Entering...Hà Nội

Now I’m on my journey to Hanoi. We decided to take the train from Saigon but we stopped at Nha Trang for Christmas on our way to the north. Overall I have mixed feelings about Saigon. In some ways it is a very lively and nice city to live but I wouldn’t say it has so many interesting places to see. My dad and I spent a lot of time just walking around and stopping at cafes. 

It is definitely a good place to have a good time when you’re on vacation. District 1 seems to be the epicenter of the tourist scene. I am not a huge fan of that area but there are some cheap bars, as well as plenty of places that will rip you off. I was staying just on the border of District 1 and 3. I liked where I was because it was overwhelmingly touristy. I was kind of sequestered to that area though I didn’t really have time to travel around to different parts of the city. I’m sure there is more to the city than I was exposed to. It’s funny how almost everyone keeps telling me that going to Hanoi is a bad idea. They say the weather is cold. The people are cold and not friendly. Most of the people that told me that are people that I don’t really respect anyway so I take what they say with a grain of salt.

There was a French girl staying in my cabin on this train who was telling me just the opposite however. She is working as an au pair in Saigon but she was telling me that she regretted leaving Hanoi.

“Hanoi is a poetic city.” She told me and we discussed for various experiences we had in Asia. While we were talking, the American guys who were ardently trying to convince me that Saigon was much better than Hanoi were getting obnoxiously hammered in the dining car and embarrassing themselves. They are not people I take seriously.

Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. Before I even got on this long 26 hour train to Hanoi we spent two nights in Nha Trang which is a small beach town. It is quite a nice place and I was surprised how lively it was for Christmas season. The problem with Vietnam is that it isn’t as tropical as a lot of people might imagine. I had hoped for a nice, hot day on the beach for Christmas but instead it was quite windy and even a bit chilly. It was nice in the morning but by the afternoon it would get positively cold. I saw Western families there who probably expected some tropical paradise but hadn’t done their research. I still like Nha Trang but beach season is definitely in the summer.

After parting ways with our Canadian friend we got on the train to Hanoi. There are four of us heading to Hanoi. I’m travelling with two other American guys and an English girl. I think we have a decent group dynamic and we are all going to help each other out in finding a job/place to live. I will probably end up sharing a place with the English girl. We both have a tight budget but she does have a few more things she considers necessary that she would like in her apartment; such as hot water, clean bathroom, and a kitchen. I’m hoping we can find a couple rooms open in a house with some other European expats and a shared kitchen. I really enjoyed my living arrangements in Manila even if they were quite basic. I also liked living with other Filipinos since they always offered me good advice about the city. I think it would be harder in Hanoi to share an apartment with local Vietnamese. I have heard that foreigners are pretty much sequestered to one part of town and it’s technically illegal to live in other parts of the city. I’ll see how much of this talk is actually correct.

Vietnam is an interesting place. At times people seem very xenophobic and at other times they overly welcoming and friendly. I was discussing the Vietnam War with the French girl I mentioned previously and I told her that I was surprised that there wasn’t more animosity towards Americans here. She was surprised as well that most Vietnamese she talked to consider the war “ancient history”. It wasn’t more than 40 years ago that the war was still going on so it really isn’t that long ago. But she said something that I agree with: Vietnamese people are constantly looking to the future. For the last twenty years Vietnam was been quickly developing and the people have a strong drive to push their country to first world status. Vietnamese people are anything but passive. However I do sense a bit of an inferiority complex among a lot of Vietnamese people.

My supervisor from the course I took in Saigon is going to the Philippines for the first time two weeks from now. She told me she was nervous to go to a “big country”. The Philippines is probably a bit bigger in terms of land area but in terms of population Vietnam and the Philippines are about the same. In overall GDP the Philippines might be a bit stronger then Vietnam but I think per capita Vietnam is stronger. The wealth seems to be distributed a bit more equally over here; probably a legacy of communism. I didn’t see the vast disparity of wealth in Saigon that you see in Manila. There were far less beggars on the street and I hardly saw any street kids that are all over Manila.

I have made some progress in my real goal for coming to Vietnam.  I didn’t come here to teach English. I came here to better understand how microfinance operates and helps alleviate poverty in the Vietnamese context. I want to only teach part-time and use my free time to volunteer at various NGOs that work in microfinance. While my dad was here, he was able to meet with an Australian guy working in a pretty prominent microfinance institution in Saigon. He gave us some insight to what we should expect. According to him there isn’t much demand for an academic paper like what my dad and I would have cooperated on but I take what he says with a grain of salt. My dad wants to work with me to eventually publish something about microfinance. If this will come to fruition is really up in the air. My first goal is to better understand by volunteering for some different offices. Whether or not we can construct a coherent academic study from what I discover depends on how much information I’ll be able to access and the feasibility of making a meaningful people from those findings. Everything seems ambiguous at this point and I will first have to better learn Vietnamese and establish the necessary connections. The eventual outcome is still shrouded in a haze but I am confident that whatever happens I won’t settle for mediocrity.

