Tim: Well, here we are in Melbourne's departure lounge waiting for our boarding call. A bit of stress earlier when we arrived - there was a queue to check-in almost back to Keilor. Word was that Vietnam Airlines had overbooked the flight! There were a million people here! How could one slender tube of aluminum take all these people and bags?! Still no-one behind us! We won't get on! I was panicing a bit I will admit, afraid that we would miss our flight. But it seemed there was another option; we could shamelessly queue-jump. Plenty of others were doing it; we could just brazen it out and be sure of getting our flight. We seriously considered it, and one of us went to check it out, but by this stage officials had clamped down on the practice. Slowly the line moved; people joined behind us, and eventually, once we saw there were 20 people behind us, we knew we would get on. And so we did.
The flight seemed long, and immigration at Ho Chi Minh City was very slow. Whilst waiting, I wondered about the people in the qeues with us. There were only a handful of westerners with most of the rest seemingly of Vietnamese extraction, although many were Australiancitizens. There would be some returning from their first time overseas, exchanging their holiday ideas for workaday thoughts. There would be others here returning for the first time since fleeing as refugees, others coming for the first time to the land of their forefathers. How would they be feeling about being here? Lots of time here in our glacial queue, whilst those in other queues sped past.
We checked in to our airline-provided hotel - for our 3 hour stay - and flicked through the TV channels. MTV. Soap operas, dubbed from one Asian language to another (with all the parts spoken by one bored man). Cricket (but South Africa vs. India). Nothing here for us so we had dinner in the hotel and hit the streets. It was 8:30 at night but still a high level of industry everywhere, rivers of motor scooters flowing past the front door of the hotel.
Polly had a headache and wanted some paracetamol, so we went out to find a chemist. The shop itself was tiny but Polly had no difficulty in making herself understood, but the pharmasist brought out a huge bottle of pills. Afraid we were being oversold to, we protested but the pharmasist just smiled and asked us how many we wanted; she them shook two out on to a tray and popped them into a tiny plastic bag.
We walked on, feeling very different from the locals and out of our environment. It dawned on us that all of the people sitting on the footpath, the men repairing scooters in a tiny shopfront, the children playing on the road and the road-side food vendors and their customers would all know one another; we were seemingly surrounded by a deeply connected community. Shortly after, our bus for the airport arrived.
Polly: I really want to go back and spend some serious time here someday. As a girl from Springvale I felt a teensy insight into the thriving Vietnamese community at home. I remember everyone bitching about them being bad drivers - having seen the traffic they're used to at home I now realise that they are in fact AMAZING drivers. Anyone who can negotiate through that amount of traffic with no apparent road rules deserves a medal, not our narrow minded disapproval.
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