Việt Nam Diaries, Pt. 3: Sài Gòn

Week 56

Sunday

One day I wake up and take a taxi from southern Hà Nội with my friend Sean, all the way to the capital city and then past it. Significantly past it, to the remote outpost of Nội Bài International Airport.

Shortly after, I find myself in Sài Gòn for the first time.

As the plane touches down, all I can see of the city outside is that it's shrouded in a brown haze. Oh, I think. It's not that different from Hà Nội after all.

Leaving the terminal, we are hit with a blast of hot, muggy air. Not that hot, at about 82° F, but hotter than its been in Hà Nội for months. It's hotter than you're expecting anywhere north of the Equator to be in January.

The Peace Corps has "Mid-Service Training" for us and since there are only 5 volunteers of our cohort left in the capital, and more than double that in Sài Gòn, for once it is our turn to do the traveling.

The Peace Corps has put us up in a very nice hotel in the heart of District 1, on what I am not alone in describing as the Times Square of Việt Nam. A music festival is occurring right outside our hotel windows in the pedestrian-only boulevard that takes up most of Nguyễn Huệ street. My roommate will be Harristh, who was my roommate at staging in San Francisco, which feels like a long time ago. "It feels like we've come full circle," he says. If we weren't on such opposite sides of the country, we'd probably have hung out a lot more often, as he is at once the most mature and most silly of our cohort. Just who I want to hang out with.

My friend and former Vietnamese teacher Thùy lives here, so I message her to see if she's free for dinner. She texts me: "There's this Chinese place that's really ngon (tasty)..." I have to laugh. "Thùy, it's my first time in the South, I want to eat Southern food." In her view, all the food in the South is Southern food, and everything I can get here I can get in the North. But in my view, I want to try the dishes that the city is most famous for, and experience what I know intellectually, to interrogate what everyone has told me: Southern food is sweeter and spicier than Northern food.

I set off on foot to explore District 1 and see some of the main sights.

When I finally meet up with Thùy I've walked for probably two hours, nearly all the way to District 3. I get my first taste of Cơm Tầm (Broken Rice). The cheap low-grade broken grains of rice, not fit for export, are the basis of a cheap but delicious meal in the South. It's traditionally served with grilled pork marinated in a sweet sauce, a fried egg, pickled vegetables, an egg casserole, and a spicy-salty-sweet fish sauce that is just the best.

As we walk down a crowded street packed with food stalls, she points out how many are not "Southern" and not even Vietnamese: Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, India and more.

Next we pick up a plate of tré trộn. The shopkeeper scoops slices of chả, a large dense pork sausage, with pickled vegetables, hard-boiled eggs and many ingredients I am unfamiliar with into a mixing bowl where it is mixed with sauce. This salty, sweet, tangy and very spicy mixture is then eaten with crispy shrimp chips; every possible taste bud is engaged at max volume.

Later in the evening, all of the volunteers meet up to take in the sights of the city from the top of a double-decker tour bus. Harristh provides a humorous tour guide commentary, and we get a great view of the skyline from the bridge across the river into District 2.

A few of the boys decide we can't finish the day without a few glasses of fresh beer, and we learn that even the bar snacks are a little different in the south. We order steamed lotus seeds with a tangy dipping sauce, and some fried potatoes which are dusted in a sweet cheese powder. Normally, I don't like the cheese powder, but here it's very tasty.

Monday

Today is a health check-up day for all the volunteers, and I start by going downstairs to give a blood sample in one of the hotel meeting rooms. The mobile nurse is running late and the Peace Corps medical assistant keeps graciously apologizing. I'm grumbling wryly about being hungry for breakfast, but make it abundantly clear I'm not really mad.

Sean has the Eagles' playoff game on his phone and soon Matt joins us standing behind him to watch what's going on. They both howl mournfully as the game comes to a close and other volunteers start texting them condolences.

Next up is a trip to a dentist in District 2 for a cleaning and check-up. I'm chipper now and I volunteer to go first. Although the staff speaks English here, I use some Vietnamese and the lady at the front desk compliments my Northern accent, saying with astonishment: "I can understand what you're saying!"

Two dental technicians work on my teeth cleaning together, but it goes well and I have no dental problems. I'm one of the lucky ones.

After a long day and a dinner with Peace Corps staff, all of the volunteers decide to go out for ice cream. As we wait in the square for everyone to come down from their hotel rooms, Harristh demonstrates his ability to jump over a person, even someone as tall as Will.

The ice cream hunt becomes a hunt for bingsu - the silky and light Korean milk snow - which we finally find down a narrow alley when the auntie selling bottled drinks at the end of the alley figures out it must be why we're all milling about confused and helpfully points for us: "Kem! Kem!" (Ice Cream!)

Afterwards, we buy tallboys of beer and hike across the bridge to a riverside park in District 2 with a permanent carnival. The narrow walking path is dotted with dozens of people taking photos or selfies, necessitating stepping down into traffic lanes, but traffic is light and it doesn't feel dangerous.

It's excellent to hang out again with the affable duo of Matt and Jackson and later we find ourselves on a rooftop bar with a beer tower and a great view of the city, pinching ourselves that this is something we get to do right now.

Tuesday

Over the course of the day in a conference room, the volunteers have meetings and check-ins with various staff, from the country director to the housing director, sharing TEFL strategies and thoughts about how the first year of service went. But it starts to become clear that the "job" is actually more than halfway over and we'll be done before we know it.

