Short Memories from My Trip

So it would be impossible to talk about the trip without disclosing where I went so, surprise, it was at Vietnam. And double surprise, I’m Vietnamese. I was there for so long so I can’t document a complete and chronological retelling.

1. We got scammed on the ride back home from the airport. From the house to the airport, I ordered an Uber that cost $150 after tax and tip. On the ride back, my mom and I were persuaded by the airport workers to use the airport’s taxi services instead since it would be “cheaper” than ordering an Uber. Yea after taxes and tip, that ride home was $424.

2. It was insanely hot and humid. Everyday in Ho Chi Minh City was almost 100 degrees or higher. There were also an insane amount of mosquitoes. I have a feeling Vietnamese mosquitoes have a thing for American blood because I got bit all over my legs 20+ times. They were so mean and aggressive. They managed to sting my feet through the holes in my Crocs. Also, my body wasn’t adapted for Vietnamese mosquitoes so almost each bite was transformed into a nasty sized blister with a visible good sized pus (?) liquid domed over. I’d try to avoid touching them whenever I could but that was impossible in my sleep, so sometimes I’d wake up to find the blister had popped and I had an oily-like substance around my leg.

3. I went on a cruise for the first time around Ha Long Bay. The cruise was 3 days long and it took us to some islands (not the kinds you’re thinking about), caves, and beaches. The islands around there were more like a really big rock in the middle of the water and not like a sort of tropical paradise. This is also when I learn that I’m not cut for a lavish lifestyle because I apparently get motion sickness. The first day I was starting to feel sick but I thought it was just all in my head, but the second day was when I started puking my stomach out. Every time the yacht dropped us off at a new location on our itinerary, I was so excited to jump off and get back on solid ground.

4. That being said, when we were on one of the beaches, my sister and I found some tiny hermit crabs. We wanted to keep some of them so we bought a fresh coconut, drank all the coconut water, filled the coconut with sand and beach water, and dumped the hermit crabs in (~8 crabs). Online, it said that coconuts were really good for crabs so it was fun watching the hermit crabs play together inside. We brought the coconut back on the yacht and kept watch on it the whole day. The next day we woke up and all of them were dead. Sad, but we just chucked the whole coconut out the window and into the sea.

5. When I was in Hue (another region of Vietnam) they have a different dialect than I do, so it’s really hard for me to understand. I understand it sometimes, but other times I blank out completely. In turn, it’s also really hard for them to understand me, not just because of the different dialect, but because I am also speaking in broken Vietnamese. I can speak Vietnamese to a certain extent but I still have an American accent to my words. I guess that puts all those years in Vietnamese school to shame. So one time, I wanted to eat at a Korean BBQ restaurant that was next to our AirBnB but my parents were too tired to go with me. I asked them what I should do about the language barrier and they said, “Just speak in English. Even if you speak in Vietnamese you won’t understand each other anyways but at least English doesn’t have any varying accents.” When I went in the restaurant, I did as my parents advised. I could tell that the servers were thrown off and most were scared to greet me in. They found the one server that knew some English and had her take care of me. I could read the menu but I just pointed at whatever I wanted to save the hassle of speaking it out. So far, other than the words, “Only one person?”, no other dialogue had been exchanged between me and anyone in the restaurant. Around 20-25 minutes in, when the food started coming out, I realized my eyes were more greedy than what I could physically eat, so I made a discreet phone call to my mom asking her to come help me finish the meal. I guess I wasn’t so discreet because all the servers’ heads whipped to me as they heard me speaking Vietnamese on the phone. To be fair, it was a slow night for them, and other than me, there were only 3 other busy tables. It was after they realized I also spoke Vietnamese that other servers started coming up to me to talk about the restaurants ‘promotion of the day’, asking if everything was okay, and asking if I’d like any more food/drinks (all in Vietnamese of course). Pretty funny.

