vietnam

Hello fracquaintances, back from Vietnam now. Took me 31 hours to get home because of a delay at LAX and a broken Caltrain* and still I couldn't really sleep last night, so this blog entry will be short and besotted. I also just put up pictures on Picasa, so take a look if you're interested. I am going back to sleep now so I'll only say a few things.

First, I loved traveling with Bernadine Bernie Bunny B Grenadine Bunnadine and her indomitable good cheer. We sang duets and made fun of sleeping Germans to make the bus rides go by faster, swapped deep tissue massages, ate seven meals (and then some ice cream bars) per day, endured monsoon saturation, hid from/braved flying cockroaches, patiently explained to curious people how we might be phenotypically familiar but dressed like aliens (because are families are in East Asia but we were raised in America - aha!), avoided teamed nab and morning logry, and chatted with the chatty together. We were pathologically parsimonious - Bunnadine spent the last day in Saigon literally pinching, I mean with thumb and forefinger, her pennies - and both really happy when mistaken for Vietnamese. I couldn't have asked for a better, more sympatico traveling partner and can't wait for the next time we travel together! But I must wait, because she has flown off to Maharashtra to spend the next year curing the ill. Don't worry, Dr. Hand, I won't tell anyone what you said about chimpanzees and our masseuses!

Second, Vietnam...is it presumptuous to say that I'm not surprised by Asia? Moped traffic, litter, cheap labor, markets, monsoons, long histories of war and displacement, tiled sidewalks, throwing toilet paper away instead of flushing it, etc. I appreciated what I saw but feel no pressing urge to write about it. Vietnam is a very easy and cheap place to travel, but as always when I go somewhere where I don't have family/friends or a job I don't trust that I can know the place from the vistas and UNESCO sites I've seen. So this time around, the fact of travel is more important to me than the details of the place I'm in - I know this is problematic and my roommate David, a Korean national whose citizenship status will not allow him to leave America to travel, would have a lot to say about how young westerners travel like it's some special privileged rite of passage and would allude, deservedly, to my being a banana.

And finally, related to the fact of travel, I don't think I can pull off the backpacker thing for much longer, for lots of reasons, not least of which is that it is incredibly inconvenient to travel with a backpack. It's antithetical because backpackers think they're survivalist but actually that 5000 cubic inch carapace just takes up room and knocks people over on buses and immediately profiles the owner as an 18-30 year old American, Israeli, European, or Australian, probably some college-educated, probably uses Lonely Planet, probably white, probably wears some "ethnic" item or some patch back in home country to signify traveling adventures, probably likes to Get Off The Beaten Track^TM, probably likes to be just uncomfortable enough to have good stories to tell at home. I'm guilty, of course, and in fact spent months working as a budget travel guide writer so in fact I enabled some of these unwashed souls that I am now deriding, but self-righteousness, not -reflection, is the raison d'etre of this blog. I traveled with just my school backpack this time and felt that even that was too much. Just a purse next time, to get both the advantages of light travel and gender conformity. Also, other reasons to stop backpackering is that backpackers live in the shittiest hovels in each town and so you leave Delhi thinking everything is like Paharganj, and also that when you travel with young westerners they can't resist the urge to talk talk talk talk at you. Two pale girls in Dalat with matching stringy dreadlocks - we called them the Matrix twins - complaining about the cold weather...did I ask to be complained to? Shut up!

Okay, I don't even know what I'm writing about I'm so tired. If this blog is disappointing low on details, like the smooth beards of ceramic garden gnomes fresh from the plaster mold, then check out the Picasa page linked to above for more of a sense of what I did/saw (and also for an explanation of the garden gnome thing). Naptime!

*Emphasis mine. I couldn't believe my luck - the engine broke on my train and we were stalled outside the San Mateo station until another train came by and pushed mine slowly the rest of the way to Palo Alto. Always mature, I cried and banged my head against the window because I was so uncomfortably sleep deprived, hungry, thirsty, and needing to have explosive diarrhea everywhere.