It only took me seven weeks... but I really do think that my negative opinion and experience of Saigon is beginning to change. Overnight.
On Friday afternoon, after battling to be heard over the ceiling fans and general noisy school atmosphere (and smoky school atmosphere - I saw one of the teachers climbing the stairs to his classroom with a lit fag in his hand - a far cry from NZ's smoke free schools!) my throat is wrecked from teaching 12 year olds how to punctuate correctly. Despite my desire to go back to my hotel and sleep off the week, I allow myself to get pulled out for a 50c can of beer down an alleyway ten minutes from work that I never knew existed. We arrive in a swarm, five female whiteys all working for the same company and each pull up a plastic chair at the local 'bar' while Emma (the ringleader in the know) opens the fridge herself and begins handing out the 'BaBaBa' beers. A Vietnamese fella in a singlet is hanging around smiling while his three beautiful young daughters flounce about, climbing on and off the laps of the ones who got there before us, who all seem to live in this strangely quiet alleyway.
There are four of us all completely sick of living in the land of backpacker sleaze known as Pham Ngu Lao. Now that I've moved and been gone a day, I wonder how I could have stayed there so long, but I suppose it was because a) it was what I knew how to do b) it was easy and cheap, which I needed at the time and c) I really hate hotel / house hunting. But in hindsight, I now know that this was what was making me so miserable about being here.
Besides the traffic and the pollution, that is - moving hasn't changed those things, although they are much less noticeable down my new alleyway, which is too narrow and filled with roadside juice/beer/noodle soup joints for bikes to drive too quickly. The alley is also void of hawkers trying to sell you sunglasses every two minutes, or pester you about motorbike rides, and you are much less likely to get ripped off.
Most long term ex-pats in Saigon tend to opt for apartments because of the lounge factor, but from now on our lounge would be the plastic chaired roadside bar where everyone seemed to meet in the evenings ater work - within ten minutes we had made five new friends and gained valuable information about where to go for everything we needed - except vegetarian food. However, thanks to international veggie website www.happycow.net I soon found three decent local places to chow down in my new 'hood. With a shop selling guitars and pick-ups (which I need in order to do any more gigs here), 50 cent baguette stands, laundromats where a kilo of laundry will cost you 40 cents and where all shopowners will bring out complementary iced tea, this is a local alley in which prices have remained thus. Apparently there have been a handful of foreigners here for a year or so, but not too many to create another Pham Ngu Lao - the alley is too small for that anyway.
It's amazing how much a new home has changed me - I feel like I have an entirely new perspective on where I'm living. Until now I'd been hating on my city in a major way, and it's interesting that things just seemed to be going wrong for me again and again - in hindsight I know it's because I was attracting that kind of business - losing my wallet (or getting it pickpocketed - still don't know...), getting shortchanged and nearly run over - with my attitude. I hope I never forget this again. I probably will, but if so, I hope I can manage to maintain a better balance and acceptance of everything - all of a sudden I am somewhat ashamed of my feelings of helplessness in the past weeks. It's astounding what can change in just an evening...
Now that I'm away from the tourists I'm experiencing a different kind of behaviour from the locals as well. Yesterday, as I explored my new surroundings and tried to find somewhere to eat I was having my usual difficulty crossing the road, until a local man came up and gestured that I should follow him as he stepped out and wove his way through the moving bikes. I think I was much better at this when I first arrived actually, but for some reason I've developed a bit of anxiety about it lately and always sigh with relief when I finally get across safe. Sometimes I feel like living here has taken years off my life! So, the roads haven't changed, but the kindness of strangers has.
Last night, sitting around the plastic table littered with cans one of my new neighbours, a New Yorker named Chris, asked me how long I was planning on staying here. I told him definitely no longer than May when the school year finished, and he just looked at me, smiled and said he looked forward to having this conversation again in May to see how things had changed. I still don't know what makes so many people fall in love with this place - it hasn't QUITE happened to me yet - but let me say that Saigon and I are now in a 'courting' phase. Who knows - maybe we'll discover that we do like each other after all.
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