Somewhere between Vox & Hunter S. Thompson
Since moving to Southeast Asia I've felt that I would be robbing myself of the true experience if I didn’t at least try every strange dish that is pushed across the table in my direction. So that is exactly what I have been doing. And it's been a lot less disgusting than I expected... until the Buffalo penis.
This was disgusting.
We were driving overnight and I was doing my best to sleep but it was tough with our bus driver trying to break some sort of land speed record on the winding, bumpy mountain roads. It didn’t help that I had to twist and mangle my long white-person legs into terrible positions to fit into my seat in the first place. We made it to Mù Cang Chải a little bit before sunrise. This town would serve as our ‘base camp.’
When I woke up I was instantly confronted with one of the more ridiculous landscapes that I have ever seen. Green, mossy giants shot abruptly up out of the earth all around me as our bus weaved down a narrow road. We were also arriving in a dense fog, which made the whole thing a little more dramatic.
Within the first few months that I spent in Vietnam, I had a couple gnarly accidents, the second of which landed me in the hospital. But before I got to the hospital—while I was I was lying in the street at the end of a long skid mark of blood and metal—it occurred to me that passing on the wisdom I had gained through learning to drive in Hanoi would be prudent. They say that the first 3 to 4 accidents are a rite of passage for driving in Southeast Asia, but that doesn't mean that you need to go into the experience blind. What follows are my 10 rules for staying safe on the road in Hanoi. But, before we get to any of that, I have a lil' treat for you.
That’s when it happened. I was broadsided by a taxi that took a sudden, unexpected turn. And I hit the pavement hard. You’d think that in an event like this there would some sort of adrenaline rush that would kick in and help with the pain, at least initially, but there was nothing. In the second or two between my impact with the taxi and my impact with the ground I think my emotions are best expressed this way: “Really? Again? REALLY?”
During rush hour I spend as much as an hour at a time weaving through the insane Vietnamese traffic, all the while breathing in exhaust and all sorts of nasty chemicals. It wasn’t long before my virgin immune system succumbed to the advances of all these noxious gases and I got sick.
What does it feel like to get sick from pollution?
After about a week and a half of making my way on foot I knew that I needed to get my ass on a motorbike, ASAP. That is the mode of transportation this city is made for. Getting chauffeured around town on the back of other people’s motorbikes was getting old and I was feeling like a big, white burden. And the Vietnamese bus system… no thank you. Not that the 3 hours per day that I had been spending on it feeling like Gandalf in a Hobbit hole weren’t fun… I’m just a free spirit and no cage (nor bus) can contain me.
This is a minor event I suppose… but it's Halloween and there is an interesting video to accompany this story so I felt that it merited its own post. One night I came home to find my two female housemates sitting in the kitchen together. I asked them what was going on and they told me that there was a cockroach and a giant spider in the bathroom. Their plan was to keep the door closed forever. To their credit, this was actually a feasible plan because our downstairs bathroom serves primarily as a storage room and to enclose the smell of our cat's liter box.
As an English teacher, I often find myself giving the ‘food’ lesson. I will ask my students to tell me all of the different foods they know in a given category and they will help me compile a list of all the different vocabulary words they know. One day I was teaching this lesson to a class full of 8 and 9 year olds. I was asking them about different kinds of drinks and one of them kept saying a Vietnamese word that I didn’t understand. Every time he said it the class laughed and my teaching assistant scowled at him. I asked my teaching assistant what he was saying and she explained that he was talking about a traditional Vietnamese dish that is essentially blood soup. Cue my first food post.
Within a few weeks of arriving in Vietnam I had the blessing of more than one day off work in a row. It would be the only time that this would happen naturally (that is, without twisting any arms) until February so I wanted to make the most of it. I asked everybody I knew (which at that point was not a lot of people) what their plans were for the Holiday but nobody’s off-time coincided with my own. It was two days before my holiday and I had become gloomily resigned to not doing anything. But then one of my roommates’ plans changed at the last minute.
