Somewhere between Vox & Hunter S. Thompson
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Hanoi
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.
I know that I said that my next post would be about my new motorbike… but something came up, so I thought we could take a little break from our scheduled programming for some live reporting. It was another Tuesday night in Hanoi. I was having drinks with a few friends at a nearby place that we like to go to. And that's when I saw the smoke...
First, I'm sure that you will be relieved to hear that my missing luggage was recovered about 24 hours later. It was actually delivered to the office of my employer (where I was living) by the airport staff, which is much nicer than anything I have experienced in the Western world. I wasn't living in that office for very much longer though. I found an apartment within 2 days of being in Vietnam through Facebook. Thank you social media. And guys, this place is amazing. It is coolest place I will probably ever live and it is only $210 per month. But rather than try to describe it I’ll just give you the tour...
Fast-forward to 30 minutes after my plane landed and I was the last remaining passenger watching an empty baggage claim carousel circulate. My bag (the one that we had paid so much money to get onto the flight to Chicago) never arrived in Vietnam. I spent the following 30 minutes trying to break down the language barrier that separated me from the poor souls working at the ‘lost baggage’ counter. It didn’t help things that I mysteriously had 2 baggage claim tickets for the same bag.
