Saigon

(I wrote this a couple days ago but the internet was down)
I reached Ho Chi Minh City very early this morning after a 33hr train journey, where Long and his girlfriend Dung (‘Yung’) were waiting to meet me. The journey itself was not half as terrible as everyone seemed to expect it would be – after a 24hr bus ride from Vientiane to Hanoi, and innumerable 10hr stints by bus and train, a six-bed hard sleeper berth is quite a luxury to me!

I made a friend, of course. Thi Anh, the woman in the bunk below, was travelling alone with her young daughter (perhaps 10 or so), and made it her maternal duty (with much encouragement from a very sour-looking older woman opposite, who in fact was perhaps not so unpleasant as she seemed) to wake me at every meal and show me how to eat it – which, I might add, is something I’m still inept at. I slept for most of the journey, like everyone else, because there wasn’t enough room above to sit, and so when I tried to read my translation of Fontane’s Effi Briest lying down, I invariably always fell asleep. I spoke to Anh at mealtimes, enjoyed the omnipresent and always-shared bag of in-season lychees, and attempted to hold a conversation (her English was very bad and my Vietnamese of course pitiful). She held my hand and smiled at everything, and when she asked for confirmation that we were friends (and I replied ‘yes, we’re friends’) she smiled even broader, and reached up a soft cool hand to stroke my cheek. She called me when I’d reached Long’s to tell me she missed me and confirm my promise to meet for coffee.

Today has been a quiet restful day. Much catching up of emails, reading my book again, writing in my diary, catching up on Saigon history and perusing the tourist hotspot list. At 8pm Long drove me (at terrifying speeds on his powerful Japanese motorbike, I might add) to meet Anne Dudas for dinner. She was very sweet, and though my feelings of importance were flattened somewhat by the revelation that she has an au pair every year, I hope that I made a good impression on her. Tomorrow we will meet again for dinner before she leaves for Paris on Saturday, and she promises to speak only in French with me (something I half dread, because my French is so rusty and I can’t remember how to string together a sentence – at least she complimented my accent).

Saigon, most of all, is very strange! The people here are amazingly different from their Hanoi counterparts. To be honest, I could only just make out a small difference between the Thai and Vietnamese, which perhaps I only imagined (and little at all between the Thai and Laos). Here the people look positively strange – their faces are sharp, elongated, squashed, and formed so extremely that I wonder if it is poverty, or the war, or something else. Many are very short (shorter than Hanoians), and they dress so differently. In Hanoi the women wore mostly the same style – nearly all of them taking care to cover their upper bodies well, often with short-sleeved t-shirts, and rarely do you see a Hanoi woman in a strap-top. The men, when casually dressed, wear polo shirts, jeans, uniformly normal clothes. And here, there are young girls with very low necklines and push-up bras, strappy dresses, short skirts. There are young men in leather and chains, or little shirtless boys who press up against the taxi and beg for money. Amazingly, the beautiful traditional ao dai dress, normally ankle-long with a great slit up to the mid-waist, and a pair of smooth loose silk trousers underneath seems to have been unfortunately bastardised here for the benefit of the tourists (in my opinion). The reception girls at a restaurant had left out the trousers altogether, and if naturally the slit was a tad lower, their uncannily long legs bared up to the thigh still looked much more suggestive than the bit of hip flesh the women demurely show in the North. And there are so many tourists here – many many more than there ever were in Hanoi. It is rather shocking and strange, to think that these loose, casual, slightly coarse-looking Saigon people are from the same country as the conservative, neatly dressed Hanoians. I wouldn’t dare to make a preference, but it’s strange all the same, and I am itching to get out and see it all.

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So I have talked a good deal with Long after he came back from work yesterday. I have to say I’d somehow gathered the impression that he was a very forbidding character, but he seems family enough, and we get along just fine. He laughed with pleasure when I mentioned Kaissa’s emails, and confirmed how he liked them, and thought it amazing that she always has the time to write even a little something even to our grannies. He said he used to email Ileeya a little, but when he broke up with Hien unfortunately it lapsed, and he expressed his regrets at not taking it up again (perhaps that means he will now). And of course I mentioned Mum, and he said a little sadly (I thought) that he missed her very much, though more on the matter I left to my own imagination.

We talked a great deal about the vast differences between Saigon the modern commercial centre, and Hanoi the cultural administrative capital. The North-South divide is bigger than I thought, in some ways. He complained that there is nothing whatsoever to do here, and quite often he and Dung decide to stay in and watch a movie rather than face going out. Anne Dudas echoed something on the same line, that there wasn’t much to see… that said, I’m still eager to see more of the city.

At the moment I’m waiting for Dung to wake up and take me to the market. Unfortunately, she has insomnia, so I don’t know if we’ll go out at 11 as arranged. In any case, it just stopped raining, which makes movement impossible (or so the Vietnamese say, who I gather are hydrophobic). I’ll wait a little longer yet.