Birds chirped in accompaniment to the delicate intonation of an alleyway song, marking our mornings as much as the light seeping through our curtains. I was ecstatic to see a different world at my doorstep, shuttered doors now covering the dens of ine[quity/briated], storefronts and restaurants now open in their place. Our first meal in Vietnam was to be breakfast as locals do, a hot bowl of Pho to match temps nearing 100, both of us eagerly tossing in extra heat and full cloves of garlic. It somehow makes sense to eat spicy food in hot climates, in all climates really. There is a Zen-esque balance achieved when your insides match your outsides, beads of sweat ensuring you don't overheat entirely. We watched the sea of scooters as if it was cinema, old women carrying kitchens on their backs, mesmerized by the frenetic nonchalance of it all.
Our muscle memory wasn't eager to pound lengthy streets in such heat, and I recalled that icon on that iPhone - surely there's no Uber in Saigon. Spoiler alert: there's totally Uber in Saigon, there's even UberMoto in Saigon where you hail a scooter from your phone. If your first thought when reading that was "well we have Uber here too big whoop" then I'd wager a good bit of Dong you've never been to SE Asia. It's a complete game changer for anyone with a data plan, also readily available and incredibly cheap. My previous month based out of Bangkok gave me taxi PTSD - not only did you have to avoid ripoffs and insist the driver run the meter (many didn't want to) but trying to negotiate the destination translation is a grueling endeavor that can leave you stranded on the wrong side of the city. Not to mention those drivers that can't (read: won't) give you any change for any amount of bill. I now wait 3-5 minutes for an often air-conditioned car and automatically get billed the $1.50 (!!!) fare to visit my next bowl of noodles, the address I enter on my phone before the car even arrives. Worried about getting ripped off buying a SIM card? You should be! Hit up the historic Saigon Central Post Office and find an official Mobifone store around the corner - $9 gets you a SIM and 1 GB of data for 30 days. AMAZING!!!!!
We were intrigued by a craft brewing place nearby, and headed up the narrow stairway to the small bar pulling pints. The coconut porter was good, the passion fruit wheat outstanding. A young man on his phone next to me eventually made small talk, a sociology PhD student who started sharing his work and a bit about the religious history of Saigon. I had no idea Catholicism has been here for 400 years - communism doesn't lend itself well to gods outside of the state itself, and we got deep into a wonderfully enlightening conversation about the realities of Saigon today. My heart sank deep when he described the many poor Vietnamese families scrounging and saving to send their children to those uncouth British idiots of the night prior, who get paid a whopping $25/hr to teach English in one of the cheapest big cities in the world. Every time he mentioned the D word (-emocracy) he did so ten decibels lower, bad at masking his obvious joy of talking taboo subjects with foreigners. I left the bar beaming, grateful to have a taste of perspective.
Something he said has stuck with me: "how does it feel to be a millionaire?". We laughed about it then but he isn't far off - it's hard to spend large quantities of money here, my value-centric pleasure centers tingling wildly but often blindly. When you can drop fifty cents on a fresh Bahn Mi and eat among the locals it makes you feel powerful, which is an odd thing to feel when you're simply eating. It's easy to act frivolous but important to remember that exorbitant wealth leads down dark paths - of expectation, of taking for granted, of not being aware of the true cost of things. This was most clear during cocktails on our hotel roof bar, overhearing conversations between couples, of American and European men trying to show off to their Vietnamese "girlfriends". In my mind there's no room for romance when the scales sit so disparate - it's an act on both sides, the submission and manipulation of economic desperation pitted against the pitfalls of testosterone-driven vanity and having to convince yourself that it's any actual part of you she's after (shallow or otherwise), and not just the eventual contents of your wallet. My $3 glass full of Jameson was ten times the size of the thimble I paid $15 for back in HK. I basked beneath strands of mood lighting, eight floors above the chaos below, sipping on my watermelon juice chaser, happy to be sitting across from an old friend, perfectly content with the baggage I carry.
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