I hate to say it, but a pattern seems to be emerging of giving less-than-full accounts of our doings. We’ve done it again, you see—scooted to a different country without advance warning. No warning on this site, I mean; I don’t want to give the impression that we absconded from Melbourne in a whirlwind of unpaid bills.
Kathryn and I left Australia in mid-December and spent a lively five weeks in New Zealand, which I won’t even attempt to describe here because I didn’t keep a holiday diary. I will simply say that it was a brilliant trip, and there’s a lot more to New Zealand than Lord of the Rings filming sites and bungy jumping. Our hearts go out to the Kiwis as they struggle to rebuild Christchurch, following the terrible 6.3-magnitude earthquake there on 22 February. It was such a beautiful and vibrant city when we visited it two months ago, which makes the pictures we are now seeing all the more dismaying.
Our new home is Hanoi, Vietnam, where I am again teaching, though younger learners this time. Amazing experiences continue to crowd in on us, so the best approach is probably just to recount a few, in no particular order, and trust that order will come to these postings eventually. Or not.
First of all, everything you’ve heard about traffic in Vietnam is true: to cross streets here you essentially have to ignore every rule your parents taught you about doing it safely back home. You do not look both ways, cross with the lights, and only proceed when nothing is coming. Following that method, you would find yourself marooned for life on a single city block, and even then you likely would be run down eventually by the motorbikes that take to the sidewalk when the streets are too choked for movement.
Before my visit to Hanoi last October, a teaching colleague in China gave me advice that probably saved my life: “Be the rock,” he counseled. When crossing the street, he said, I should move slowly and predictably, thinking of myself as a rock in a running stream. This I do, the water (traffic) flows around me, and harmony is maintained. I’m sure I still look like a giddy, hypersense foreigner, but the system works tolerably well most of the time. Nonetheless, I’m a pretty vigilant rock, and am prepared to skip if the flow is obviously going to go over me rather than around. I have a 20-minute walk to work, and have not had a dull commute yet.
The other day, waiting at a corner to cross a busy road, I heard a loud clunk a few feet away. Looking over, I saw two motorbikes had collided in the crush of traffic. As I watched, the woman who had struck the other bike leaned down and picked up a piece of something that had been broken off the other bike. She calmly handed it to the other rider and then, because the light was now green, she rode off. No words were exchanged, much less insurance information: just a typical ride home for both of them, I suspect.
My only street mishap so far didn’t involve a moving vehicle at all, but was up on the sidewalk. I had been in town just five days, and it was late evening. I was making my way to a restaurant that had been recommended, and as I stepped between some parked cars and up onto a dark spot on the sidewalk I felt something heavy and quite sharp hit me in the upper left thigh. It knocked me sideways a few feet, and it was only then that I realized that the heavy, sharp thing was a rottweiler-sized dog with a good set of teeth. He began snarling, now that his chain prevented him from sampling any other part of me. If I could have laid my hand on a bat at that moment we might have settled things there and then, but I couldn’t, my thigh was already quite painful, and I didn’t know how strong his chain was. So I just shook my fist at him and limped away, back into the crowd.
As soon as I could discreetly do it, I stuck my hand down my pants to see if I was bleeding. I wasn’t, and my pant leg appeared totally undamaged, so despite the soreness I went on to dinner. My sense of adventure was at a low ebb by this point, so I just returned to a restaurant I already knew. There I had another surreal encounter (which I’ll save for a later post) and then returned to my hotel room. By this time my thigh was very painful and going red, and there was a bit of blood from one of the three distinct tooth marks as I showered before bed.
I had to observe classes the next two days, so I just winced and limped as my thigh went from fiery red to greenish purple. The people at my hotel were full of sympathy, and one of them went with me to ask the dog’s owner if, perchance, pup had had all his shots. Through my translator, the owner assured me the dog was perfectly healthy, and indeed he had felt so during our brief meeting. This reassurance comforted me for perhaps 30 seconds, and then I realized that the first words out my own mouth, If I owned a vicious cur that had bitten a foreigner, would be, “Don’t worry, he’s perfectly healthy.” I had the next day off, so I decided to see what a doctor might think. I was whisked into the examining room minutes after my arrival at the clinic, dropped my pants for two female doctors, and was immediately told that I would need a series of rabies shots. Furthermore, they didn’t have the shot there, so I would have to mince along to a different clinic a few blocks away for my first rabies cocktail.
And here’s where the silver lining began appearing round the cloud: as the one doctor who spoke English stepped outside to give me directions to the other clinic, a young woman pulled up on a motorbike and joined us. She was the doctor’s cousin, and the doctor quickly related to her what had happened to me, where I needed to go, and what she thought of my underwear, for all I could tell. But the thing is the young woman instantly volunteered to give me a ride on her motorbike to the other clinic. Not only that, she led me through the intake process and and remained on hand till I had had my shot. The nurse who administered this shot had to mix the contents of two small vials, but before she did this she held them up for me to look at. I nodded at her and she proceeded to give me the shot. It reminded me of a waiter displaying a bottle of wine and pouring a small sample for the customer’s approval before serving the rest of the party.
My new friend, Thu Bac, also volunteered to give me a ride to yet another clinic, even more distant, for my next shot in three days’ time. Her family has since more or less adopted Kathryn and me, and hosted us for a meal during the Tet (Lunar New Year) holiday, took us to a thronged local pagoda, and even took us in a taxi to a small town an hour outside of Hanoi where Thu Bac’s father owns a private school. We have been overwhelmed by the kindness and generosity of the Vietnamese people. Another family that has taken us under its wing is that of Mr. Tran, the uncle of a former student of mine in Melbourne. This student put me in touch with her uncle when she found out we were coming to Hanoi, and his family likewise had us over for Tet and hosted us for the day in Mr. Tran’s ancestral home in a nearby village. He teaches English at university, and Kathryn and I went in and spoke to his class a couple weeks ago.
But back to my rabies shots. I got the last four of them at that third clinic, and finished the series a couple weeks ago. I was impressed by the production-line efficiency at this place (a lot of babies were in getting vaccinated each time I turned up) and was even more impressed by the price of the visits—the total for all five shots didn’t even use up the deductible on my insurance. Indeed, Vietnam seems to be the place to come for cheap drugs. On the pharmaceutical end, all manner of things that require prescriptions in the west are available here over the counter—from amoxicillin to Viagra; on the recreational side, marijuana is so widely available that half the sidewalk food vendors have a bong on hand for their own or customers’ use. Even alcohol is dangerously cheap, with a beer going for about 75 cents, while a 750-ml bottle of decent vodka costs just over $3. I suspect other products are available, but I haven’t made inquiries.
You see already how one topic leads to another that needs explaining. Everything is like that here. I could mention, for instance, that this clinic had a small shrine with incense sticks and offerings of food around it. All businesses have these shrines, as do most homes. Ancestors are prayed to at these shrines for guidance and “luck,” especially at important times such as the beginning of the new year, and the first of every lunar month. Usually the food offerings are fruit, but I have seen boxes of cookies, six-packs of beer, and even a bottle of whiskey. The practical-minded Vietnamese consume these offerings themselves after a few days, but they always give their ancestors first crack at them. And still the interesting impressions keep coming—too many for one posting.
