Today marks four weeks in Vietnam! The last month has absolutely flown by! On the whole we’ve been having a wonderful time, although there have certainly been moments of “oh my word, why did we move half way across the world to a foreign country where we know no one and have nothing?” but they’ve generally been short lived.
We celebrated our one month here by being extremely lazy! We went for drinks with some friends last night and only got back after midnight. We slept in and felt a little under the weather. Vietnam beer is different and makes you feel rubbish in the morning. Mel only had three (or maybe four) beers and Ross only had four or five! So we watched series with the fan blowing on us, then after lunch we thought that we would stop being so useless and went for a walk to the market for supplies.
Today, we thought we’d share some a few things that we’ve learnt about Vietnam:
The Vietnamese LOVE the world ‘California’. Slap it in as part of your business’s name (California Fitness, California Karaoke), it makes your business sound way more international and legit.
The most popular haircut at the moment for boys is short back and sides, long on top.
It is not rude to spit in the street or blow snot rockets (very visual, sorry!). Audible snorting is another socially acceptable act which is used liberally here.
Recycling!! There is no such thing as recycling or sorting your rubbish here. Plastic bags are handed out willy nilly and plastic bottles and cups are used everywhere! There are people who go through the rubbish and sort it to make money but it seems rather absurd that people don’t just separate it or have recycling plants rather than people having to dig through all of the rubbish which included food waste and toilet paper.
There are no smoking restrictions here in Nam, and people ‘light up’ just about everywhere - restaurants, busses, on your motor bike, anywhere really.
Traffic, traffic, traffic!! More on this to come.
It’s hot here. Like crazy, I don’t really feel like I can walk for longer that 5 minutes hot. This in turn means that you need to drink loads of water. This is easy enough, except you can’t drink the tap water here in Ho Chi Minh. So we end up spending quite a lot of money on bottled drinking water. At our apartment building we have a pretty sweet deal, where we can get a 20L bottle from the office for only 20, 000 VND, or about R10. We were stoked to find out from a local friend on Saturday that this water is in fact no good, and probably straight from the river - delightful! We then decant this into smaller bottles and pop these into the fridge (when it’s cold it tastes much better, especially since our most recent discovery!). We figure that this water has been filtered at least once, so will be safer than the tap water. If not, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?
There is a particular ‘song’ which plays at at least one shop on most streets. Either it is crazy long (like 20 minutes) or is played on repeat by every person who has it on hand.
Communicating with the Vietnamese people is not always easy, and it has become evident that our acting and explaining skills suck! I mean who doesn’t know that hitting your one hand aggressively with the other in a ‘chopping’ action while shouting “I only want HALF” is a no brainer. Apparently it isn’t as obvious as we thought it would be, because it is almost always met by the ‘screwing in a light bulb action’. This is the Vietnamese universal signal for “I don’t know what you are trying to say and will stop talking to you and entertaining your craziness from now on”. It’s best to walk away and try another stall at this point.
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