Overall my stay here has been enjoyable but not without its hardships. It is really difficult for me to be away from my girlfriend Kristine. She is the love of my life and she is on my mind continuously. I talk to her when I have the opportunity but it is difficult while I’ve been travelling. Hopefully when I settle into an apartment I’ll have a more normal schedule. Through hardships such as these I believe our relationship can become stronger. I would not do anything to lose the best aspect of my life.

First impressions of Ho Chi Minh City

I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City a week ago and I want to write about some of my first impressions of the city and Vietnam itself. It’s funny because I was happy to leave Cambodia but now I have to say that I do miss it a bit. Phnom Penh is quite a nice city and its size is a lot more manageable than Ho Chi Minh City. I’ve seen signs referring to the city as Saigon but it seems that the locals pretty much all call it Ho Chi Minh City.

The first thing I noticed was that Vietnam is definitely more developed than Cambodia. The roads are better and the streets are full of life and businesses which signify to me the robustness of the economy. Ho Chi Minh City is quite massive and is a bit overwhelming at first but I’m used to big cities now and it is actually quite smaller than Manila. There are also far more tourists and other foreigners walking around which is good and bad. I’m glad that people are attracted to Vietnam and bring their money here. The tourist industry seems to be thriving. However, there are obviously things about touristy places that get one my nerves, for example getting ripped off on random things. It’s really the same as the Philippines. You just have to be savvy for how much things actually cost. Most of the time it is pretty innocent but once I settle here I’m going to learn how to handle these situations. I sympathize with the Vietnamese since a lot of people seem make their living overcharging foreigners but if I live and work here than I don’t want to deal with this kind of bullshit.

One thing I noticed right away with Vietnam is how good the food is. I feel bad saying it but the quality of food here is just better than in Cambodia. The Vietnamese know how to make good food and there is a wide variety of stuff to choose from. There aren’t only noodles but the noodles are pretty awesome. The stomach problems I was having Cambodia stopped immediately once I got here which is nice. I have to learn more about Vietnamese cuisine and understand what the names of things are so I can know what to order. Vietnamese menus are pretty intimidating if there’s no English and a lot of times the translations they give aren’t really that helpful and are sometimes pretty ridiculous. I saw “snail porridge” on a menu and I don’t know it could be alright but it just sounds disgusting. I can pick up on some French influence with the food and how much Vietnamese people like coffee. Pate is widely available and so are nice baguettes. I like the Vietnamese culture around coffee.  There are people up and down the streets that sell good ice coffee. People chill on the sidewalk with little chairs and hang out with friends or play some chess. It’s a nice atmosphere. Actually, the whole atmosphere of Ho Chi Minh City seems friendly. It’s not as intimidating as Manila could be at times. Vietnamese people have been really nice with me. I’m sure there is some anti-American sentiment in some hushed conversations but it’s not obvious.

I haven’t really had time to do a lot of sight-seeing here but I did stop by the Notre Dame which is cool. It’s exactly as its name implies: a Notre Dame like cathedral. When my dad gets here on Monday we’ll hopefully go and check out some cool places. It’s quite lively at night around there. I like the nightlife here. There are plenty of bars and restaurant catering to foreigners but they are usually over-priced. I like the local style of restaurant and I like how people hang out in parks at night. It’s nice and Manila definitely lacked this aspect. Manila is a bit more dangerous I think so people are more cautious. I think too cautious but that’s just my opinion. One thing about Ho Chi Minh City that I somewhat dislike is the traffic. There are just thousands upon thousands of motorbikes cruising around all the time. It gets kind of annoying because the roads can get so backed up that people just ride their bikes down the sidewalk. You have to constantly be aware because people will honestly drive within inches of you and they can go pretty fast.

My class is going alright. I’m on track to finish this week and I’ll get my TESOL certificate. I’m planning on heading north with a couple guys who also want to work in Hanoi. I’ve been job hunting a bit and I haven’t got any prospect as of now but I’m not worried. There is a ton of demand for English teachers now so I’m sure I’ll find a job. Whether or not it’s my ideal job is another story.

