Impressions of Vietnam: First five hours

• Motorbikes. Obviously I had expectations of the streets flooded with them. In actual fact maybe they were actually a bit more well-behaved than I expected. Saying that, though, I witnessed so many near shaves that I’m not quite sure if it could be worse than reality. Everyone rides a motorbike/scooter, including                                          – people of all ages from miniscule baby (not alone though) to grandpa                         – you can have up to four people on one scooter/motorbike (so far), be it all adults, or families including toddlers, who are usually sandwiched in between adults or joyfully hanging at the front                                                                                                         – alternately you can be heavily pregnant and ride like half-saddle (what is it called? For ladies with skirts, when you have both legs over one side of the bike) extremely precariously on the back of your boyfriend’s bike                                                      – and you don’t need to be a human being to ride a motorbike. Stacks and stacks of eggs, stacks and stacks of juices, or random thingies like this…     

– and don’t worry not if you are not on motorbike, the same lanes are valid for          

• Road-crossing is exciting. I have survived so far. Here we can put Conor’s famous quote about road-crossing: “When in doubt, don’t hesitate!” Walk over the road confidently, trust the bikers will dodge you, they are very used to it!

• Eager ‘motorbike-taxi-drivers’. This one is a difficult one for me. I have been brought up not to get on a motorbike (well any vehicle) with a random stranger. And indeed, if you are approached by someone dodgy in, say, France, beware of his dodginess. But here…? Motorbiketaxis are the way to go, I did find out doing my pre-trip research. It’s normal here, in the same way as flagging cars down off the road as taxis in Russia. But I am nowhere ready to say to an eager Vietnamese motorbikist “sure take me wherever and we can fix the price at some point”. My main eager motorbikist showed me a notebook full of good reviews on him written by various tourists. Very sweet and cool, but also I remember reading scams about cases like this. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s a very high risk of getting physically hurt here by scammy motorbikists, just getting your money stolen. But still, I’m gonna do more research before venturing out on motorbikes. Maybe I’ll make a friend first.                          

• Paying an excorberant (how is that spelt?) price for a silly souvenir fan. Okay, 80,000 dongs is only about four dollars, so I like to think that I was just helping out a poor lady. She was cheerful and kept on saying “lucky!!”. Bless her.                           

• Drinking three milk-based drinks in an hour. Strawberry-milk from shop, coconut ‘juice’ from café (SO EXOTIC), and amazingly refreshing mango-banana-passion fruit smoothie. OM NOM NOM NOM NOM. 

• Taught English. I have taught English. True story. Random story. I sat down with my amazingly refreshing mango-banana-passion smoothie and soon this teenage Vietnamese guy came to talk to me. I would’ve been a whole lot more apprehensive but he also brought his incredibly sweet and innocent-looking small female friend (like, probably the same age as him but she was very petite and very, well, not-threatening). He was asking me many questions like where am I from, am I married (which very much weirded me out, though now I recollect clearly from all my Vietnam-web pages that it is normal for the Vietnamese to ask very personal questions as nearly a way of introduction). Then the chat proceeded to him looking up English words in his English-Vietnamese dictionary on his smart phone and asking me to explain them to him. So I did my best to explain words like ‘engraved’, ‘concentrated’, ‘diffuse’, ‘divided’, ‘psychological’, ‘formed’ to him.                                                                                                                                                                                                              It was quite weird to begin with, but then I started realising that maybe there is no hidden motive – this is as guidebooks and everything said, Vietnamese really want to learn English. So, easiest (and cheapest!) way to learn it – walk up to a foreign touristy-looking person and strike up a conversation! His friend spoke no English but sat patiently and silently for the half hour we were talking, and I started feeling a bit sorry for her, but no, she was completely happy, and clearly got her part of the deal done when, when I said that I should get going, the guy asked me if he could take a picture of me and the girl (for her), so we happily posed with the very Asian peace-sign and I felt very integrated into the country. :’)