6. As an American, food in Vietnam is really cheap. Where a bowl of pho here would cost anywhere from $10-$16, over there it only cost $2. Food there is also…riskier? There so many food stalls all sprawled across the streets. It’s common to just wake up, walk out of your house, and be greeted with varying food options all from different vendors. But also, because it’s a third world country, most of the food stalls are just stalls and not like a nice sit down restaurant. Sometimes the raw meat ingredients would be out in open sun waiting to get cooked and would have flies flying on or around it, and that’s just completely normal. But again, because I’m an American, that concept isn’t very common with me so thinking about it would make my stomach queasy. Every time I ate out at those food stalls, I’d make it a point not to look at the open ingredients and live in blissful ignorance. I guess it worked cause I never got food poisoning or anything, and the food tastes great. Where in America we try to choose our restaurants based on cleanliness and adhering to health code violations, in Vietnam all of that gets thrown out the window and it’s the “dirty” restaurants that serve an ant in your drink (that really happened) that has the best food and all the “clean” places were gentrified restaurants with no flavor.

7. I tried a Vietnamese pizza. They like putting seafood on there. I was too scared to commit to a true Vietnamese-style pizza since there’s calamari, clams, and imitation crab on there, but I tried a tamed version of it. A regular dough with Thousand Island dressing in place of the marinara sauce and pineapples, shrimp, bell peppers, mushroom, and squid (I think) as toppings. It was so nasty I loved it. One of my main reasons for wanting to go to Vietnam is to try all the butchered “American” foods (even though yes I know pizza is Italian). I also tried the McDonald's there. Surprisingly similar to how it is in America but just sweeter. They also served fried chicken at the McDonalds but I didn’t think those were very good.

8. I went to a Japanese onsen (bathhouse) in Hanoi. It was called Yoko Onsen. The first Japanese-styled bathhouse in Vietnam (I think). There’s a whole neighborhood that was reconstructed specifically for that resort and all the homes there are Japanese styled. The home I stayed at for one night had 3 rooms, our own hot spring, and our own cold and hot sauna. The hot spring was man-made and sort of like a hot pool with a lot of added minerals. The hot and cold sauna could fit ~2 people each and were really cool. The resort also had a public bathhouse for those that were there just for a few hours. The bathhouse had different bath areas with an array of varying temperatures; warm, hot, really hot, cold, super cold… They also had different types of saunas; cold sauna (it just feels like the walk-in cooler at Costco), hot/steam sauna (the typical ones), and a rock sauna (it had heated marble floors for people to lay on and relax).

9. Compared to my 5 week vacation, my sister was only there for 2 weeks. She came a few days after my mom, aunt, and I had landed so we were there to pick her up, but she had to leave to the airport by herself. The only international airport is the one in Saigon (the south), but my parents and I were in Hanoi (the north) still on vacation. When it came close to my sister’s departure date, she had left us (Hanoi) to get back to Saigon and be ready to leave. Since it was just her down there, my parents had advised her to call any of the other family members (the ones that actually live in Vietnam) in case if she needs something and to take her to the airport. On the day of her departure, she thought it was similar to America where we could check-in online and arrive at the airport ~1 hour before the take-off. What she didn’t account for was the insane traffic Saigon gets, so she ended up missing her flight. Technically the plane was still there, but the time to check in the luggage had closed. My sister believed she was an independent woman so she never called any of the other family members to see her off. If she did, she could’ve at least left her luggage behind with them and left with just herself and then later when my mom and I would depart, we could just pay extra for extra luggage, but she didn’t and was now stuck. We got a FaceTime call from her as my family and I were in the middle of lunch with our tour group and she was bawling her eyes out. Eventually, my mom got in contact with the other family members to go pick her up and she just ended up having to buy a new ticket for $700.

10. Airplane tickets are expensive, but since my family and I are trying to tour all over Vietnam, we need a budget friendly mode of transportation. ~Sleeping busses~ I don’t know if that's the correct name for what it was, but that’s what I’m calling it. It’s like a really big bus with beds instead of car seats. The beds are tiny. You’re really just sleeping on the floor that has minimal padding and just a curtain to separate you and the other people. In Vietnam, I rode on those 3 times. The last time was from Hue to Ho Chi Minh City (about 16 hours). Unluckily, instead of normal luggage, some lady was transporting dead fish to bring over to Ho Chi Minh City to sell. Usually there’s space at the bottom of these busses to put everyone’s luggage, but the workers left her foam boxes filled to the brim of dead fish on one of the “beds”. For the whole 16 hour car ride, it smelled like a fish market in there. Closing my curtain helped a little bit, but whenever it was too unbearable, I sprayed my perfume around my area.

I have more short stories, but I fear this is getting too long and might go over AnonBlog’s word limit. I’ll probably make a part 2, but no more than that since reading these stories might start to seem redundant.