May 31st 2006 - The First Day

I am in Saigon. This has been a crazy last 24 hours. This flight has been the first time I flew with China Air, not surprising since I have never been to Asia before. The female flight attendants wear these purple uniforms that are one part stereotypical Asian cheongsam…and one part swinging sixties. This shade just begs for a matching hat. There was this one male flight attendant who was very no-nonsense. The movies that played were Casanova, New World and Glory Road. Though I wanted to see the first two, they sent me to sleep right away. It could've been the dimming lights…or the fact that I could barely make out the audio because there was something wrong with the sound where I was sitting.

So we arrived in the Chiang Kai-Shek airport. It felt like the few blocks of Chinatown that I was used to growing up has magically expanded into an all-encompassing universe. The candy-coated yellows, pinks and reds of the signs for some reason scream Asia to me, the continent of KAWAII!!!…where Hello Kitty and her knock-offs were born.

The plane to HCMC was nicer. There were individual screens on the backs of the seats where you could pick your own movie. I watched this crazy artsy Chinese musical called "Perhaps Love". I liked it…but the ending spoilt it for me. The descent into HCMC was beautiful. Lovely greens abound. This is Vietnam.

We landed, waited in line through customs, a harrowing experience. Then we went to baggage claim, which was chaos. A man came to us and asked other how many bags we had. At first I had no idea who I was, and coming off my Cameroon experience, I just decided to ignore him, figuring that we should deal with our luggage ourselves. However, it turns out he worked for the airport, cuz I saw a lot of other men in similar uniforms. There was a helpful moustached man clad in a white shirt, in his forties, who was really helpful to me in Kyla. I got to use some of my limited Vietnamese (basically saying I have two pieces of luggage, one blue, one red, etc.). One of Kyla's bags got misplaced, but after a lot of confusion, the moustached man led us to lost and found, where we found it. We finally met with Loc, a thin, nice-looking student, who sadly had to wait for two hours in the blistering heat.

Saigon is HOT! The heat is a physical presence weighing down on your shoulders as you walk the street. In the taxi, we struck up a conversation about World Cup, and he knew who Eto'o Fils was! And he knew that the Cameroon team was good! That is the way into a girl's heart. He took us to our hotel. This was funny…because it was exactly what my mom had thought I was going to stay…a hotel on Bui Thi Vien street. However, she was misled by the receipt Thai sent me, which said we were staying in a house on Nguyen thi Minh Khai.

After showering, me and Kyla met with Loc, who took us to meet with Thai. We met at this very sheeshee place called "Highlands Coffee" or something like that, which is basically like an upscale Starbucks-like establishment, with several branches popping up in Saigon. It's owned by Italians. The menu is in English, and serves stuff like croquet monsieurs. Loc likes hip hop and rock ballads, and would like Kyla to teach him how to do hip hop dance.

It's been a strange and beautiful experience being here so far (which has been like six hours). It's very foreign yet really familiar to me. The way the city is constructed, laid out, how the buildings look remind me a lot of Yaounde, how the urban concrete is littered with lush greenery that seems naturally there, not forced, like in SF. It's not like I feel like alas I have arrived home. However, there are aspects of it that seems familiar. It's like Yaounde and Little Saigon fused together. I never really thought about it, but my experiences of Asia have mainly been through cultural enclaves, Little Saigon, Chinatown, Japantown, Little Tokyo. All these diminutives and now I'm in the Asia big leagues!

There aren't as many bicycles as I thought there would me. Mostly motobikes. So many! Just swarms of them! Plenty of women drive them as well. When you cross the street, you just become surrounded by them, as you try to evade them buzzing by you. Thai and Loc took us walking around the CBC area….where there are a lot of businesses and sheeshee cafes. He treated all for of us to cyclo rides back to our hotel. It was amazing to ride through the city on a cyclo. It's just all this open air, and you're barely dodging getting hit by cars or motorbikes, but you just have to have faith that your driver, who's like 50 years old, has lots of experience and knows what he's doing, you place your trust in him, just sit back and feel the joy of zipping by a new place that seems incredibly exciting, scary, and full of promise.