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Rants, Rates, Slags, Slates. Manic-depressive posts from Red Wright-Hand. Because there are thousands of worthless blogs out there and who am I not to add to their number?
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Tuesday, March 01, 2005
DONG KHOI: In case I'd neglected to notice I was now in a Communist-run country, the view out the hotel room window served to remind me. But who cares when your first Vietnamese meal is waiting downstairs? The local coffee and I begin a lifelong love affair, followed by ricemeal, croissants, and delectable alien fruits. Time for a little daytime trekking. The traffic is stupefying: the main mode of transportation is the motorbike/scooter and the streets are an endless stream of them. Here is what a local turn signal sounds like: HONK! HONK! HONK! To cross through this, just like the guidebooks say, I have to take a deep breath and just sort of steadily keep walking through the stream at a regular pace, trusting to the drivers to slow and swerve around me. I think I'm getting the hang of it but will suffer an existential crisis before the end of day. Dr. Sinister and I walk to the War Remnants Museum, an exhibition comprised mostly of photographs detailing, with suitable captions, the horrors of the American War. A diorama shows a crude GI in action, a scene found on the cover of David Lamb's Vietnam, Now. While there, a fellow with no forearms, a dead eye and a bad leg approached me with a rack of books (mostly war history) slung around his neck. He was rather deft at holding the books out to me with the remaining stumps of his arms, while recounting, in decent English, how a bit of leftover war ordinance had left him as I saw him that day. Yes I bought one of his books. Speaking of this, there is an extraordinary trade in bootlegged/pirated English-language books in Ho Chi Minh City and, I was to find, in the rest of Vietnam and into Cambodia. The usual merchandise includes such classics as The Quiet American, Dispatches, A Bright Shining Lie and, depending on where exactly you are, histories of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. Right out in broad daylight! No Tim O'Brien however, that I noticed. Anyway, more sightseeing until I began to get the jetlag wobbles again, precipitating probably the worst moment of my trip: it seemed impossible to deal with the traffic, impossible just to cross the street. Drinking didn't help, and dinner at the Hoi An restaurant, likely the very best restaurant I visited during my entire trip, was wasted on me. Dr. Sinister stayed out late and lived up to his name; I lamely crashed back in the room. |
