Through time, the great philosophers (Socrates, Nietzsche, Kyle) have all mused on the life of a man through reasoned consideration of the human experience and lie detector tests. Great literature is constantly preoccupied with the cyclical nature of the human experience. In the mater bothering, eye gouging, orgy of Oedipus Rex, the Sphinx posed the riddle of the three ages of man; In Twelfth Night, Feste the clown muses that 'What's to come is still unsure', and the Very Hungry Caterpillar had to eat his way through 1 red apple, 2 green pairs, 3 purple plums, 4 red strawberries, 5 whole oranges, a cake, a salami, a swiss cheese, ice-cream, cherry pie a whole watermelon and a single leaf before he could realise his full flutterby potential. It's a fable which is either a nuanced rhetoric on the importance of experience to formulation of the psyche, or Kerry Katona's daily 'to do' list.
So it is with these musings in mind that once again my feet have itched like Usain Bolt's slippers and I have relocated the blog to the streets of Ho Chi Minh city, better known as Saigon. Like the US army, various stoned pack-packers and a very successful Vespa sales rep before me, I now find myself pitched up in this often filmed but little visited city in the South of Vietnam.
The tedium and tiredness of a 16 hour journey (highlight = the peanuts) quickly gave way to befuddled anxiety when I reached the Vietnamese boarder control and realised that the local immigration processes were probably sketched on the back of a fag packet and hidden in a safe that everyone was looking for the key to. Scrawny, clueless looking officials in ill fitting olive green shirts stood around attempting to adjust their frowns just enough to convince their superiors that they were taking it all very seriously and not standing around idly while a gazillion new arrivals jostle pointlessly for some indication of what the bloody hell was going on.
In front of me in the queue were two Chinese Monks apparently failing miserably to be allowed to go about their business. The argument which followed regarding the legitimacy of their papers took approximately 14 hours and so many officials that it appeared that they were recruiting, training and dispatching new officers to add to the futile squabble. After a while they were led off to another room, presumably to be frowned at in new and exciting ways, leaving me free to approach the counter, cough up my $50 and be waved instantly through. Money definitely speaks louder than mixed metaphors in this part of the woods.
Once I was able to leave the airport, I was feeling sweatier than Satan's jock strap, so to get into the icy, air conditioned cab was exquisite. The heat is almost terrifying, because it seems to suck all the air out of the room, leaving you with only a kind of moist stew which occasionally allows oxygen to enter your lungs. Sweat beads gather on glasses, on shirts, around your wrist watch and if you wear tight pants, you might as well cut out the middle man and simply boil your gonads in warm marmalade.
In this type of oppression, the last thing you want is to be swapping barely understandable platitudes with a hotel owner in the middle of the back-packer district of Saigon whilst wondering if the ten thousand or so locust-like scooters which swam the city streets are actually participating in a kind of live action Grand Theft Auto where the mission is to attempt to fracture your spine with a wing-mirror.
Still, as a hotelier, Mr. Binh is friendly enough. The only real draw back is his increasingly hostile attempts to sell you whatever shite he was able to pick up off ebay the previous week. Sim cards, chocolate, water, fags, T-shirts, tactical nuclear weapons. He's so excited to have a captive audience of bewildered teachers to flog his wares to he actually leaps from buttock to buttock in his chair with excitement if anyone so much as shows a passing interest. His reaction to a knock back is more disappointment than anger, but don't feel sorry for him. The mark up is at least 50% and the quality is at least -40%. Who said business was difficult? - think of a number, double it, sell it. If you can't do that, you're fired.
So over the next week I'll actually start teaching English to the little darlings of Vietnam, which should provide ample distraction from the fifty cent beers, trying to count money in the millions and blocking up the holes in the walls from the gathering armies of furious looking ants.
More updates to follow - probably in their thousands. In the meantime, remember, this is the country where 'five dollar' can get you some things, but it still can't get you through customs.
Saigoneroaming xx
No comments:
Post a Comment