progressing

     We went through the visa gate like herded cattle, got our bags from the carousel, and exchanged $100 for around 2,080,00 Vietnam dong. We looked like children fumbling with our money, trying to find places to stash it, pretending like we knew the value of each bill. We had nothing lined up for our first night’s sleep and after exiting the doors to the airport we were not allowed back in to use the wifi. Like rookies we went though the travel book as a taxi driver hassled us to let him drive us. We found some random place and got let out, going up four flights of stairs and dropping off our bags before going to look around. At this point I was at maybe four hours of sleep in the past 36 hours. We sat at some bar with Vietnamese music blaring. Looking around, sitting in silence, in awe. It was hard to believe where we were at---partly from the lack of sleep, partly because it was hard to believe where we were at. A little girl no older than six was walking up to each person at 3 am, trying to sell them gum. There was a man with twisted legs, a victim of Agent Orange, dragging himself down the street selling the same item. For a moment I I felt like I would cry as I did inside. I can’t understand why the world is like this or how it got this way. I don’t think anyone could. And there we sat, drinking a 50 cent beer with the music blasting incoherent English lyrics. Minimum wage in America is 100 times better than the lives most people here live. It made me appreciate the security and structure of America for a brief moment. How blessed we are to be randomly born in our part of the globe. I couldn’t even finish my beer. On the walk back I almost got hit by a motorbike…twice.
     Where the fuck are we and why. It was a weird dream.  Speaking of dreams I slept about 20 minutes that night, woken up by the blaring of horns and yelling of people in the morning. They walk by and say ‘hello’ to which I respond ‘sin jchow’. There are a lot of mutual exchanges like that that take place. Body language is the universal communicator. Eye contact is understood by all, even the chickens on the street. In Saigon, you cant go more than 5 seconds without hearing a ‘beep’. People will stare at you until you stare back. Finding those who speak english is like walking into a room full of skittles and trying to find just the red ones.
     We checked out the Vietnam war museum. There were retired tanks, helicopters, and bomb shells in the front. I couldn’t help but to wonder who created these things and how did they justify it to themselves. I pictured the American engineer who went home and kissed his family after a long day at the lab creating something to kill another family. It was a humbling experience, I went through it chewing gum without tasting it. Its baffling to look around here everyday and think that if I were at my exact age 40 years ago, I probably would have been here. Instead of exchanging money we would have been trading bullets.  All these kids in the photos holding weapons were exactly that…kids. Im a kid.
     On a differnt tune, the traffic here is complete MADNESS. There’s no way to describe it, I laugh every time I (barely) cross the street. To go across is like a dance, you move slow and cautiously with hundreds of bikes whizzing by you at 30 MPH. Its like frogger. The novelty of being able to purchase alcohol has already faded. Everything is so cheap here that’s its going to be hard to go back home and pay full price for anything. A tshirt is $2, a full meal is $2.50, a hotel room is $7, a book is $3. Nuts. We wandered around the city and stumbled upon a man with a table set up on a street corner. He called us over and offered us the last of his sake along with a bite of his crab that we were supposed to eat whole, green guts and all. A security guard was laughing hysterically at how we were hanging out together. No words were spoken, only grunts. We showed him pictures from American and I gave him a fruit roll up as a gift. He advised me to wrap the camera strap on my hand so that a motorbiker wouldn’t take it--- again all this communicated without a single word, yet still fully understood. We shook hands with both hands and parted ways. Gam-ay (like ‘come here’) means thank you.
     It seems like everyone lives in their shops, usually a whole family sits in the back cooking or eating, watching tv, while the mother or father works the store front. Each shop tries to sell a common product differently- I saw one street where there were 15 different vendors for the same inhaler. Foreigners are a dollar sign, but they are still as intrigued with us as we are of them.
We went out to breakfast and met an American from California who was sitting at his favorite place. We got to talking and told him of our plans to purchase motorbikes from a man 30 minutes out of town. He offered to take us there and help us rent One for the day. His name was Doug, but his friends called him Booya. About 60ish years old, he was here once before for the war and still had the unhealed leg wound to prove it. He makes fly fishing shorts and gets the materials sewed together for the .15 cents/ hour that he pays the workers. He has a new ‘girlfriend’ every two weeks that he meets at local coffee shops; he assures us that they ‘speak pretty good english’. Kind of a dick but at the same time one of the nicest men ive ever met.  He got us a bike and I drove it, overwhelmed to be a part of the traffic flow. We went for about 20 miles out of the city into no-euro zone where we met this guy at a market. He was a Britt, in some war or another with a caved in shoulder and shakey from a bullet wound. We went to his garage and got the rundown on the bikes for sale before getting one. We would come back in a few days for the other.  Exchange of currency and registration papers and we left back for the city like a white person caravan, getting some interesting looks. Bikes on one closed off lane of the highway, everyone else on the other side. Again, it is fucking madness. There’s no other way to put it. The dictionary defines a ‘kludge’ as “a software or hardware configuration that, while inelegant,inefficient, clumsy, or patched together, succeeds in solving aspecific problem or performing a particular task.” That’s exactly what the streets are here, a kludge.
Later on we went to a market and got hassled into buying two tshirts that we really didn’t want, but with four middle aged Vietnamese women pulling your arm and yetting at you while waving a calculator in your face, you don’t have much choice. “Youre crazy” I told them, “no youre crazy!” they said while pretending to beat us up. We took the bike out to a random part of town and found a carnival with about a thousand couples, all dancing and holding hands. Next to this was a childrens arcade/play building. Irony. I went to the supermarket and bought a bunch of little plastic animal replicas for kids. I gave one to this little boy whose parents worked this food stand and he took it, walked straight away from me to sit down at a table, and started playing with it. It was kind of funny. I gave one to a girl whose mother nudged her awake, she put it in her mouth and as we walked away the mom was smiling, fishing it out. (The) people are beautiful.
It seems like there is a huge absence of the concept of individuality. It is not a value in their society. Everyone does their job and does it well, there seems to be a ‘one size fits all’ mentality everywhere. Its kind of refreshing. Organic is unheard of. Its not important. If you eat then you succeed. Ho Cho minh was probably the best place we could have landed in. it was a crash course in another culture. I have yet to see a full sized table, all the stools are inches off the ground.
     The amount of pictures you take is inversely proportional to the amount of time you spend here. Everything starts to seem normal. I don’t know how people live past 30 with all these fumes, I constantly feel lightheaded. My clothes wreak of gas. I learned that the money here is made of wax paper so that it can get wet; that’s how heavy the rain is. Pause for a bit but ill get back on as soon as I can. We plan to head out of town here soon with the bikes we just purchased; two Honda win’s.