Good Morning Vietnam

For some reason every port we visit is my favorite port and vietnam was no different. It is a beautiful country with a very unique culture.
One of my good friends on the ship, Chi Chi, is from Vietnam and she took me as well as 15 other kids to her house on the first day. Her mom made us so much food it was insane how much we ate. Fruit is a big deal and just about everywhere we went including Chi Chi's house they had us try all of the unique fruits of the area, such as dragon fruit, jackfruit, rose apples, durian, and a very interesting fruit called breast milk. Food was an adventure here they serve dog and rat as well as many snakes, unfortunately I did not find a place to eat dog or rat, and I really wanted to eat a cobra heart, but Chi Chi said I had to go down a dark ally to find that so I thought it best to leave that for my return visit. I did however try the snake wine, this is a beverage that consists of rice wine, or rice moonshine that ferments for three years in a jar that is full of dead snakes. It wasn't terrible, someone else described it as a whiskey flavor, but I don't think I will be drinking a snake-and-coke any time soon.
I had no idea but apparently getting a suit is just a thing you do in Vietnam so while we were at Chi Chi's house they had their personal tailor stop by and all the guys got suits made for us, I got a navy blue suite, it's pretty awesome.
Before I get to far into what my trip was like I should describe how one crosses the road here so that you can picture how exciting it was to even walk down the street to go shopping. How it works is that the cars never stop, and the majority of vehicles are motorcycles and scooters. What you do is simply start to walk across the road slowly and never changing speed. The motorcycles and cars part around you as you cross and you find yourself in the middle of a four lane road during rush hour as vehicles fly past you and you are terrified hoping that everyone gives you enough room, it is actually really fun once you get the hang of it, and it is nice because you never have to wait for a light to change, you just cross when you want and where you want, very different from Singapore where there was a 1000 dollar fine for j-walking.
On the first night we decided to go to Karaoke, but half the group got caught up at Chi Chi's house so me and three friends decided to go do our own thing. We ended up having a very interesting night. First we stopped by the wedding reception of two students who got "married" really they just wanted the cheap open bar that accompanied a wedding ceremony, it was not exactly our crowd so we left rather quickly and went in search of another place, little did we know that we would be leaving the next place even quicker.
We were walking down the road and saw "billiards" outside this little bar, so we thought we would go in and see what it was like, we all liked to play pool. Well, funny how it works, because it turns out that we walked into a brothel. Ya, all we wanted to do was play a game of pool and have a beer, but this institution was designed for much more than that. Being the naive people we are we didn't get the hint until several girls asked us if we wanted them to go back to the hotel with us, and we quickly caught on. None of us were interested in what they had to offer but as we stood there I asked them about their life and how they got involved in this job, did they like it, were they happy, that kind of thing, but apparently one of the girls started answering to honestly about her "boss" and another girl started yelling at me, so we quickly made our way exit and avoided the three "bosses" that were at the door. Just so you know, Vietnam is one of the largest countries for human trafficking in the world. The rest of the night was much smoother and we all made it safely back to the ship.
I went on a trip to the Mekong Delta, There we stayed in a local house on the water and visited the worlds largest floating market. It was amazing to see how similar life was to the backwaters of India and the small tributaries of the Amazon. One night we had dinner on a river boat, there were professional singers entertaining the whole boat which was filed with not only our group but several other Vietnamese groups celebrating an occasion, somehow I ended up on stage singing "as long as you love me" by the Backstreet Boys, it was a pretty big hit, the funny part was that there was a piano player who didn't know the song, and he was the only accompaniment, so it sounded nothing like the song and I could not even think of the words or tune because he was just playing whatever he wanted on the synthesizer, nothing like embarrassing yourself in foreign countries. We visited a brick manufacturing facility and I helped put the mud into the machine that shaped the bricks, it was a good time, very messy and hard work, I could not imagine doing that for 10 hours straight.
We did a lot of shopping, Vietnam is a big place in the knock-off industry. You can buy anything you want there. One of my favorite stories happened on the last day. I had been looking for dress shoes for two days since I didn't have any to wear with my new suit. Shoes here are very European and come to a very odd point, shoes should be shaped like a foot in my opinion. I finally found the perfect shoe, I tried on a size 42 but needed a 43 (european sizes). As the woman was talking to us trying to distract us you could see in the back another worker stretching out the 42's with a piece of wood, really working the shoe to make it bigger, and then they brought out the same pair of shoes with a sticker over the original size that said 43. We all started laughing and even the workers laughed when they knew that we had caught onto their game. I almost bought them because of their ingenuity, but 40 dollars for a knock-off shoe that didn't fit was just to much.
The trip was not all fun however. One thing that caught me off guard was how prevalent the Vietnam, or as they call it the American war still was. Kids are still being born with birth defects from the agent orange and other chemicals we dropped over the land. Whole areas of farms are still toxic and the effects of the war can still be seen everywhere you look. Just a few years ago someone was killed by a land mine that was left over.
I visited the war remnants museum on the last day. I have never had a physical response to movies or sights, but I felt like I was going to throw up the entire time I was in this place. It was honestly sickening to see the images, the preserved fetuses and the rubble from the war. We dropped millions of gallons of toxic chemicals, the effects of which are still felt today. Seeing what happened from the other perspective was very emotional. Seeing language like American Imperialists, and other choice words used to describe the USA made me step back and think about everything in a new light. One thing I found interesting was that throughout the entire museum they made it very clear that it was not the American people, but the American government that was to blame, on ever wall was another example of how Americans protested the war and disliked the war. Generally we don't think of the government and the people as two separate entities, we are a government of the people, by the people and for the people, we are the government, at least that is how I generally see things, but from their perspective of their own relations between government and peoples, they could easily draw that distinction.
I learned a lot in this port and I will always remember what visiting here made me feel. One of the big things I have been trying to do is to make it count, in everything I do I want to make it count. Each experience and every moment can teach you something and make you realize something, it is very easy to let things flow over you and not think twice about them, but I have made it a point in my trip and now in my life to have all of my experiences flow through me not over me, and by doing that and by being present in the moment and paying attention to what every minute can teach me I am trying to make it count.
So I will write again after China and after I see Katie! ( I am so excited she has a lot of stuff planned), take care, and make it count.