I write this article to let you in on some of the issues you can have interacting with foreigners whilst you are abroad. You meet an interesting mixture of people when you are traveling, and in spite of their differences, the usually have one thing in common: extreme personalities. Another issue is that there are nearly always cultural differences that can muddle interactions. To make matters worse, many people living abroad are scared, stressed, or thinking that they are beyond the reach of consequences, so they will do extreme and selfish things from time to time.
There was a huge, black SUV stopped in the middle of the street. There was a mysterious white powder all over the shattered windshield. The rest of the vehicle was already very badly dented, as if a crowd of people had attacked it. There was an angry mob gathered around around the drivers seat door. Something was happening there.
Before going into this museum I was vaguely aware of most of it's contents but I had never been forced to really consider any of it or face what America has actually done in this country. I'm not very political so I can have the tendency to be lazy in this department.
On Christmas night, two friends and I walked into a bar in District 1 to have a beer and play a game of pool. This was maybe not the most traditional activity for Christmas night, but at least we had each other. I was the last to arrive at the pool table on the third floor of this bar because I had been distracted somewhere en route. When I walked up the stairs I was handed a pool stick and introduced to my teammate: a random guy in the bar. His name was Leonardo.
Is there even anything to do in Vietnam for Christmas? Asia has definitely bought into Christmas for the pure commercialistic value of the holiday (check out below if you don't believe me) but does anybody here actually care? It was the evening of December 24th and though some light Googling I had happened upon some vague information about Christmas Eve festivities at or around Notre Dame Cathedral in the center of the city. So we got in a cab and told the driver to head over!
Since moving to Southeast Asia I've felt that I would be robbing myself of the true experience if I didn’t at least try every strange dish that is pushed across the table in my direction. So that is exactly what I have been doing. And it's been a lot less disgusting than I expected... until the Buffalo penis.
This was disgusting.
We were driving overnight and I was doing my best to sleep but it was tough with our bus driver trying to break some sort of land speed record on the winding, bumpy mountain roads. It didn’t help that I had to twist and mangle my long white-person legs into terrible positions to fit into my seat in the first place. We made it to Mù Cang Chải a little bit before sunrise. This town would serve as our ‘base camp.’
When I woke up I was instantly confronted with one of the more ridiculous landscapes that I have ever seen. Green, mossy giants shot abruptly up out of the earth all around me as our bus weaved down a narrow road. We were also arriving in a dense fog, which made the whole thing a little more dramatic.
Within the first few months that I spent in Vietnam, I had a couple gnarly accidents, the second of which landed me in the hospital. But before I got to the hospital—while I was I was lying in the street at the end of a long skid mark of blood and metal—it occurred to me that passing on the wisdom I had gained through learning to drive in Hanoi would be prudent. They say that the first 3 to 4 accidents are a rite of passage for driving in Southeast Asia, but that doesn't mean that you need to go into the experience blind. What follows are my 10 rules for staying safe on the road in Hanoi. But, before we get to any of that, I have a lil' treat for you.
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?”
