Having passed the one month mark in Saigon, I felt it was time to reflect upon the lessons that I’ve learned since arriving.

#1 – Look Both Ways Before Crossing the Street

I have never seen traffic like this before.  It comes from all directions and very often appears on the sidewalks as well.  You are not safe anywhere.  There is also a lack of street lights which means that when you want to cross the road, it’s an “every man for himself”, jaywalking situation.  They do have a system here, though.  You start to slowly walk into the road and the vehicles go around you.  You take steady steps forward and the drivers swerve around you.  It’s terrifying at first, but you do get used to it.  My biggest near-misses have come when I’ve crossed a one-way street and thought myself safe after checking the direction the traffic SHOULD be coming from only to find a motorbike flying down the street the wrong way. It’s truly crazy and cannot be explained – you really have to experience it (and do your best to stay on your feet).

#2 – Use Your Horn Liberally

Drivers at home use the horn in a “fuck you, ya cut me off” kind of way. Drivers here use it as an essential communication tool for letting other motorists know where they are – if they’re passing on the outside or inside, coming up behind you, etc. People can be pretty unpredictable on the roads and there is an absence of turn signals so at any moment someone can swerve and take up that tiny space beside you. I learned this quickly and now ride my motorbike around town with my thumb permanently on the horn.

#3 – Don’t Tempt Fate

If memory serves me right, I recall that I was the one was said “I can’t believe no one has gotten sick yet!”  Famous last words. Everyone knows you can’t say stuff like that and get away with it. Lo and behold, not long after I was taken down pretty hard by a stomach bug (I will spare you the details). I was also the one who said “I can’t believe, with all this traffic, that we haven’t seen an accident yet!” Not one hour later we pass by an accident scene that consists of a dump truck, a motorcycle on its side behind it, two pairs of flipflops and a helmet on the ground, and a pool of blood that starts at the back tire of the truck and spreads behind for a metre or so. Maybe I’ll keep my mouth shut next time.

#4 –  Always Be Spontaneous

Some of the coolest things we’ve done or seen so far have come to us last minute, sometimes in a text or message that doesn’t contain much information, but simply says that we’ll have a good time if we go. My personal philosophy is to say yes to absolutely everything that comes my way. Doing this means I’ve shown up to things not knowing a single other person and at some points flirted with exhaustion for consistently going out at night and then teaching early classes the next morning. But it’s worth it and hell – there’s too much fun to be had to worry about money or sleep.

(French version of this post further below)

It’s my first time traveling to Asia. Despite the stories I had heard about Viet Nam from friends and family, I felt very unprepared. So, call me an over planning-girl if you’d like, I simply couldn’t leave without a guidebook. My bible is called ”Le Guide du Routard,” and it’s an excellent one for people who travel on a low-budget, just like us.

Being healthy

Before I left, my first concern was to ensure-as much as possible- that I’d be healthy during my entire experience in Viet Nam. After several talks with my sister who studies medicine, and with a very good friend who seemingly knows it all about tropical medicine, I paid a visit to my doctor to get vaccined against typhoid fever and rabies. Luckily, I was almost immune to rabbies already. Had it not been so, I would have needed two more shots- which are expensive. (Besides, I was already immune to Hepatitis A and Meningitis.)

I know it is unlikely that I come across a rabid dog or get the malaria in Ho Chi Minh City. But since I’m hoping to travel to the countryside, I decided to protect myself from rabies and to bring a box of malaria treatment, as a precautionary measure.

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Our Health CONdition levels are measurements of our overall bodily health security, a function of what we eat, drink, and do during our time in Tokyo.  HCON is an assessment of our health risk.  Simply put, we’re already at war.  Weeks of rice, eggs, rice, instant coffee, eggs, bread, instant coffee, etc. have sunk our nutrition levels so low.  Both Rob and I have googled “scurvy”…

I’ll have some posts coming up which explain in more detail what our diet situation is and what we’ve been eating, but here I’d like to show you what we haven’t been eating – and why.

Seriously, why is it so hard to buy healthy things?

100 Y is about $1.10, so 1 normal pear costs about $2.20.  To get vitamin C from fresh fruit, we would pay almost  75 cents per Mandarin orange.  At these prices, I would eat the pear stem and savor the orange rind, perhaps even chewing on the seeds until they either went safely into my stomach or became a choking hazard.  All fruit is similarly priced, so needless to say, fruit is not a part of our diet.

Vegetables are definitely cheaper, but only ones that are a staple part of the Japanese diet, usually meaning they are not part of the American vegetable diet.  We’re not really sure what to do with most of these cheap vegetables other than rip them to shreds and eat them (and actually I’m the only one that will do that).  Online recipes work well in some situations, but they’re not very helpful for cooking with ingredients you didn’t even know existed.

So the occasional leaves of Chinese cabbage are one of our main sources of nutrition in Tokyo, and most of the time we get by wistfully wandering around the produce section and wishing that a banana bunch didn’t cost over twice what a corndog does…