Good Morning Vietnam!

First off, only 5 weeks and 2 days till I’m back in Miami. That is like no time at all. Only bad thing is 25 of those days are spent on the boat. I hope they have some fun stuff planned for us. Ok, now onto Vietnam. What a wonderful city. Of course, like always, the people on semester at sea told us to be careful with our stuff and whatnot, but I have officially stopped listening to them. I’m not sure if it is because they do a shitty job at preparing us for a country, or if it is because there is no way they could prepare us for a country. No matter what they warn us of or tell us to expect, I am still never satisfied with what I know prior to a country. I was interested in a couple specific things about Vietnam. How American invasion has affected the country, their culture in general and of course the food. Those are things that are hard to teach in a classroom. Luckily part of my classroom is spent immersed in a foreign country.
I’ll start with their bizarre driving techniques. This seems to be a reoccurring theme in my blogs. One of my favorite parts of Vietnam is the way they cross the street. Vietnam has very few cars, buses, or trucks but the entire city of Ho Chi Minh is pack full of little motor bikes. Similar to in other countries, these bikes are so plentiful that they have their own lanes in most cases. They have very few traffic lights and they drive on the right side of the road!! (on a side note, a road was just completed that connects many south eastern Asian countries. The hilarious part is some countries like Malaysia drive on the left, and some like Vietnam drive on the right. I have no idea how they handle that situation.) Because of the communist government, SAS had to provide a bus that would take us into the city. I think it has something to do with a lot of taxis lining up outside of the port, but I didn’t even fully understand the reason for it. The shuttle bus was great for us tho, we spent way less money on taxis (that money went directly to souvenirs, but I’ll talk about that later.) The bus came every half hour-ish and dropped us off right in the center of Ho Chi Minh. Because there are so many motor bikes, the lines in the streets don’t mean much. Honestly, we have become accustomed to little or no traffic laws so that didn’t bother us much. I think all of the world should cross the street like the Vietnamese do. Instead of waiting for the green man to signal that it is safe to walk, they just slowly walk across the street. All of the motorized bikes just go around you as you are crossing. As long as you are looking in the correct direction and walking slowly enough, you are safe. They honk their horns a lot when driving, but they never honk at people crossing the street. They just casually steer to the left or right to avoid you. Perfect system. The only problem comes when people aren’t obeying those general rules. We were walking around on my second day in the city. I was watching this man run down the sidewalk, he must have been in a hurry to do something. Because there are so many motorbikes parked on the street, he ran in front of a parked car and attempted to run alongside of the parked traffic. Instead, he ran directly into the corner of a large taxi cab. Yeah, you read it right. I watched someone get struck by a vehicle. Of course everyone around the guy started freaking out. As he lay there, a crowd formed and he started to have seizures. I guess that is how your body deals with getting hit by a car. I have never seen a serious situation taken care of so poorly. I’m not sure what to do when someone starts going into a seizure, but from Juli’s experience with Amo (her departed Brittany spaniel) I’m pretty sure you just make sure the person, or dog, doesn’t choke on his/her own tongue. For sure, you don’t pick up the person and hold them in your arms. As he was seizing, someone that knew him came over. I think she was his wife or sister or mother because she started getting hysterical. She was looking for someone to call the ambulance or take some sort of action. Before an ambulance came, some people around picked up the guy and jammed him into a cab and I guess they went to the hospital. Now lets recap: someone gets hit by a car, so you pick this man up and shove him into a taxi. Did those people know if he had a spinal chord injury or internal bleeding? Probably not. If I spoke a lick of Vietnamese, I for sure would have stopped them. I have no idea if the man lived or died, but it was quite the experience for me. If someone can get that messed up while running, could you imagine how easily their life would be taken in a motorcycle accident. No thanks.
Now lets talk about the American dollar in Vietnam. It is illegal to use any currency other than the dong to purchase something in Vietnam. However, that law is completely disregarded in every establishment that I walked into. You get a better rate if you use dong, but if you have none, the dollar is always accepted. I felt like a millionaire here, partially because I was. The conversion is $1 to about 16 dongs. 2 million dollars is about $125. Needless to say, whenever I walked away from the ATM, I felt like Bill Gates. At the same time, whenever they told me the price of anything, I was so outraged. I ended up spending a lot of money here. I don’t know what I expected, but I heard everything was so cheap. Some things were super cheap, but not everything so you had to pick and choose what to spend your money on. The Northface hiking bags were anywhere from $10-$30 – Cheap. (I got one) But things like chopsticks were like fifty cents each. I bought sooooo many bootleg dvds. They were like a dollar a dvd, but these dvds hold like 4 times the information. So a full season can fit onto one cd. I’m still checking to see if they all work, but my collection currently consists of such seasons as Sex and the City, Scrubs, the Sopranos and The Blade Trilogy. Totaling $33. Love it. I also got a dress made. It’s a full length white silk dress. It’s pretty, but I have no idea where I’m going to wear it.
