News from the Boat_Vietnam

Okay, everybody: Hell Week is coming up fast and I’m rather fond of my sanity, so I’ve given up on translating anything for now. Sorry. Just trying to survive.

And as a quick side note to all you smartasses that feel the need to point out how bad my German has gotten: I’ve been in the States for three years now. The average German I speak there is an hour a week on the phone with Helga (it averages out to just under 9 minutes a day, in case you were wondering). Since I’ve been on this trip, the amount of time I’ve spent on the phone speaking German has gone down to an hour and a half *total*. (That would be around 1.258 minutes a day, FYI.) And the amount of German emails I get during a semester, not counting Helga and Volkmar, averages out to about, say… five? So yeah, my German has gotten pretty bad. Believe me, I know. But it’s not going to start improving any time soon, so for the love of God, stop telling me about it.

***

71 days into our voyage, the good weather finally abandoned us. Turns out, that whole “rainy season” business? It’s not rain like we know it. It is literally water pouring from the sky for hours. It’s “I can’t take pictures because I get water on my lens every time I try,” it’s “I’ll buy this crappy poncho that I know won’t last a day because otherwise I don’t see how I’m getting home,” it’s “I don’t think I’m going out tonight because I’ll be soaked to the bone before I get to the shuttle bus.”

It’s *wet.*

But anyway. Have I mentioned how much I loved Vietnam? The people are incredibly friendly, even when they’re trying to rip you off. It seems like to them, tourism is a giant game. They’ll start giggling when they bargain and laugh at you when you scuttle through traffic with terror in your eyes. They even immortalize their spaghetti-like telephone lines and the infamous phrase, “Same same – but different” (the bane of every amateur barterer) on their cheap and cheaply made t-shirts.

[If you have no idea what that particular sentence is supposed to mean, don’t worry – neither do we.]

But they’re smart, too. The maze-like markets have an elaborate system of color-coded plastic bags in which sellers wrap your purchases to signal to the other shop owners how well you bartered. They’re experienced players in a game that foreigners struggle to understand – but a game is all it is. In India, shopkeepers get angry when you won’t budge on your price. In Vietnam, they roll their eyes, take your money, and gleefully calculate how badly you’re still overpaying.

Of course that’s city life. Outside Ho Chi Minh City, previously Saigon, the pace is slower. There are no scooter stampedes just lurking around the corner, waiting for you to set one foot on the road so they can rush out at you. Instead, boats of all shapes and sizes meander along the Mekong Delta. The floating markets sell fresh fruit and vegetables, people make rice paper and coconut candy (and rice wine, which is a little like vodka, only more intense), and people dig up mud from the bottom of the river to fertilize their gardens. I’d call it sleepy, but the obnoxiously loud motors make sleep pretty much impossible.

If it hasn’t hit you yet that you are actually a foreigner here, it definitely will out in the country. Forget English. You might as well be speaking Klingon for all the good it does you. Little kids in supermarkets start giggling when they see you. But no worries. Pointing and smiling will usually get you where you want to go.

Aside from the Delta, where I spent two of our five days in Vietnam, the major theme for my stay was the war. We call it the Vietnam war, they call it the American war, and the perceptions that the two countries have of it are as different as the names they give it. Mention the war to an American, and he or she immediately scowls. The reasons for that are usually fairly diverse – from “Communism sucks” to “Capitalism sucks,” and anything in between – but the reaction is generally the same.

Now, I never actually walked up to a Vietnamese person and said, “So, about that war…,” but I did see a lot of things relating to it. I visited the War Remembrance Museum, the Reunification Palace, and the Cu Chi Tunnels. Hell, I even fired an AK-47. Yes, they let tourists fire machine guns at the tunnels. There’s no pussyfooting around the issue. Yes, the war happened, and yes, they won. They don’t feel the need to apologize. From a German perspective, the Museum in particular was a hard. I’m not used to people saying, “There was a war, and *we* were the victims, and we’ll throw every shred of evidence we have of that in your face.” Three stories worth of photographs of an American G.I. holding part of a Viet Cong or plaques reading “This is where American soldiers killed two twelve-year-olds and disemboweled a ten-year-old boy” are not easy to take. Plus, they have a tank with Agent Orange – disfigured fetuses inside. I’m not saying it was bad, but it was definitely an experience seeing the other side.

The same goes for the tunnels, I guess. We were shown into a bunker where our guide held a brief speech about the set-up of the tunnels, and then said, “Now, we’ll see a video.” He neglected to point out that it was a propaganda video from the war, with black-and-white footage of cyclists, and a narrator detailing how the locals used to enjoy picnics in the scenic Cu Chi area before the evil Americans came in and dropped bombs on their unsuspecting heads. And while the rest of the visit was more about the Viet Cong side, about the conditions they lived under, the overall mood still seemed to be the same.
Not that you can blame them. I crawled the 100 meters through the tunnels, in the dark, with a gaggle of terrified girls behind me and only occasional glimpses of the guy in front of me. I hit my head and scraped my knees and tried to ignore how badly my legs were aching from the half-crouching position I was in. And this was an enlarged tunnel. Imagining actually having this be your life, with bombs and tanks waiting at the surface, was absolutely terrifying. I was sweating and exhausted by the time I crawled back out, and I don’t even mind enclosed spaces.

Almost equally memorable was that I got to shoot a gun. I’ve wanted to for ages, and there they were, with every machine gun imaginable. The whole thing was probably fairly sketchy, but they had ear muffs at least. And they were definitely needed. Aside from being really, really loud, shooting an AK-47 was also easy. Frighteningly easy. If I, a 5’8’’ hundred-twenty pounder, can fire a gun that dangerous that easily, I don’t even want to imagine the damage an experienced fighter could do.

The whole experience wasn’t necessarily bad, but it was certainly different. Like I said, I’m not used to looking back on a war with pride. I guess they’re entitled. Everybody likes to be proven right (whether or not they actually are, is not for me to decide). And I certainly found it valuable to see the war from their perspective. I just don’t think people should gloat about successfully killing other people.

Lots of love from 35˚ 4.2N/139˚ 41.9E
Alexa

[It was totally awesome though. :)]