Bow Nee Oh Dee Uhn

That means ‘how much for this’ in Vietnamese and I must have asked that about 946 times since I’ve been here. For food, for gas, for places to sleep. It’s win-lose situation, asking this. On one hand they admire that you are trying to speak their language. On the other hand, they think you can speak their language and fire off a few dozen words at you. To this you respond, ‘doy kom hee-yo’, or ‘I don’t understand’. I say that a lot.

            I’ve come to notice that what somebody once told me is true; that 99% of the people in the world are good and it’s the 1ish% that gives people as a whole a bad reputation. Everyone here is so self-less. Strangers offer for us to sleep at their house, mechanics fix our bikes for free, old men on the side of the road wave us over to try their cup of home-made tea. Gus said that he thinks its going to be hard to go back to America where everyone is so worried about themselves. I agree. It will be even more of a culture shock then when I came here and saw the opposite. I’ve yet to meet someone who is not at least mildly pleased with our presence. Especially with the motorbike; stopping in random villages and talking with Vietnamese elders who don’t know a single English word- just wide eyed and a faint smile, slowly raising up their hand to point us in the right direction.

            I don’t know what day it is. I don’t know the time. Actually I do now cause I just looked in the corner of the screen but I’ve worn my shirt 3 days in a row. My feet have a tan that looks like my sandals. I sleep an average of 5.5 hours every night and it feels good.

            I don’t know what im looking for. In the bathroom stall tonight someone wrote on the wall, “In search of something, I traveled the world only to come home and find what I was looking for.” I hope that guy found it.

            They use the metric system here, but everyone uses the same units for time. What if different cultures had different time units and clocks? Like one second in the united states equaled 2.67 seconds here. Something to ponder…

            Even the dogs and cats here have different personality traits. Each is adapting to the cultural settings. Like the people. Like me.

            We rode from Nha Trang (google it) into the mountains in search of a road we should have known we were never going to find. In the American suburbs, everyone stays inside at night after a ‘long day of work’. They keep to themselves, watch their metal boxes. In this country, everyone is out doing laundry, playing volleyball/soccer, or talking with their neighbors. It seems like all the people here have more frequent as well as higher quality interactions with one another. There’s something to be learned.

            I know ive said it many times before and will say it many times again, but the following few days took place in the middle of nowhere. And by that I mean we were at least 30 kilometers from a paved road.

            We rode in search of a town called Chu Se as the sun left no visibility and gus’s headlight quickly followed. At a gas station the employees were watching a program teaching the English language. I borrowed a pen and wrote something down as they looked over my shoulder, fascinated. We both used the same pen and paper, but what was created was worlds different. Literally.

            So anyways we’re riding along and stop for a snack. Walking back to our bikes (parked in the road), five cops ride up and park about 20 feet from us. I see one walk up to a truck driver- who hands him and high valued **something**- and the cop walks away. They see us, sit there, and wait. The man in the store looked at the cops, looked at us, looked at the cops, looked at us. Smiling creepily, he hinted that we were about to have an encounter. We walked back casually to our bikes and loaded them up. One cop came up and asked ‘where from?’ I pretended I didn’t understand. A few of them walked up, looking at our cargo. I told gus in English (cause they obviously couldn’t understand us), ‘get out the map so we can make them think that were lost and trying to find directions.’ Which we did, and the cop pointed, and we broke eye contact and rode away.

            We got to this hotel late at night and the woman was trying to charge us far more than the room was worth. I got a little hot headed so she motioned for us to leave. We rode around town before finding nothing and decided to return. Upon which she raised the price about 50%. “Fuck that.” And we rode off. Again, in the middle of nowhere. We come to a swanky red light and hear, “hey are you boys Americans?” in a Southern accent.

We look to the left and see the first white person we’ve seen in 400 kilometers. After hearing our situation he told us to follow him. His name was John and he was from north Carolina. He met his wife, Snow, on facebook and she happened to be from this village. They were both in town for her sisters wedding. LLOONNGG story short they invited us to stay at her family’s house with her brother who was our age and was in the police force. They were a well known and well respected family; the father a teacher, the brother a doctor, the uncle was the chief of police, the mother did some government work. That night and the next morning, the brother, Davitt, showed us around town. Coffee, beer, chow, pho, the fishing pond, the market, the toy store, flower shop, friends houses, kareokee, everything. Everywhere we went people starred at us. They didn’t look, they starred.  People even stopped their bikes in the middle of the street to watch us walk down the sidewalk. I felt like a celebrity and here we were being paraded around everywhere. Im willing to bet limbs we were the first white people to do most of the things there.

            We were invited to go to the sisters wedding and couldn’t say no. I dressed in my best clothes- a polo and a borrowed pair of shorts. At first I thought it would be a small gathering, maybe at a church with 30 people or so. We ride into the country side and see a ginormous tent in the distance. They walked us in and up to the front where the bride was so we could give her the gifts we bought. They made us get on stage and take a picture with her. Let me describe this scene: 3 white people in the tent, two of them on a stage, 300 pairs of eyes on us. We say- “what the hell are we doing here.” They say- “what the hell are they doing here.” Insanity at its finest.

            Thus began Vietnamese wedding festivities. By that I mean that we both had a glass and they simply would not feel satisfied if there wasn’t beer schlopping over the brim. Sorry to who’s reading this but They. Got. Us. Drunkk. Everybody was trying to come up and say hello, shake our hand, take our picture, touch our bodies. The women asked us to dance and the men asked us to cheers their glasses. I cant stress this enough, but we weren’t supposed to be here. I went to pee and found myself on the outskirts of the tent with 5 Vietnamese men sitting on the ground. Each one of them took terns drunkenly slurring words in my face. All I could do was my signal for I don’t understand; point at me, make an x with me arms, point at my head.

            Everyone has such a genuine interest. I cant understand it.

            We went back to their home after being convinced to stay one more night. We were told by the brother (who spoke decent English by the way) that the family had prepared a feast for us. Which they probably shouldn’t have because again I couldn’t eat anything. I was too busy being force fed beer. Every time the mother cheers’d us we had to chug what was left in our glass. “We cant be rude and say no,” so I drank about 4 beers in 25 minutes.

            I never knew tables and chairs were so unnecessary. We had a feast while cross legged. The mother pulled out a dish and handed us two beautifully crafted bracelets that we were told were made with gold. “This is to show that you are my family. We are family and you are my bother. Do not forget us.” Davitt said. His last line was unnecessary as well.

            I still have it on. I hope to always wear it. To me it symbolizes the kindness of the human spirit. Even that 1ish% that I was talking about earlier—they have it too.

            And I think. None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for red lights. Something that forces people to stop and look around instead of ahead.

            Last bit. I try not to discuss my eating habits but its almost impossible not to here. Im a vegetarian (‘ahn jai’) and have been for about 7 years. The night of the feast I (un)(knowingly) broke my streak. The dish they made had some item in it. I thought it was an egg so I asked and Davitt said, “yes egg”. It felt like an egg, but didn’t taste like an egg or look like one cause the white and yellow part had black strings through them. So again I asked, ‘egg?’ And he said, “yes…egg” while pointing at his eye, which is what he probably thought I was saying. I ate a cow’s eyeball. Ask for that the next time your’e at the drive-thru.