Wednesday

I'm able to sleep in a little bit, because my appointment is not until 10:00 am. This morning is about the Language Proficiency Interview. Every Peace Corps volunteer has to take it several times throughout their service. The results are strictly informational, for both PC staff and the volunteer's personal edification. But nearly every volunteer wants to do well. I'm only able to keep calm in the morning by refusing to overly cram and worry about it. At this point, what will be, will be.

My LPI is with our language training director Quy. I had a practice interview with her in the summer, so this time as I sit down with her it feels familiar.

Despite twice weekly language lessons, the subtle trickiness of the Vietnamese language is so hard for a Western language speaker. The approach to tones and vocal production couldn't be more at odds with decades of vocal expression in a different system.

But I've been having a breakthrough recently...

We start in English and then Quy starts her tape recorder and asks me to introduce myself in Vietnamese.

This part I didn't practice again, and soon I'm blabbing about what comes naturally - movies - and this is a big mistake. She asks me to name a movie that I liked recently, and here I put my foot in my mouth again. I decide to answer "28 Years Later" because I can say the title in Vietnamese.

This is a huge mistake. Quy then asks what the story of the movie is about.

Okay, there are zombies. And there's a boy. He lives on an island with his family but his mom is dying. He wants to help his mother, but his dad says there's no help. They disagree. The son runs away to help her anyway...

Quy: "And where are the zombies?..."

Me: "Everyone else said that, too."

After this interview, we go into a roleplay session. I'm to play a customer at a restaurant and after eating I realize that I don't have my wallet or phone and thus have no way to pay.

"I'm ready to pay. How much?"

Quy says: "Ba trăm nghìn." (Three hundred thousand.)

"Đắt quá!" (Too expensive!) It's a hilariously expensive amount and I react so sharply that Quy laughs and "breaks character", whispering:

"You already ate it!"

In the afternoon, the Peace Corps treated us to a "cultural experience". We went to a coffee shop to learn how to make several types of Vietnamese coffee drinks. Egg coffee, salt coffee, and coconut coffee, all made with the base of the cà phê phin, a simple, reusable filter.

The staff has us weigh out very specific amounts of ground coffee and boiling water.

"I'm not doing this part at home, I tell you that," I mutter.

But soon, I learn something that makes the whole class worth it.

I had long learned that you must soak the grounds first, so that they expand and the water will flow at the proper pace through the coffee. But every time I did it at home, pouring the first amount of water always came with some grounds passing through the filter prematurely.

"Place the lid on the counter and pour 8 ounces of hot water into the lid. Now place the filter in the lid."

Whattttt???? I think to myself. Oh, no way....

I place the filter into the lid and the steaming water soon disappears, sucked up into the filter by the dried coffee. Causing the grounds at the bottom of the filter to expand first.

I now know the secret of brewing ca phe phin.

The lights to the coffee shop suddenly dim, and soon everyone is singing "Happy Birthday". There are two volunteers celebrating their birthday this week. And when pieces of birthday cake are passed around, I finally experience another tradition that I've long heard about.

Birthday cakes in the south often have sweet corn in them.

It's really tasty!

Thursday

Thùy has to travel for work, so we make plans to eat together one last time before she leaves the city. This time, the Chinese restaurant.

There is a huge Chinese immigrant community in HCMC, and there's a large Chinese market and "Chinatown" neighborhood. Shops are already preparing for Lunar New Year with red lanterns and decorations for sale; although, that describes all of Việt Nam as well.

The tiny restaurant has delicious food, and the Chinese-Vietnamese family running it sits at a table next to ours to hand roll the rustic, thick dumplings. The black vinegar and umami dipping sauce is so wonderfully balanced in flavors, and a welcome change from the very sweet and spicy sauces of Southern Vietnamese food.

Friday

I am no longer staying in Downtown Sài Gòn, as the Peace Corps conference is over, but I'm staying for the remaining week on my "own dime". I walk down three stairs of spotless marble floors at my homestay and say good morning to the auntie who owns the house and slip my shoes off the rack by her front door, next to a cold beverage refrigerator. I slip out down a long narrow alleyway. Massage parlors line this alley which is very near Sài Gòn's rowdy "Beer Street", which amazingly I am unable to hear from my homestay room. But the young girls at the massage establishments seem desperate for clients; some even grab my arm to entice me.

I actually could use a massage. But I can't afford it right now.

A trip to the somber War Remnants museum is an obligatory stop in Sài Gòn. Across three floors, documents and photos give in excruciating detail the human cost of the Vietnam War. The battles, the war crimes, Agent Orange, decades of unexploded ordnance, everything.

Is it unbiased? No. But it's full of true horrors, real memories that need to be preserved, and the perspective of the Vietnamese who lived through this time. So it was absolutely worthwhile.

Outside, a man with one leg missing below the knee approaches me on his well-worn crutch. He says he lost his leg to a landmine and asks me to a buy a book from him. I talk to him a little in both English and Vietnamese.

The books are miscellaneous war history books, and quite small. I plan on buying one, until I see they are priced at 280,000- 300,000 VND. I've bought a few books in Việt Nam, most under 100,000.

And I literally can't afford it. After a week in the city, even though I haven't splurged on anything exorbitant, I'm left with scraps in my account.

And I have one stop left to make before I return to Hà Nội...