Tuesday

Writing yesterday's update reminded me that traffic is a perfect subject for one of these "miss about Vietnam" entries. The odd thing is, I don’t know which kind of entry to include it in. I feel pretty ambivalent about it. So I'm going to do both: what I will and also won't miss about Vietnam (volume five and five): traffic. Before coming here, we were warned. Maybe warned isn't hysterical enough. Everyone had plenty to say, usually in a wide-eyed and high-pitched aside. We usually laugh this sort of thing off, but arriving here we discovered the situation really is terrifying. It took months to get comfortable navigating around town by foot. The sidewalks are as dangerous as the streets. Nearly everyone has a Saigon Birthmark: an oval of waxy second-degree scar about muffler-high on the calf. Everybody knows someone with ten stitches in their brain or gravel embedded in their face. But that's Vietnam: its spaces constantly, maddeningly, numbingly, chaotically cram-packed, jacked-full, overwhelmed with endless, odorous, hot, heavy traffic. Twenty-four. Seven. Nineteen months later we still talk about it all the time. Everybody does. But this subject, fact of life, force of nature eventually does become understandable. Scooters are just metal pedestrians to me now. I feel as safe walking with them as I do with any crowd. I never look for traffic lights to cross the street anymore. I hardly look for traffic. (It's easier to cross between intersections because the scooters cross at crosswalks.) Once we've left Vietnam, I'm going to miss the adrenaline rush of walking around town, the relative safety of slow-moving traffic which might leave my leg burned. But I'll also enjoy coming home to pedestrian right-of-way and regulated crosswalks. And scaring the hell out of people who are coming to Vietnam. [Cavin]