A week in Vietnam

We’ve just come back to Saigon from a trip out into the outskirts. We spent three nights away, staying in two towns that saw few foreign tourists. It was a different world. We were followed by open stares, not of hostility but of friendliness and/ or curiosity. We were invited to sit with a group of people as they celebrated a whole host of things, including a birthday, a holiday life and having three foreigners join them for celebrations, something they really seemed to dig.

We drank the local moonshine. It tasted something like vodka and gasoline. We got immensely drunk off of it. We danced, laughed and sang songs in pygmy Vietnamese. A tooth was chipped and contacts were lost, but sometimes things have to be sacrificed in the name of fun and experiencing the bizarre. Talking about bizarre, we were offered a dish of dog. The smell was rather offensive, but the meat actually didn’t taste that bad, if you could get past the fact that you were eating dog. Something we couldn’t, really.

The necessary eating dog jokes followed to help us deal with, well, having just eaten dog.

Right now we’re sitting in a hotel room, on the fifth floor of a hotel with no elevator. Good exercise, but a bitch if you forget something and you only realise when you’re on the street. From our balcony we can look into a temple, where Vietnamese people are chanting in white robes. It’s a fantastic sound. Earlier we got to see a bell ringing ceremony from our balcony, as well.

To some extent we’re slowly starting to figure these people out. They are very complex and emotionally charged. I think they’re actually pretty cool. I’ll probably be going to India on my trip, though.