One more month

With a whole month left, it might seem a bit premature to say my trip is drawing to a close. But in a way it’s the truth. It seems like yesterday that my trip was at its halfway point. That was when I first began to have this feeling—a vague sense that my time in Vietnam was finite, and that it would eventually draw to a close. Now the halfway point is long past, and the feeling is much more tangible. In a month, I will be back home. Before I left for Vietnam, I had difficulty imagining what life in Vietnam would be like. Now, after only three months here, I am having difficulty remembering what life was like before.

Some big changes will soon be occurring in my life here, contributing to this overwhelming sense that I am nearing the “last leg” of my journey. Tomorrow I will receive my paycheck for the month of October and will subsequently be quitting my side job at Aston. This was a difficult decision to make: I truly love my job at Aston, the children and the staff. But it’s necessary. I have to see at least something of Vietnam outside of Saigon, and traveling is impossible with two jobs. The month’s paycheck should be plenty to support any traveling I do within the country. Even airfare.

With this major change there will be an accompanying shift of focus from work to . . . everything else. I have to finish my papers for the ELTAP program, begin planning weekend trips (the first of which I think will be to the Mekong Delta region, but more about that later), make a souvenir shopping list, and begin planning my BIG trip, which I will be taking over the last twelve days of my stay. The current plan is to fly to Hanoi (the capital city of Vietnam, located in the far north) and take buses back down to Saigon, effectively touring the length of the country, and hopefully arriving back in the city in time for my flight on December 12th. Preparing for this will take up a lot of additional time.

The bright side is that with all of this travel, I think we will start to see blog entries coming in greater frequency, and with a lot of pictures. The main problem I have been having for the past couple months is that, while I am enjoying my life here enormously, it has not been exactly what you would call “exciting.” This is not a criticism. It simply means that I have been living more or less as a working class citizen of Vietnam might live. I love Vietnam, and at this stage in my life I’d much rather be a working class citizen here than in the US, but still, I think there is a limit to the amount of excitement you can experience with such a lifestyle. Now, as my role changes from full-time teacher to part-time traveler and eventually full-time traveler, I should have a lot more to write about.

I’ve received requests to talk more about Vietnamese culture in my blog. These requests were eye-opening. First of all, I apologize for the self-centered nature of my blog; here I am in a foreign country and all I can talk about is myself! But the requests were eye-opening in another way too: before receiving them, I truly felt like I had integrated into Vietnamese society. I had made lots of friends, was able to get around the city, even learned a bit of the language. But when pressed to write about Vietnamese culture, I struck a brick wall. How much have I really learned about this culture, anyway? Just because I can function within the culture doesn’t mean I’ve even begun to understand its subtleties. I’m sure there are hundreds of tiny cultural details I miss on a daily basis.

One major difference that I have noticed between Vietnamese and American societies is that Vietnamese society is much more collectivist. Now when I say “collectivist,” I don’t mean it in the sense that Vietnam is a communist country. The fact that it’s a communist country has very little to do with it. In fact, I wouldn’t classify the country as communist at all in the theoretical sense; business here is more or less free market, with probably fewer regulations than in the US. The government is rigid and controlling, but in a social rather than an economic sense. It’s probably closer to fascism than communism.

The collectivism I refer to in Vietnamese society is a characteristic I suspect has been around for a very long time. It’s not a national unity but rather a very powerful unity among small groups. These are usually family groups, but can also be groups of coworkers or plain old friends. The ties within these groups are far more binding than ties between coworkers and friends in the US. With a job in America, it is understood that you will probably, at some point, have to move on, and any friendships you have made up to that point could very easily be severed, or at least will fall to the wayside. In Vietnam this is not always the case. Often people will have the same job for their entire lives. Coworkers become part of the extended family.

The importance of family is immediately apparent. Each home has a shrine to dead relatives. The death day, rather than birthday, of a relative is celebrated as a holy day. Family ties go back generations. The New Year holiday, Tet, is celebrated over several weeks, during which I am told Saigon becomes an empty shell. Everyone floods to the countryside to visit their “family.” Think about that. 8 million people live in Saigon; most of those people live in what we would consider an extended family, with grandparents, aunts, and uncles often living in the same house. And this “family” goes to visit more “family” in the country. How far do these family ties reach? I’m just sorry I have to miss the holiday; I really would’ve liked to be around to experience it.

Anyway, I’ve taken quite a few more pictures of Saigon, but the more I take, the more I realize pictures aren’t the best way to give you a sense of the place. One of the city’s intrinsic characteristics is that it’s always moving, and without that sense of movement, the feeling of the city is lost. So instead I’ve composed a brief video tour of the streets at night. I think unfortunately the video gives off a bit of a creepy stalker vibe, which was certainly not my intention, but I was trying to be as discreet as possible with the camera. Still, this is probably about as close as you can get to actually experiencing the city, so it’s a compromise I’m willing to make. The lights have a funny effect on my camera, but overall I think the video turned out well.



I mentioned earlier that I plan on going to the Mekong Delta region, the southernmost region of Vietnam. I’ve arranged to go this weekend with a friend, so hopefully I’ll have lots of pictures for you next time.