The following two posts were written in February 2010 in Vietnam

Avoid Puddles if it hasn’t been raining
I am sitting in Highland’s coffee waiting for my latte. It has been a long week, but interesting I must say. I have met so many nice, interesting, odd, friendly, smelly, cute, amazing people during the past 7 days. I cannot keep track of their names, where I met them and who they are friends with, but I know that many of them have contributed to the impression I have gotten so far of the city that will be my home for the next 6 months. When coming here, I didn’t know what to expect. I knew it would be crowded, dusty, busy and sometimes smelly. I knew that I would most likely LOVE the food and the mentality. What I didn’t know was that I would be thrown into situations where I would face my western roots and admit that there ARE things you cannot and will never understand.

In the following blog entry I will draw out some interesting stories, experiences that I have found strange or different and episodes that have made me wonder. The way that I will be describing these situations is not meant to insult anybody or hurt someone’s feelings, it is meant as my subjective point of view coming from a part of the world that functions particularly differently in many aspects of life.

One of my favourite subjects is marriage. I don’t know if it interests me so much because I am not particularly interested in getting married myself or whether I just keep running into situations where I need to ask questions and end up interrogating poor girls and boys about their love lives. However, every time I do so, I pick up new interesting stories and traditions, so watch out, out there, you may be next.. 🙂 I picked up the Vietnamese part of the marriage tale on my second day in HCMC (short for Ho Chi Minh City) when I spend my Sunday with three lovely girls. To make it easier for you to imagine, Vietnamese girls are generally very giggly, they love little miss kitty things, flowers and baby-pink and often look half their age. I know I am generalising at the moment, but if you came here, you would know what I mean. There are, of course, girls who do not fit this description, but the majority would definitely be able to see themselves in the picture. So, the girls I was hanging out with are around 27 years old (of course looked 20), non of them are married or in relationships. I tried to ask in a polite way if they were seeing anyone, but even though Vietnamese people are very direct when asking about weight, income and any other issue that I may find private, the girls started giggling and were very shy when trying to answer my question. Vietnam does not have the sort of dating culture as we have, daaaaah, which didn’t surprise me at all, so neither of the girls have ever had a boyfriend and as they are close to turning 30 this whole machine of boy-hunting has started for them. They said that they really want to find a boyfriend, but I am not sure that I believed them deep deep inside. They said that it would be very complicated and difficult if they were not married before 30, as society is build around a certain custom saying that men cannot marry a woman if she is older than 30 or even worse, marry a woman who is older than himself.

This leads to a fantastic story about a romance which started in the SCC office about two years ago. An American woman (about 32 years old) was volunteering in SCC. She worked very closely with a Vietnamese man (about 27 at the time) and during their work, they fell in love. In many cases, this love would have been a true heart ache, but these two people took up the fight with family and society and are now married and live together in HCMC. Miracles DO happen.

As you may have guessed, marriage is not the only thing that is different in this country. An interesting story that I was told during lunch today literally almost made me choke. A lot of families live in very small houses where the whole family sleeps on the floor, close together without covers or blankets. If any children are reading, please close their eyes as this inner picture may be very frustrating. The story goes like this. My friend and colleague from SCC knows a surgeon who during his education went on an internship in HCMC. Every week there would be a man visiting the clinic with a broken penis. Yes, I was thinking the same, broken? How? Why? Where? WOW… Every week. This is literally a general problem. How? Shit! So, the thing is, men are bound to wake up once in a while with a hard penis, boys, you may recognise this. This is not very convenient when lying on a floor among children, elderly and women, so these men are trying to hide their penis and somehow make the erection go away. This violence against the little man apparently breaks him. SCARY as hell!

While sitting at Highland’s coffee I looked out of the window and spotted a safe sex clinic/shop on the other side of the street. I was very glad to see that this type of shop actually exists, but when I looked over there again, three small children ran out of the clinic. He he.. Just one of the small incidents that make me wonder sometimes.. 🙂

The last observation I will be dealing with in this blog is probably the most difficult one while also, for me, one of the most disturbing. The observation is about how knowledge about germs, bacteria and the spread of these have made cleaning standards and even law in Denmark so much higher and harsher than they are in Vietnam. When walking the streets in HCMC it is almost impossible to miss the very characteristic smell of pee. I don’t know if this is due to a high number of people living in the streets (who I haven’t seen many of yet, actually) or whether it is because people just don’t know how fast germs spread, particularly in hot whether, but either way, this smell is only evident in a very few places in Copenhagen. The difference is very evident when it comes to food. There are obviously nothing close to the ‘smiley’ system that we have in Denmark. Nobody checks up on restaurants and there are no rules as to how long the food is kept and hoe many degrees it needs to be stored at. This means that many of the stalls on the streets sell food at lunchtime or for dinner that in some cases have been prepared in the morning. This food has been standing there in the heat all day attracting germs and pollution from the traffic. No wonder people get sick from eating that!

My friend told me another very interesting story about her first year in HCMC. Because she worked a lot, she hired a maid to do the cleaning and laundry and those things. This is very common, but also, in this case, quite a chance to take.. She had a feeling that this maid was not doing a very good job and that she had very little understanding about germs and the things mentioned above, but the only thing she could put her finger on was that the maid picked her nose. She figured it wasn’t a good enough reason to fire her, so she kept an eye on her for a while. This truly made it a lot easier, as she caught her one day washing the bathroom floor with the toilet brush. I don’t know what I would have done in that situation, because the poor girl must have had absolutely no clue at all about bacteria and all those things, but she was fired awfully quickly… I will let you all think about this while I will try to forget and pretend that I haven’t heard these stories. Otherwise, I think my life in HCMC will be slightly more difficult and expensive than it already is. 🙂
Why does everything have to be sooooooooooooooo cumbersome?
Getting a motortaxi, subscribing to the gym, buying a mattress, renting a house, everything is one big never ending negotiation. It is a matter of who stays firm and who doesn’t. Things don’t really have a price. They have the price the seller can get from the customer, nothing less. This means that getting home from a nice dinner can take a long time, especially when you are not a stupid and ignorant tourist who doesn’t know the real price. As I have started knowing the price, it has become quite difficult for me to make anyone take me home, because they know that another foreigner will come by any minute and they can charge even more. Sometimes, though, the buyer is on top. In the gym, Chinh and I managed to get 2x 3 months membership for 100 dollars, whereas the actual membership price is three times higher. It took us a few hours and a long process of being told five million times that we were too fat around our hips and needed exercise (hrmf) to make the deal, but we managed – and went for pizza afterwards.. haha.. 🙂

My biggest concern at the moment is our negotiations with landlords, real estate agents and house owners. We never know if they are trying to screw us or if they are in fact giving us a good deal. We just have to hope for the best and check the contract one hundred times before signing.. Sigh! However, even though we now know how to bargain and how to stay firm and all these things, everything is still so annoying. You can barely buy a shampoo without having to bargain. You have to walk away and come back in order to make them give a more reasonable price. This is why I found a supermarket. A real supermarket, where prices are fixed and printed on the groceries. It may be a little bit more expensive, but whatever I can do to get out of bargaining hell, I will indeed do it!!