Cambodia's Tragedy

Now I have finally arrived in Ho Chi Minh City and I thought I would reflect a bit on my time in Cambodia. Cambodia and Phnom Penh are not large places and I think I was able to see most of the place in the time that I spent there. As I wrote about before, Phnom Penh is quite a nice city. The people are warm and accommodating. The city is pretty and reasonably accessible for non-Cambodians. I did have some problems with the Cambodian food however. I pride myself in being able to stomach all kinds of different food but for some reason I didn’t really enjoy the food while I was there and my stomach reacted pretty violently. I won’t get into the details but my digestive system was definitely struggling throughout my time there and only now am I feeling a bit better.

One aspect of Cambodia that is hard to miss is the fairly recent, extremely violent history of the place. If you were only visiting for a few days or so and just partied it up around the riverside then you could miss it but I used my longer period of time to try to get a better understanding of the situation. There is a place in Phnom Penh called S-21 which was one of the largest secret prisons of the Khmer Rouge. I wasn’t sure if I was going to go and honestly I was prepared to skip over it entirely. As important a place it is for the history of the country, I don’t have a particular fascination for depressing places. If I went to Poland, I don’t think I would want to go to Auschwitz. Anyway, some of my friends were going to S-21 so I decided to tag along. I didn’t take any pictures because firstly it’s not a beautiful location in the first place and I thought it was kind of morbid to be snapping pictures where thousands of people were tortured and killed. The compound used to be a school and was turned into a prison shortly after the Khmer Rouge seized power. The present government decided not to change anything and to leave the place pretty much how it was left; with the exception of a few rooms which were full of pictures and stories about the time period. They removed the dead bodies obviously however except for a room full of skulls and other bones. The compound looks like any other communist compound, fit with the uniform concrete pillars and fairly identical rooms. The rooms are pretty much empty with the exception an occasional bed frame with the torture utensils left on it. Some of the rooms are also fit with gruesome pictures of what the Vietnamese military discovered when they found the prisons after it was abandoned by the Khmer Rouge.

It’s hard to describe the chilling feeling you get when you walk into a room where probably over a hundred people were gruesomely tortured and murdered. I looked at the small window and could just imagine what the victims’ last view of the outside world would have been. Some of the rooms have writing scratched into the wall which I couldn’t read but you don’t have to be able to read the script to feel the anguish. As I walked from room to room, the solemnness and tranquility of the place is unsettling. Occasionally I heard children laughing from a nearby neighborhood and the bustling of modern life outside the prison which contrasted starkly with the raw silence of the rooms. It’s almost as if the souls of the victims are held within the compound by the silence. On the bottom floor of some of the sections was a museum section. One room was just a wall of photographs of victims and you see that the entire population was represented: children, young people, the elderly. The criteria for being killed by the Khmer Rouge were quite arbitrary and cruel. If you could speak another language, wore glasses, or had soft hands than you were probably killed unless you could hide it. Pol Pot sought to create an agrarian utopia and so anyone with a higher level of education was seen as a threat. As his reign of terror continued, the criteria became far less specific and victims were forced under torture to list the people they knew and loved as traitors and so the genocide continued. It seems that the cruelty of the place only escalated as time went on. There were pictures of soldiers throwing babies in the air and shooting them. I was thinking to myself about how awful rapes and murders are, crimes of passion, but I can’t imagine a worse part of humanity than this kind of systemized slaughter.

There is a section of the museum devoted to the current war crime trials and they spent a decent amount of time documenting the evidence for the genocide, as if we needed more evidence. The infuriating thing is that the Cambodian genocide was pretty much ignored by Western governments during the 70s and 80s because of the geopolitics of the region. The United States and the United Kingdom supported the Khmer Rouge while it was blatantly obvious what was happening. The Vietnamese were the ones who ousted Pol Pot from power by force and the US government was too bent on humiliating the Vietnamese to be on the right side of history. I heard that Bill Clinton was the last president to be shipping weapons to the Khmer Rouge as they fought their guerilla war against the government established by the Vietnamese. The ridiculous thing is that the president now was also a former Khmer Rouge who was opportunistic enough to flee at the right time and then work his way back into the government. Hun Sen has gutted the authority of the monarchy and rules with an authoritative fist. The war crime tribunals he oversees really have been a farce. The man who ran S-21 and oversaw thousands upon thousands of people tortured and killed was only sentenced recently to a mere 19 years in prison. It makes you wonder what you need to do in Cambodia to get life in prison. The truth is that the judicial system is very corrupt and the government now isn’t too enthusiastic about having these trials. Hun Sen I believe has said that only a few more people will be tried. So there really is no justice.

