn, the swifts darting about the spires of the Notre Dame cathedral to the northeast, the city skyline that features Saigon's epic construction: the Bitexco Financial Tower in the distance to the south. Not much room on the rooftop for malarkey--there's a water cistern and a solar water heater that takes up most of the space. But there's a bit of room to sit and take in the views. In the hours before sunrise, this is my favorite place in my new home.

Provender
- breakfast: bánh mì and chè đậu
- lunch: canh chua (leftovers from yesterday)
- supper: gỏi đu đủ khô bò and cháo

Within a mere 24 hours of my arrival in this fair tropical land, it would seem I have acquired for myself some form of profitable enterprise forthwith, and certainly one that would perchance precipitate a sizable return on an investment of just a modicum of time. Lol!

Thanks be to the interwebs and to me bro. I'm officially a teacher now. I got a gig giving guitar lessons starting today, and I'm really excited. In the one day since Mike posted an ad for me on a local forum, almost ten people responded. Most responses have been parents asking about lessons for their kids. Some of the jobs wouldn't begin for about a month. But it's a good wage, and the wage is doubled if I travel to their house.

As tasteless as it is in the states to brag about how much money you make, the game is different here. Folks here don't seem to mind much about discussions of salaries, savings, and expenses. So, here goes. -takes breath- I'm making enough money in one hour to ride a bus fifty times, or buy sixty-six potato cakes from a street vendor, or pick up sixteen tickets to the Saigon Zoo. There I said it, my wages. Well, not exactly. It's still not natural. Check back in a couple weeks, though. By then I might have posted my entire budget for the next six months.

Seriously though, gotta start working on a lesson plan. But first, there's a little cafe around the corner, and I hear they have nice pastries in the morning.

Provender
- breakfast: canh chua
- supper: bún chả

The airport in Ho Chi Minh City (which I will, from now here on after, refer to as Saigon) looks like every other airport I've ever been to. I didn't feel like I was in another country until I stepped outside through the automatic doors to the sweltering balmy air that carried rich wafts of smoky incense. Strange as it may seem for such a smoggy, crowded city that looks about as densely developed as Hong Kong, but Saigon actually smells pretty good.

I had my hands full. Along with my straw hat and green guitar, I had the frame backpack which was all I needed for a month of backpacking in Europe. I also dragged behind me two blue, wheeled suitcases like a pair of mules loaded with gifts and odd-and-ends that are hard to find in Vietnam. Never in my life have I traveled with so many bags.

At least a hundred people crowded outside the terminal waiting for arrivals. My bro and sis-in-law, each carrying a scooter helmet, found me through the crowd and ushered me and my canvas mules toward the rickety bus waiting to take us to my home for the next six months. Mike was wearing the shamrock shirt that goes with the baseball cap I was wearing--both were Christmas gifts from Kevin. T'was heart-warming to see them back together again.

Currency exchangers in the airport usually charge excessive fees, because hey, what choice do you have, so I still didn't have any đồng on me when we got on the bus. Lucky for me, Lữ came along for the ride to help me find my way home. She talked with the bus driver and negotiated the price, which may have been a bit excessive, since he charged full bus fare for each of my bags. Lữ picked up the tab, which was, by local standards, exorbitant. For the two of us and the three bags, the total came out to be 20,000₫, or about a dollar.

The bus sped off among throngs of scooters and taxis. The streets are a raging cacophony of tiny two-cycle engines revving up and ceaseless feeble beeps from scooter horns. Crossing at an intersection takes fortitude, faith, and luck. Lữ says the safest way to cross is at a brisk, consistent pace. Almost all the scooters will steer clear of you that way, and most of the cars. Not the buses though. Mike says the buses will honk a few times before they run you over. To me, it seems like a collision with a bus would be the hard one to walk away from.

Occasionally, you'll see a really fancy car on the streets as well. Later that night, Mike spotted a Bentley, and told me that, on top of its $200,000 price tag, the government in Hanoi slaps on a 100 percent import tax. You might ask, wait a minute, how can someone in a communist country afford that kind of extravagance? Needless to say, there's some disparity among classes in this people's nation. Average wages for folks in Saigon is around $200 a month. That doesn't buy a lot of Bentleys. Communism ain't what it used to be.

Flashes of scenery though the bus windows and, later on, a stroll through the city confirmed my initial impression: Saigon looks a lot like Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and not much different than Singapore. Which makes sense. All three cities are bustling trade centers which were once colonial capitals, with a melange of contemporary, traditional, and Euro-Asian architecture set among rows upon rows of shop-houses. Although here in Saigon, the Indio-British style with neo-classical features like rounded arches is largely absent compared to Malaysia and Singapore; in its place is the sharp, Gothic architecture characteristic of French influence.

The powerlines of Saigon tangle like cobwebs.

A perfect testimony of the stark contrast of new and old, perhaps, is the bundles upon bundles of telephone and electric wires overhead. They look like like rubbery-thick black tendrils of steam-punk vines that darken the sky and choke out all other forms of life. Whereas with most cities, in which the electricity that powers them is routed underground, here the wires are in the same location they were when the city was first electrified. It's as if the first electric wires that were installed so many ago were never replaced; they were just built layer upon layer with every successive generation.

The bus pulled into the stop, and we climbed out with bags in tow. Beyond the bus station was the notable Quách Thị Trang Square, which features a horse and rider statue in homage to a general who led the Vietnamese in their independence from China in the 15th century. Across the square was Bến Thành Market, which contains all manner of tasty foods and souvenirs. From there, it was a short walk in the balmy heat to Mike and Lữ's charming little apartment in a quiet ex-pat community in district 1, where its easy to hear the bells of the Notre Dame cathedral around the corner. With only two hours of sleep since the morning of my 19-hour flight, the rest of the day went by in a blur. But, between narcoleptic-like fits at the restaurant with Mike and Lữ, I remember feeling incredibly happy to be here.

Provender:
Bánh xèo with coconut buds