Advertisement
Published: October 28th 2008
As usual, it takes a thunderstorm to give me an excuse to write my blog. Unless you want to take a lunatic of a xeom driver with an addiction to speed and a strong belief in his own immortality, under a thin sheet of plastic (visibility nil), you are ultimately trapped in your guesthouse in a rapidly flooding alleyway. For once, I’m pleased, seeing as it’s been a few weeks since I last blogged.
I’m trying to recall all that I’ve been doing but I know that merely telling you won’t be enough to do Vietnam or HCMC justice. In the past three weeks, I’ve been to Vung Tau (coastal seaside city about an two hours south east of HCMC), the Cu Chi area (where the ubiquitous tunnels are located), Cao Dai temple (massive structure that houses the Triple Religion of Vietnam; Confucianism , Buddhism and Taoism), the Ho Chi Minh City Museum and the War Remnants Museum.
In Vung Tau I got burnt until my skin turned paddy-girl pink, I was subsequently abandoned for thirty long noon-time minutes, up a mountain, at a lighthouse (alone) and later chased down the mountain by rabid guard dogs. (I didn’t know
you weren’t allowed into the lighthouse…why did my smiley xeom-driver-for-the-day-I-love-you-long-time-and-the-most leave me there for so long if not to explore??!)
In Cu Chi I, along with Amy, another colleague at ILA, experienced first-hand life as a tunnel rat or Viet Cong guerrilla. It’s a little akin to a day of work at the Gaelic Bar - you show up in black uniform and spend the day betting how many little small spaces you can fit into. You get bonus points if you know how to handle explosives/booby traps with spikes and can hide them well under grass, bamboo and leaves. So exactly like the Gaelic then…On a serious note though, having walked forty metres of an ‘enlarged’ tunnel with three levels of pitch darkness (I had to stoop - my thighs hurt for two days after!), it’s amazing to think the Vietnamese fighters actually lived underground for months to survive incessant US bombing. The claustrophobia of the tunnel life still remains and is authentic enough; when thirty sweaty tourists are racing to get to the end to claim their coke and shoot a gun at the firing range (loud, expensive and pointless to my mind), you know you must
continue because you’ll never squeeze past them, so panicking is not an option.
I went to Cao Dai the same day as Cu Chi and although not there too long it was like falling into a Vietnamese movie. This religion embraces pretty much everything and anything so it has (if you look at the pictures carefully) a Catholic/Christian style entrance façade, a globe symbolising the Muslim world and finally another spire structure representing the Asian religion teachings. (Taoism I think; I stopped listening to my guide at this point - it was boiling!). We saw a service which was pretty cool but to be honest I think my guide left more of a lasting impression than the temple. I don’t want to sound arrogant (moi?) here but surely one requirement of a tour guide is to be able to communicate information in the language of the tourists. Our guide had English but not the connecting words and pronouns such as: the, to, and, for, he, she, it, their, we, your, not and but. So sentences generally went like this:
“Friends, ears please: let tell concerning (he got that verb from an electronic dictionary) Cao Dai. Religion big people
all learnings. Okay? Lets lunch!” Lunch was cool; Amy and I got to sit in a tree hut. Amy also had the additional pleasure of trying winter melon tea. (It’s not as refreshing as it sounds. I had had it while negotiating for two hours with my soon-to-be landlord the contract for a new apartment I‘m getting with Vera another ILA teacher. His family generously offered us drinks and I swear I’ve never vomited over food or drink before but this went beyond nausea. It’s like coke but flat and syrupy like cough medicine! You can see Amy’s reaction in the photos but multiply my reaction X 100!!)
Anyway back to the tour guide. This was my favourite engrish example:
“…Suddenly 1932. Ho Chi Minh death. Ho Chi Minh unhappy.”
UNHAPPY?! WHAT??? Unhappy in his reincarnated being or what?! This mangling of the English language aaaagggghhh! Perhaps I was just annoyed that I spent longer on the bus journey than actually at these fantastic places. One of the most irritating things about my new job is that I never get two days off together unless it’s a holiday (rare!). This means that I can only do day
trips and Hanoi, Nha Trang, Danang and all the hundreds of places I wanted to explore will have to wait for a while. While there are loads of things to do on my day off, there is only so many times the luxury health spa/pubs/restaurants/martial arts will keep me entertained! Yesterday I did go to a Taebo class with Amy - it wasn’t the best thing to go to when you were out on the traditional Sunday night of revelry until 3am but it did eventually clear up my headache.taebo is like aerobics but with kickboxing and punching thrown in. at the end of the class Ms. Vi comes around to everyone lying on the floor and after wiping away the gallons of sweat from your face, pushes your forehead and shoulders into the floor, sticks her thumbs into your eye sockets and presses a pressure point behind your ears until all the nasty hangover from hell just magically disappears. And the class was free because they want me to return. How cool is that I ask?!! Between my Taebo, Vietnamese language lessons and impending Vovinam (Vietnamese martial arts) classes my time stretched!
Over the last few weeks I’ve
visited the two museums mentioned above - the HCMC museum used to be the revolutionary museum and the War Remnants used to be the War Crimes museum. These former titles give an indication of what they contain - yes, you guessed it tanks, helicopters and fighter jets. It was great to see the original photos etc that until now I only studied at university and it was an amazing feeling to stand in actual places I only heard about from lecturers. Also it was fun spotting the Irish people their - they are few and far between! When they do appear they are covered in sweat and sun cream, freckled and mostly wearing red people’s rep. of cork t-shirts or GAA jerseys. It makes starting a conversation easy…sometimes I introduce myself by asking in my thickest Irish sing song brogue “So you must be Ausie like?” It really confuses them - best part of my day!
Having described my last few weeks to you all it still feels inadequate. My most inspired moments are usually on the back of motorbikes and always when I have no access to pen and paper. I’ll be moving to a more permanent place
this Thursday - it’s a lovely two bed apartment not far from school. So I’ll be able to give everyone an address then and won’t be a homeless bum no more! My job is going well and no one has realised yet the Vietnamese know more English than I do!! The other day I was teaching my beginners adult class al about my family, so I drew a family tree on the board. When I got to my father I drew a man with wild black hair, a moustache connected to a long black beard and asked them to guess who it was. At first their pronunciation confused me - they kept saying “bad layden. It was twenty minutes later, after the entire class had fallen into deathly silence that I realised they thought my father was Bin Laden. I quickly made your beard shorter and neater Dad! Less cave like than real-life though!!
I’ve decided that in a few weeks I’m going to try my hand at riding a scooter in the chaos of the city - have already had offers of lessons - and it is getting annoying haggling and generally being ripped off by xeom taxis
every twenty minutes. Either they pretend not to understand where you want to go thus stopping on every roundabout to get me to repeat the address or they take the ‘scenic’ route to justify their high price for white skinned lady. You know when you’ve been ripped off when all the other xeom drivers speak in Vietnamese at you and laugh hysterically. If you get angry and tell them you don’t have time for their showmanship, as I did today, they drive at a hundred miles an hour to try to get you to say “No Fire!” My pride usually gets the better of me, so I pretend not to be screaming inside. I remember Dylan driving me on his speed machine to work at the Gaelic. I smile and sing the fields of Athenry to myself; it’s strangely comforting and they think I’m more of a lunatic than they are. I figure I’ll be safer and more independent with my own death machine. Wish me luck, I’ll need it.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.076s; Tpl: 0.014s; cc: 5; qc: 53; dbt: 0.0486s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Keira
non-member comment
:(
I am addicted to you blog :( I live and breathe your words of Vietnamese life because on the inside I am dying with jealousy!