A friend of mine that has lived in Cambodia for a long time told me that he thinks the entire country is still going through a post-traumatic stress disorder. He said he reads every day about people committing violent and heinous crimes. People that probably just can’t cope with the past they’ve lived. History will always have its value in shaping human destiny but just as children still laugh and play games outside of S-21, perhaps Cambodians could benefit from a spell of amnesia as the sands of time erode the grief of the past.

S-21 was a sobering place to visit and I don’t know if I recommend other people to visit it. It’s tough but maybe it’s good sometimes to see the worst of humanity so you can appreciate the comparative placidity of today’s world.

Phnom Penh

I thought that it would be good idea to write a bit about my experience so far in Cambodia. I have been living in Phnom Penh near the river front area of the Mekong. I am attending a class to get certified as an English teacher at a nearby university. The class itself is interesting but boring at times. I like the people involved in the program and I think that I’ve made some long lasting friendships already. It is mainly Americans in my class and a few British people and a very nice lady from Columbia.

 My first impressions of Phnom Penh were good. I’ve explored the city and been to most of the places of interest but there are still a few more places I should go to.

 The only problem is that my class is from 9 to 5:30 so I do not have a lot of time for sightseeing aside from my hour and a half lunch break. Since I am leaving Phnom Penh this Friday I don’t think I will have much time to get more touristy excursions in. I usually wake up early, around dawn, and I jog up and down the river front area. 

It is quite beautiful and lively at that time of the morning because around dawn and dusk are the only time people around here exercise. It is much too hot to exercise during the day. I made that mistake in the Philippines and got some sort of heat stroke so I am trying not to make the same mistake again. Phnom Penh has some very wide boulevards and magnificent monuments which remind me of the French style of city planning. The Cambodians taste for baguettes and good coffee also reflects some French influence. Phnom Penh is nice also because it is littered with cafés and nicely maintained parks along the river side and throughout the city. This makes the city a bit more accessible for foreigners compared to Manila.

Cambodian food is interesting but I wouldn’t say I am really amazed by it. I have tried to eat at various different kinds of restaurants to get a feel for the cuisine. Some of the local food reminds a bit of the food in the Philippines but it is quite different. Pretty much all sandwiches here come in baguettes but like most Asian countries the meals revolve around rice or some kind of noodle. I have soups that remind me of Vietnamese style soups but mainly the combination of meat in some sort of sauce with some rice seems to be a staple. My boss was complaining that Cambodian food is quite bland which when it is compared with Vietnam or Thailand (the gastric powerhouse of the region) would be true but I don’t think it is a fair characterization. I have enjoyed pretty much all my meals but the only problem is that I still can’t point to anything really distinctive in Cambodian food that differentiates it from other Asian foods, like sushi for the Japanese or kimchi for the Koreans.

My main complaint about my trip so far is that I have not had the chance to communicate extensively with a local Cambodian. I have spent most of my time talking to Americans and my interactions with the locals have been limited. I really valued my time I spent with Filipinos while I was in the Philippines and I learned a lot about the local food and where or where not to go. I have been shooting in the dark as it were over here which can be cool in different ways but can be frustrating. That being said, I have only good things to say about the people here.

I have also had the privilege of travelling to Siem Reap to visit Angkor Wat. That trip was awesome and unforgettable. The temple grounds are massive and it would really take over a week to really explore the whole area. It is very tourist however which did put me off a bit but as they say, tourists have good taste.

The temples were built mainly in the twelfth century but the city was eventually abandoned because of frequent invasions from Siam. The name of the closeted city, Siem Reap, actually means “The Defeat of the Siamese” so I guess the Cambodians must have expelled the Thais at some point. The various temples and old capital buildings I saw were spectacular but I don’t want to bore anyone by writing a several page description of the place. 

On our way back from Angkor Wat we stopped at a more obscure temple that is also in ruins. It’s called Beng Mealea and that place was a trip. Unlike Angkor Wat there are no guards or park rangers and the whole temple is completely unrestored and open for whatever exploring you want to do. We climbed throughout the ruins and were quickly spotted by local kids who just sort of inserted themselves as your tour guides. They were good since they knew the safer routes to take and they showed us around to some super cool parts of the temple. The whole experience has surreal and extremely enjoyable.

I have only a short time left in Cambodia but I am going to a famous beach town in Cambodia this weekend with the whole crew of people that are going to Vietnam and that should be a good time but a long journey on Sunday to Saigon. I’m looking forward to it and I am also very excited to be going to Vietnam. My time in Cambodia does feel like a vacation at this point but I am not complaining.