The food in Vietnam was not anything to write home about. However, I am writing home about it. Take that however you want. The smoothies were to die for, but the food was just normal. I tried turtle (sorry joule.) It was tasty, but lots of tiny bones. It was almost annoying to eat. However, I am sooo good at eating with chopsticks. I’ll probably eat most of my meals with them from now on. Mal has a theory that all Vietnamese are thin because it takes them so long to eat that they realize they are full before Americans do. In addition to that, they don’t eat portions that are quadruple the necessary size. Anyways, I had some pretty delicious noodles and of course lots of rice. If you need a lesson in chop stick using, you know who to come to.
One of the days, I went to the Cu Chi Tunnels and the the Cao Dai Temple. Cao Dai is a relatively new religion started here in Vietnam. It was formed because some guy wanted to please all of the people that were invading and waging war on Vietnam. Instead of having one god, they pray and accept and choose traditions from all religions. Mainly Hindu, Buddhist, and Catholic religions are most recognizable. In the temple, statues of gods from lots and lots of religions can be found. It was odd because spectators are welcomed and even expected. They have 4 services per day and just looking around; you can tell every religion is practiced at once. It was odd. I’ve never heard of a religion like that before. Normally, a religion is either based off of a prophet or someone that had amazing ideas. Sometimes it’s a unifying theme or even sometimes started by someone who sees a flaw in the current system. This religion is simply using the best parts of other religions. Weird.
After the Temple, we went to the Cu Chi tunnels. The tunnels were used as a strategic way to defeat the enemies without hand to hand combat. The tunnels zig zaged in a very confusing manner. The soldiers who used these tunnels to fight also used these tunnels to live. It wasn’t like these people just hopped in the tunnels, took some lives, then went home for dinner. They lived there for many years. This is an area in the south west of the country where part of the American invasion of Vietnam took place. Here, they refer to it as the American invasion of Vietnam because it wouldn’t clarify anything to call it the ‘Vietnam War.’ Vietnam was constantly at war with someone between the year 1900 all the way till 1990. That is 90 years of war. Whether it was to gain independence from France, or a Civil War against the North, or the American’s invading- Vietnam couldn’t get away from battle. The Cu Chi tunnels were dug in order to hide from invaders. Originally, the tunnels only covered 30 km of underground escape tunnels. At some time, the people who lived there were able to make the tunnels wider. When they were completed, they stretched 200 square km of land. By the time the American’s invaded, they little village was prepared to defend their area. Our guide said each soldier had 3 friends and they were assigned to one entrance to the tunnel (a square that was about 1’x2’) and they didn’t know where any other entrances were. This way if they were captured, they couldn’t give up the whole system. Their tunnels were perfectly camouflaged so just throwing some leaves over the door made them impossible to see. Our guide said a soldier would wait till the Americans were sleeping, climb to the tunnel that led up to the center of their camp, come up, and shoot the soldiers when they were sleeping. I know it sounds harsh and terrible, but you have to remember that we pretty much had no reason to be there anyways. And we had a lot of casualties, but Vietnam had about 8 times the number of deaths. It was a really terrible war, and we did some really terrible things over there. There is a museum in Ho Chi Minh called the museum of war remnants. It is a tough museum to get through because it has pictures of the things we did to these people when we were here. I know war is always messy and it will always be like that, and I also understand that they probably did similar things, but it’s not excusable in any way. There was a picture of a child being dragged behind a tank until his death. I’m not saying every child in Vietnam was killed in that manner, but it is really powerful to realize that your country did shit like that to other people. I guess it was so important to me because I didn’t really know much about the war until I came here. Back to the tunnels: we were able to crawl through a 200ft span of tunnels. I’ll just explain the tunnels by saying they were small. Vietnamese are much smaller than Americans. I was about a foot taller than the tallest woman there. I could imagine how it was almost impossible for the American’s to destroy the defenses of the Vietnamese. We had a chance to climb in them and we quickly realized that Americans are much larger than Vietnamese. I guess it’s hard to explain and no matter what I say, it won’t really do justice for what it was actually like.
I think I’ll leave it at that.
Fam- Your package is on the boat, but I haven’t gotten it yet because the ladies that do it was super busy with passport stuff so I’ll get it tomorrow.
Mark- I hope your letter is in the same situation as the box from my parents, because I haven’t received it yet. I know you wrote one tho.
Fetsko Fam- thanks for the Easter basket… or Easter box. The cookies actually survived. I think the bread saved them from being yucky. They are delicious and I really appreciate it. I cut out the picture on the box and it’s now on my wall. Thank you very much.
Joule- Go Bruins!!
Everyone- I read a couple of your emails because I was on the internet for a little, but I will reply to your Malaysia emails today and your Vietnam emails tomorrow when I get them before I get to CHINA!!!!

Love you all!

Ps, Go Pens (GO GINO)
Pss I’m sure you’re all ready, but it’s almost NFL draft time!!
Psss see you soon!