Hàng Ngày

I have arrived back in the Big Apple, and it feels like home. After a short visit to B’more to see my grandmother, who seems the same as always, even after not seeing her for a year and a half, I took the train up to NYC on Sunday morning. I’m staying on the West Side of Manhattan, which seems fitting, since that’s where I lived for four years in school. I actually was a bit nervous on the train ride into the city: what if I can’t cut it in New York anymore? What if I’m not “trendy” enough for people there? (well, that’s always been the case) What if it’s lonely? What if I can’t get in touch with people? As soon as I got on the 1 train up to the West Side, I felt like I was going to run into someone I knew, but not a good friend, just one of those awkward “Hi, how are you? What have you been up to for the past 14 months?” type of acquaintance. I was actually a little thankful that I didn’t see anyone until later in the afternoon.

I’m staying with my friend in her classic but somewhat rundown Upper West Side apartment with a great story behind it. Seeing Darcy again, in some ways it felt like I’d never left at all, or maybe just for a weekend. The dynamics of our friendship were not changed much at all, which was very comforting. However, about 3 hours after my arrival, Darcy left to go on a short vacation (3 days only) and I was left alone in this large apartment with this Japanese exchange student (who knows I’m an English teacher, ahh!) and a lot of time to kill.

One of my adventures yesterday, I just walked up and down Broadway again to re-orient myself to the surroundings. I decided I needed to buy a watch, because all New Yorkers have to be in a hurry. I stopped on the sidewalk at a sign that said “Designer Watches, $5.” I saw on the table the exact same “designer watch” that I’d bought about 4 years ago, and had served me well until the rainy season of Vietnam did it in.

I struck up a short conversation with the man selling the watches and he asked where I was living. I told him Vietnam, that I was just in town for a visit. Turns out, he was in Vietnam too…30 years ago. I stopped to talk to him for about 30 minutes, at some points he was near tears when talking about his experiences in Vietnam, what he had to do, his subsequent drug addiction and illness, and how the government refuses to compensate him for anything that happened during the war. He asked how people in Vietnam feel about the war, and I had to tell him that I really don’t think about the war much at all there. Most people are, well, not necessarily “over it,” but they don’t talk about it and obsess about it the way Americans do.  Another thing he told me, when I was just listening to him tell his story about the war, was that I was a lot like his therapist: I listened and smiled and didn’t really give any ideas, just acknowledged his story and gave it value. That meant a lot to me, and left me thinking all evening yesterday and all morning today about what it is I am good at, what I should be pursuing in the future in terms of careers, what type of satisfaction I would look for in a future job. This trip has been a lot of thinking for me about my future both this year, and especially after I leave Vietnam in April, 2008. I guess it was necessary to get out of my current situation for a little while in order to see a bigger perspective on what I’m doing there and what I will be doing in the future.

I have been in the US for just one week now and already I am starting to notice the many differences (and similarities) between life here and life in Vietnam. Some of my first reactions to the US:

1. People are big. Not just fat, because there are plenty of people who aren’t fat. But poeple are just bigger than in the US.

2. People aren’t as outgoing with strangers. Even in the airports in Singapore and Frankfurt, I had this strange desire to talk to random people and have random people talk to me. But beyond teh friendly “hello” there was no further communication with me and definitely no questions about my age, job, marital status, or income.

3. Things are expensive! I’m trying not to convert from Dong to Dollars and vice-versa. It would only make me sad. But, I can’t help but notice that a piece of fruit at the Chicago airport (now this is the airport, mind you) was $1.00!! That would buy three kilos of more delicious exotic fruit in Vietnam. I’ll have to get used to it for a few weeks or risk starvation…

Yesterday we went as a group to Lang Co Beach, about 67 kilometers from Hue on the road to Da Nang. The driver took us to a fairly dumpy but friendly guesthouse on the main road where one of the daugthers showed us how to get to the beach using the back roads and shortcuts. After two trips yesterday I decided to try it myself this morning for my 5:15 am exercise. As I was walking the path that cut through people’s backyards I heard English news. This was a surprise, and more so becaues the anchor was talking about a “horrible tragedy.” I stopped to listen in front of someone’s house and an uncle-aged man came out and said “hello!” I said hello back and said I had heard the English news, and he invited me in. I sat down on his plastic chair and watched the tragic replays of the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. It was reminiscent of watching the news about Hurricane Katrina for two reasons. The first is quite obvious: when the hurricane occurred, I was also in Vietnam, and I watched it on CNN at my host family’s house while I had dinner with them. The second similarity was my thoughts at that the time, listening to these morons saying “well, we knew that this was probably inevitable, but no one did anything to prevent it.” When are we going to stop being “horrified” at such tragic events and start doing something preventative about it?