Ho Chi Minh City
"You have to be the rock in the river and let the current flow around you"
Jaclyn is in the middle holding onto Nancy on her left and me on her right. We are crossing a 4 lane street in front of Jaclyn's house but as the vast majority of vehicles are scooters, it's really more like 12 lanes deep and there aren't many traffic lights or any stop signs to regulate traffic. The mopeds drive on the sidewalk, cut corners and park wherever they please so the best way to deal with them is to walk slowly and deliberately without sudden movement and let them swerve around you. It's terrifying and my heart is pounding in my chest as we inch across the road tortoise style: Slow and steady.
We are taking a walk around town, heading to the backpackers district, the market and the cell phone store. Jaclyn goes between speaking Chinese with Chengwei's mom, English with me and fending off sidewalk hawks peddling their wares in Vietnamese. She admits her head is about to explode.
After a journey half way around the world, my sunglasses are cracked. They and I had had a good run, I found them during a Backdrop Magazine (insert shameless promotion here: backdropmag.com) release party in the bathroom of 19 South in Athens, Ohio.
Our first stop is to buy a pair of fake RayBans from a man holding a giant board of hundreds of knock off glasses. Jaclyn goes to town bargaining and gets the price down to what equates to about $2.50 USD. Not to shabby. I am now the proud owner of some Kermit green wayfarers.
Next on our walk we head to the market. The streets leading there are full of street vendors. The fruit here is giant and strange. Except the Bananas. They are tiny. We see dragon fruit, grapes the size of small plums, lychee, spikes green and red fruit, coconuts, Vietnamese grapefruits, giant Asian pears, and things even Jaclyn doesn't have names for.
Inside the market here are sections for consumer goods and a section for food. Blood drips down the side of butcher blocks and we have ego watch out step. Fish, oysters and the like sit in plastic tubs and dead chickens, freshly plucked of their feathers hang by their limp necks.
On the consumer goods side there are stalls of touristy junk: fans and hand crafts, purses, bags, figurines, trinkets and netlike manned by enthusiastic merchants telling to "just look" and that they'll give us a "good price". We wanted around to the more practical home goods. Did you need a rice cooker? No? Any type of high heel imaginable? Bolts of cloth to take to the tailor? Calvin Kline boxer-briefs? They've got em!
After doing a lot of window shopping and to a lot of buying a delicious bubble tea off the street was in order. Jaclyn got milk tea and I got green/peach. Delicious. I still haven't had any of the infamous Vietnamese coffee so ill have to get on that soon.
Next stop was the cell phone store to see if we could buy a SIM card for my phone. Unfortunately the phone wasn't properly unlocked for Vietnam so no dice. The good news is Jaclyn has a spare nugget Nokia phone so we just put some money on that and now I'm good to go! (At least until I cross the border) sometimes it's nice to have a lifeline.