Vietnam Day 17 (6/24/09)

Van Anh and I got up a little earlier today to try and catch tourists having their morning coffee. We hit a minor snag however, seeing not one foreigner after walking around for nearly an hour. I guess tourists like to sleep late, or maybe they just stick to continental breakfasts in the hotel. Just as we were about to give up, we decided to try one last trick and walked into the post office. We took a seat on the bench inside and, for a few moments, were very discouraged. Then we spotted our prey (we've become quite the tourist hunters...I'm thinking about buying some camo gear and carrying around my binoculars). We interviewed a couple of families that came there with Vietnamese tour guides that spoke better English than I do (hopefully an exaggeration, but I'm not sure). The most interesting person I talked to was a man from Wales carrying only a backpack and his camera. I sat down with him for some time and he told me his story, about how his sons grew up and left home, motivating him to go out and travel the world before he was left with nowhere to go but a nursing home. Now he travels around Asia, working as an amateur photographer sending his pictures back to an agent in Europe so he can keep funding his travels. He's exactly the kind of person I want to be, one who never loses that sense of adventure and openness to everything and everyone. (I only hope I can still be trekking the world when I'm his age).

Riding around today, I felt slightly less stable on the motorbike than I usually do. You see, when we went to the garage this morning, Van Anh's bike was out of pressure so we had to take Loan's. From the beginning, I noticed things were a little off - I kept sliding arounda nd my helmet banged into Van Anh's every time she hit the breaks. She later told me the reason was that Loan's bike is a "boyfriend motorbike," the kind a lot of guys buy so that their girlfriends riding behind them will have to hold on tighter (pretty ingenious from a guys perspective). I think I'm going to start riding side-saddle anyway, because Van Anh said when I'm on the bike no one can tell I'm a foreigner except that no local sits like I do when wearing a skirt.

As we drove around, I took notice of many of the schools in the city. We went past a preschool, identifiable from the outer gates made in the form of carved cartoonish animals (complete with giraffes, elephants, and Santa's reindeer). We also went past a highschoool with dozens of parents outside the gate, waiting for their children to finish a big final exam that would determine those students' futures. Later in the afternoon, a group of us went to the reunification palace. It was beautiful certainly, but after a while, the countless meeting rooms (that remained useless except when dignitaries visited) started to meld together.

For dinner, we decided to risk our health for the banh mi (Vietnamese sandwich) on the street. It was well worth the risk, packed with patte, three different kinds of pork, veggies (including papaya), and egg, topped off with lard mayonase and hot sauce. I'm sure Jenny Craig wouldn't approve of this meal, but I love it. Later that night, Van Anh and I went back out to survey, this time splitting up to cover more ground. The first group of people I encountered were mostly nice except for the one, more brash man who made me ask him the questions orally, rather rudely getting up and walking away in the middle when he was tired of answering questions. The next group however were all nice. They were Australian and British expats who were very interested in what I had to say about Ninh Thuan and happy to talk to me about living in Vientnam. They told me to pull up a seat and told me all the nice, safer places to go in the city and what the expat community was like. I had a lot of fun just sitting and chatting with them. While I know a lot of expats come here for shadier purposes, I'm becoming increasingly convinced it's even easy to find the decent, hard-working ones too.