On the Naming of Cities

Saigon. Ho Chi Minh City. Saigon. Without intending to, I kept reverting to the pre-1975 name for Vietnam's largest city. By the end of the week, I figured to heck with it, gave in, and just called it Saigon.

In the last few years renaming cities has become quite the trend -particularly in Asia. India has been changing the names of it’s cities faster than my teenage daughter cycles through outfits on a Sunday morning before church. Bombay is now Mumbai. Calcutta is now Kolkata. Madras is Chennai.

On one hand, I get that people and people groups should be able to control the terms by which they are referred. If they want to be servers instead of waiters, it seems a little silly to me, but I can roll with that. Flight attendants, not stewardess. Got it.

But on the other hand, historically we haven’t insisted that people refer to places using the local language. No English speaker refers to it as Deutschland. It’s Germany. No one in English spells and pronounces it Nippon. It’s Japan. Poland, not Polska -at least in English. And everybody seems to be okay with that.

So please forgive me while I continue to refer to your country as Ivory Coast, not Côte d'Ivoire. I mean you no slight, it’s just that I don’t speak French and when I try to affect a French accent I sound more ridiculous than Steve Martin playing Inspector Clouseau in the Pink Panther remakes.

Nobody seems to get their undies in a bunch when Croatians refer to it as Sjedinjene Američke Države. Or Italians call it Stati Uniti d'America. Or the Chinese Meilijian Hezhongguo.

I am sure that Beijing is closer to the way it’s pronounced in Mandarin, but I don’t speak Mandarin. So would it be outrageous if I called it by the name by which it was known to English speakers for almost two centuries: Peking?

But changing Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City Minh was not simply an attempt to change the way outsiders spell and pronounce the name of their city. That change was overtly political. More on par with changing St. Petersburg to Leningrad for ideological reasons. And we see how well that change stuck. After several decades as an attempted tribute to one of the twentieth centuries more ruthless ideologues, the people of Russia decided that they preferred the much more traditional, longstanding name. So back to St. Petersburg it is.

So when I refer to it as Saigon, don’t think of me as several years behind the curve; think of me as several decades ahead of schedule.

Besides that wildly successful musical of a few years ago just wouldn’t have the same ring to it if it was known as Miss Ho Chi Minh City.

Crossing the Street in Saigon

You're better off just not looking.

Seriously.

In Saigon, there are 99 motorbikes/ scooters for every car. Most intersections do not have traffic lights. It’s every man, women, and child for him or herself. But somehow it works. Because the immense amount of traffic is made up of the relatively more nimble motorcycles, traffic has a much more organic, shape-shifting feel to it.

If you stand on the corner and wait for an opening in traffic, you might be there for a long time. Instead, you should just go ahead and step off the curb in faith and steadily start walking to the other side of the street. Trust me, the motorcycles would really rather not hit you. It puts a real crimp in their day. They will adjust to accommodate you. As long as your actions are predictable. Once you start crossing, don’t stop. And absolutely under no circumstances should you back up. As long as you keep walking at a steady pace, you’ll be fine.

Keep your eyes on the far curb; it’s better if you don’t look at the motorcycles coming at you. If you’re looking at the drivers then they’re trying to guess what you’re thinking. They’re the experts here.

It’s scary having dozens and dozens of motorbikes rushing at you and whizzing past you, but they will avoid you.

You’ll be fine. Just take a deep breath and go.

Saying a little prayer before you step off the curb isn’t a bad idea either.

Jack

Note: surprisingly, this whole system actually works pretty well. But that’s not to say there aren’t accidents like this one. Happily, moments after I managed to snap this picture, both riders got up and rode off.

Get on the Bus

I must confess, I've been harboring a bad attitude.

When it comes to travel, I have had a bug in my bonnet about those group tours where a guide takes you and forty other tourists around on a coach bus to see all the sights of Rome or Dusseldorf at a breakneck speed. The guide invariably wears a windbraker with the company logo on it, waves a pennant on a stick, and carries a megaphone.

No thank you. Not for me. I'd rather be seen on the subway during rush hour with no pants on.

Like I said, I have been harboring a bad attitude.

But then I went to Vietnam for ten days.

Before school let out, I talked to several of my colleagues. They each gave me several great suggestions, but they all agreed on two things: sign up for a two-day trek into the mountains near Sapa and do an overnight trip on a tour boat in Halong Bay.

This was supposed to be a twentieth anniversary trip for my wife and me, but with Julie back in The States tending to family business, that wasn't happening. With less than a three weeks notice, my kid brother Nate stepped up to the plate. There was going to be a whole lot less cuddling, but a whole lot more backpacking.

Nate and I decided to do Vietnam on the cheap. We stayed in various backpacker hotels which cost us anywhere from six to ten dollars per person per night. It was at one of these backbacker hotels that we signed up for both of our side tours.

There were no retirees with their overpriced cameras, but there was a shuttle bus and a guide. No megaphone, thank Heaven.

As I climbed onto the bus and surveyed our fellow passengers, I thought to myself "What losers. Don't they have any better way to explore Vietnam than to take a cookie-cuttie tour?"

But I could not have been more wrong.

At the end of our ten-day trip, Nate and I agreed that these two tours were the highlight of our trip. First, we got to experience some amazing landscapes and encounter some indigenous cultures that we never would have been able to experience on our own.

Second, our fellow travelers -rather than being the stodgy, risk-adverse people that I had imagined them to be- were all very cool. The were mostly backpackers and disproportionately young people in their twenties. We met three American women who just finished their undergrad, a couple from Estonia, and a family of four from Denmark. Getting to know them was a highlight of the trip. Even though each of these side trips lasted less than 48 hours, when it came time to part ways I felt like a kid at the end of summer camp saying goodbye to his newest bestest friends.

I've had to swallow my pride and take back every bad word I have ever uttered about group tours. I am afraid that this means that one day in the not-so-distant future, I will be mounting an airconditioned coach bus with a bunch of the other retirees from the assisted living compound and heading to Branson Missouri to see Engelbert Humperdinck live in concert.

But when I do, I'll be packing my denture cream, Metamucil, and Reader's Digest in a backpack. Preferable an old beat up one with some dirt on it.

On the plane ride back to Hong Kong, Nate and I figured out that we'd met and had extended conversations with people from over 14 different countries: Ireland, China, Brazil, Spain, France, Mexico. Everyone of them seemed to have a fascinating back story.

Below are four of those stories.

-Jack

Note: if while backpacking through Southeastern Asia, you bumped into any young couples from Europe, just go ahead and assume they are not married. They probably aren't. (Does anybody in Europe get married anymore?)

Its a Nice Place to Visit, but . . .

Nate and I met this man and his family in Hanoi when he asked me to snap a picture of him and his family. Nate and I only chatted with them for a few minutes, but we were absolutely transfixed by their life story.
At the age of nineteen, he fled Vietnam. It was the late 1970s and the Vietnam War was over; but under the new regime, things in Vietnam were going from bad to worse. Vietnamese people were fleeing in droves. This man escaped to Thailand where he met his future wife in a refugee camp.

Eventually, they married and immigrated to The States where they still live today. They put each other through school. He earned two master's degrees and holds a managerial position with Intel. She became a dentist and has her own practice. They have two children. It was over a decade before either one of them managed to return to Vietnam for a visit. They have since made several trips back.

I asked them if -now that things were improving in Vietnam- they ever thought about moving back to Vietnam?

They sheepishy smiled and then shook their heads.

No, they enjoy bringing their kids back to visit, but would never move back.

-Jack