Sweating in Saigon II

Same same, but different

14.12.2010 - 04.01.2011 34 °C

I've got 30 minutes until I get picked up to go to the airport. I'm short about 14 hours sleep over the last two days and can only think as fast as a sleepless memory will allow, which is not particularly fast, if it has speed at all. I'll write this entry when I have nothing to do at the airport. Maybe when I have 12 hours to kill in Malaysia. Just not now.

So...Saigon.
Same same. but different. Therefore, not at all.
I'm not a fan. It's another city in the East.

It stares at me.
People vomit in the road. Other people walk into that vomit. Jens and I laugh at other people walking into that vomit. Jens drops his writing book in someone's pool of spit. I almost vomit.

I'm bad at crossing the roads. Jens saves me every time. I get it, but I don't get it right. I keeping looking right, which is wrong.

It's loud. It screams at itself and then it screams back. I scream at it in my head.
It sticks to you like chewing gum. And the 5 year olds that sell it side by side with cigarettes on the sidewalk.
It's proud of people who should be banned from travelling. Maybe they shouldn't. Maybe they should just stay in Saigon. Maybe I shouldn't stay there at all.

It's selling its soul. I'm sure some's already sold. Not to me. I just watched. And it buzzed and blared by...

...except when we ate.
First at an enormous local restaurant that is like a fast, furious, hot, sticky, shouting, rice-filled, happy-birthday-song-saturated, plastic-chaired Spur on Steroids.

And then the meagre R35 indulgence at a street cafe of Saigon sorts with some of the best food I may have had. All simply to toast the making of friends and to say goodbye.