More travel adventures

As promised here is a second installment on my commute, with some other observations mixed in.

While my trip going to work might appear to be somewhat stressful, it is really quite nice compared to the trip home. Like most other cities I’ve commuted in, it always seems more crowded and miserable riding public transportation at the end of the day. I think this is due to a combination of two factors. One, that people tend to stagger the times they leave in the morning more than the evening, and two, because you are exhausted and much less willing to be tolerant of an obnoxious commute at 5 pm.

If you remember, I take the number 9 bus to reach the street I work on. In the morning, going into the city, the 9 drops me off right in front of my building, at 102 Thai Thinh street. For whatever reason, even though the 9 takes the exact same route back, there is no bus stop on the opposite side of the street from where I get dropped off in the morning. Instead there is only a bus stop at the very end of Thai Thinh, which is around a kilometer (.62 of a mile for all you non-metric people) walk for me. The first day I took the 9 home I thought nothing of this arrangement, since I don’t mind walking. I couldn’t find the bus stop at first, showed the number 9 bus ticket to an old lady selling a completely unidentifiable fruit, and she grabbed my hand and walked me all the way to the stop. Her old lady friend then smacked my arm and pointed to a plastic seat for me to sit in while I waited for the bus.

However, the following day while I was walking to catch the 9, the bus drove right by me as I was walking down Thai Thinh street. From there it was a race, since the bus would not stop for another kilometer. I was running as quickly as I could to keep up with it, but Thai Thinh street is not the place for an Olympic sprint. Obstacles include parked cars and motorbikes, stray hens, piles of debris, trash, street food stalls, human beings, in addition of course to moving cars and motorbikes. I failed miserably, and the next bus didn’t come for an hour.

Another day that week I managed to catch the 9 without too much trouble, but as I got off the bus and was waiting for the 201 bus to arrive, the unthinkable happened – my contact lens came out. This is one of the world’s worst places to have this occur. 1)There is dust everywhere and it is very windy, 2) There is undoubtedly lots of foreign bacteria all over your hands, 3)You will be stared at the entire time you try to put your contact back in, resulting in seriously poor performance, 4) If you fail, you will not be able to see the bus number on the bus and be stuck at your bus stop for all of eternity.

Luckily, I am quite used to all my friends staring at me while I force my contact lens back into my eye, so after a few minutes I recovered. I grabbed the 201 a few minutes later. Taking the 201 back is much worse than on the way in. The bus makes an extra stop at a bus depot to make sure it is PACKED before continuing its route. Everyone knows what its like to be on a packed bus or subway car in the states. This experience is much different on a bus in Vietnam. This is mostly due to the nature of the people riding the bus. In Vietnam, as I have alluded to before, you are allotted little to no personal space. There is also no concept of line forming, of politely apologizing for accidently knocking into someone, or of avoiding hitting or pushing someone out of common courtesy. While I have had almost no trouble adjusting to living in Asia, I know that even if I lived here the rest of my life, I would never be able to pick up this pushy way of moving through crowds.

It is actually quite shocking to realize how much we, as westerners, are programmed to form lines and apologize at every accidental bump. My first experience with lines (or lack of), was when Lauren, Jenny and I were trying to purchase a train ticket to go overnight from Danang to Hanoi. We thought we were next in line at the ticket booth, waiting behind a family. As time went on, we slowly realized that it was not a family at all, but five separate people squeezed tightly together all trying to yell their ticket orders to the one ticket attendant so they could pay, grab their ticket and go. We were standing about two feet behind these people to give them their space. People continued to squeeze themselves into the huddle of people in front of us while we stood there. We decided to come close and stand directly behind these people, but more and more people kept shoving in front of us and ordering first. The weirdest thing about the experience is that we literally could not make ourselves act the same way. If we tried to inch closer, and someone pushed us out the way, we would just back off. It took us about thirty minutes to order the ticket, and that was out of luck, not aggressiveness.

On the bus you are often shoved out of the way while you are trying to make it up the stairs. Once on the bus during rush hour, you usually have to stand and are surrounded by other people, with barely an inch to move around. What makes this situation especially difficult is the bus drivers driving. Like I have said before, buses maintain the right of way in almost any situation. This means they drive very quickly, making very hard turns, constantly honking as a warning to motorbikes they are coming and being forced to suddenly break when a motorbike does not move out of the way fast enough. When you are standing and this type of stop and go is constantly occurring, everyone is swaying and even falling. The difference is that in the states, people would grab a seat back or the handle bar provided to steady themselves. In Vietnam it’s a free for all, and you grab whatever is closest to you, which could mean the handle bar, or it could mean my arm, my hair, or my shirt. It is also very weird when you hit people and they don’t expect an apology. I accidently knocked the same girl with my elbow on the top of her head about five times, and she never looked up or acted like she even felt anything.

I have spent a decent amount of time thinking about this cultural difference, and I have attributed it to the laid back, easy going nature of the Vietnamese. They aren’t going to get their panties in a bunch if you knock into them, so you shouldn’t stress out and trip all over yourself to apologize.

This calm, unemotional temperament is also apparent in the young children here. I noticed early on that when little kids fall here, they don’t cry. I’ve seen toddlers on the street take some pretty rough spills, and they always just get back up. On the bus I even saw a little three year old girl, who probably had the flu or something similar, get sick on the bus. I cannot remember a time before the age of seven that I did not automatically cry when I threw up, it wasn’t even an option, tears and puke came hand-in-hand. She didn’t cry at all! She just looked slightly sad and sat back up on her mothers lap, who I think (and hope) was taking her to the doctor.

I also want to point out one plus of commuting on the buses here, and that is that I am not significantly shorter than everyone else crowding around me. In fact I am taller than most other girls and only slightly smaller than most guys, which makes being packed much more bearable.

Unfortunately I am still not done with my traveling tales, so I will need to have a third installment. I will try to squeeze it in sometime over the weekend.