Interestin​g Randomosit​ies, Parte Tre

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3. Traffic -or- Southern California Ain't Got Nuthin' on This Place

Remember how I said it started raining while I was getting my haircut? Well, it didnt stop. For hours and hours. And I don't mean some namby-pamby little rain shower. I mean RAIN in the Biblical sense. As in, I was walking through lakes up to my mid-calf on my way home, and that was only the relative beginning of the storm. As in, after a while the alley outside of the school flooded so profoundly that motorbikes stalled on their way through, we moved the computers as high as we could get them and the man in the house across the way was bailing out his living room with a bowl a la Johnny Depp at the beginning of Pirates of the Caribbean. As in, I was late to all my classes because I couldn't find a xe om (motorbike taxi)to take me to the ones that weren't at the school (remember: everyone here drives motorbikes, and just wears ponchos in the rain) because they had all gone home. Eventually one of the other teachers took me to my first class, and then I had to find a taxi to take me from there back to the school, where one of my students would pick me up for my second class. This plan went off with minimal complications (except that it took FOREVER to find a taxi to take me back), until the taxi got about four blocks away from the school. Then we hit traffic.

So, let's reflect for a moment. Traffic is perhaps one of my top 3 pet peeves of all time (the other two are 1. mean people and 2. people who chew loudly with their mouths open), and the traffic in Southern California is probably the top reason I wouldn't be happy spending the rest of my life there. Being stuck in inexplicable traffic at 2pm on a Tuesday on the 5 just about makes me want to die. That said, let me tell you about the traffic in Hanoi, after it's been raining for hours and hours and the world is flooded, and seemingly nearly every one of the over three million people in the city waited for the rain to stop to head home from work. My friends, you have never seen traffic until you've seen this.

Think of the absolute worst traffic jam you've ever encountered. The one with the 5 car pileup on the freeway and four lanes of traffic moving at a police-directed trickle through the one half-lane open on the side. Now take that traffic jam, double or triple the density of gridlocked pissed-off humanity, put them all on motorbikes instead of in cars, and make the road 2 lanes instead of 4. Imagine exhaust fumes so thick that you're all nearly asphyxiating all the time, visible like a noxious blanket in the glow of a thousand thousand headlights. Imagine two or three cars and seven or eight motorbikes packed in side-by-side on that supposedly two-lane road, virtually stopped, for miles. Imagine them all darting in and around and between each other on the wet streets, driving on the sidewalks, turning around in the middle of the road where there's still room, creeping forward inch by inch on every street for miles around. I got off my taxi and decided to walk the last four blocks home, and let me share my new definition of "traffic" with you: if you can drive, bike, run, walk, climb, crawl, hot-air-balloon or otherwise maintain any kind of forward momentum on a street in any way, it is not traffic. I thought that walking would be better, but no; in heavy traffic in Hanoi, sidewalks just become more cramped and even-less-regulated extensions of the streets, and navigating them at all is very near impossible.

And this isn't even the rainy season! Thank goodness I won't be here for that. Because I love this place but man, give me So Cal traffic any day of the week. And I didn't think I could EVER say something like that. Wow.

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