I finally made it back to Vietnam. My last week in the States has been a bit of scramble to try to get everything in order for this next year. My visa (which is, unfortunately, only a tourist visa for the time being) arrived less than 12 hours before I began my trip. To make matters worse, USPS Express has a ridiculously shitty tracking system and I wasn’t able to find any record that my passport was actually in transit until 3 hours before I got it. As my ever-patient-sister, Christina, can attest to, that last day while I was trying to track down my passport was probably not the best time to be around me.
So I began my trip, from Madison Wisconsin to Ho Chi Minh city, my nerves frazzled, at 2:00 am Friday night and arrived in Ho Chi Minh city at 10:00 am (US time) Sunday morning. My first flight was direct from Chicago to Hong Kong was direct and we actually flew around the north pole. I managed to score a seat without anyone riding next to me and was able to have both a window and an aisle seat to myself. Looking out the window I was amazed to find that the Arctic ocean is just how I imagined it—a sea adrift with chunks of floating ice. I don't know why this amazed me. . .I mean, how else is it going to look. It's a frozen ocean for christsake From the plane it looked like an enormous sheet of shattered, white glass. I imagine lots of cute penguins ands seals flopping around on the ice and floating to Canada. Now when my students ask me if I saw snow on my trip to America this summer (which they will, stupidly) I can say yes, I did, from 8 miles up.
Initially, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel to be returning to Vietnam. After spending 6 weeks in America, I was just starting to settle into life in America, and now suddenly I’m back it Vietnam. I don’t know if my trip was too short or too long. There were definitely times in which I questioned my resolve to do another year over here. Intellectual decisiveness is always much more forthcoming in my case than emotional decisiveness . . . and emotionally, I was all over the map. Did I really like Vietnam as much as I remembered? Was I embellishing the past? I didn’t realize how much I missed this place until I got off the plane and recognized the functional chaos that I’ve come to love so much about this country. The smells, the constant noise and the stream of lights along the road, the crowds of people, the rivers of taxis and motorbikes, and the people. Vietnamese people are loud and boisterous. They laugh and they yell and they honk their horns for no apparent reason. I immediately felt at home again in this strangely familiar, foreign land.
I’m sure some of the romance will wear off after I’ve been here a while, but for now, it’s good to be back.
So I began my trip, from Madison Wisconsin to Ho Chi Minh city, my nerves frazzled, at 2:00 am Friday night and arrived in Ho Chi Minh city at 10:00 am (US time) Sunday morning. My first flight was direct from Chicago to Hong Kong was direct and we actually flew around the north pole. I managed to score a seat without anyone riding next to me and was able to have both a window and an aisle seat to myself. Looking out the window I was amazed to find that the Arctic ocean is just how I imagined it—a sea adrift with chunks of floating ice. I don't know why this amazed me. . .I mean, how else is it going to look. It's a frozen ocean for christsake From the plane it looked like an enormous sheet of shattered, white glass. I imagine lots of cute penguins ands seals flopping around on the ice and floating to Canada. Now when my students ask me if I saw snow on my trip to America this summer (which they will, stupidly) I can say yes, I did, from 8 miles up.
Initially, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel to be returning to Vietnam. After spending 6 weeks in America, I was just starting to settle into life in America, and now suddenly I’m back it Vietnam. I don’t know if my trip was too short or too long. There were definitely times in which I questioned my resolve to do another year over here. Intellectual decisiveness is always much more forthcoming in my case than emotional decisiveness . . . and emotionally, I was all over the map. Did I really like Vietnam as much as I remembered? Was I embellishing the past? I didn’t realize how much I missed this place until I got off the plane and recognized the functional chaos that I’ve come to love so much about this country. The smells, the constant noise and the stream of lights along the road, the crowds of people, the rivers of taxis and motorbikes, and the people. Vietnamese people are loud and boisterous. They laugh and they yell and they honk their horns for no apparent reason. I immediately felt at home again in this strangely familiar, foreign land.
I’m sure some of the romance will wear off after I’ve been here a while, but for now, it’s good to be back.
posted by D. White at 5:25 PM
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