Vietnam... Things I Hate
Hate might be too strong a word for most of the following, but after almost a month in this amazing country these are the things that have pissed me off …
“Disabled” Workshops - Everywhere I went, from Saigon to Hanoi, one of the compulsory stops was the factory producing anything from marble statues of the Virgin Mary, to lacquer-ware wall panels featuring the face of Elvis, to silk embroidery workshops. As we pulled up at the designated stop the different guides gave exactly the same speech about how the bombs and the mines and the Agent Orange was still maiming and disfiguring people today in Vietnam. Of this I have no doubt and it’s disgusting that the US refuses to pay any reparation or fund a clear up the the land-mines that still scar the entire country. But please, please, please don’t have half a dozen physically challenged people sat at the front of your shop and expect me to believe that they have produced all of these goods for us to buy to assuage our guilt. I saw the exact same, mass-produced crap everywhere - all of it identical. If this was handmade by anybody surely there’d be some slight difference in its appearance! At each place I dropped a few thousand VND in the collection box and disappeared to the local coffee shop. Please don’t insult tourists like this.
The Traffic - There are absolutely no rules here whether you’re driving a car, a bus, a scooter or you’re walking. It’s every man/woman/child for themselves. In some of the bigger cities there’s a few zebra crossing type things and a little green man comes up to tell you to walk. Ignore him, the motorists do. As a pedestrian all you can do is just step out and have no fear of death. The minute you hesitate to try to turn back you’re fucked mate. Keep in mind that the majority of the vehicles on the road don’t really want the hassle of scraping bits of you off their front bumper and so will do their best to avoid hitting you.
“Face” - This is not just a Vietnamese thing, it happens all over region. You ask somebody a question, and even if they don’t understand, don’t know the answer or know for sure that what you’ve asked for is impossible, they will still smile and say ‘Yes’. This is the closest I have come to getting an ulcer/having a heart attack in my life. It’s ok to ask me to repeat something, or admit you don’t know everything. Saying yes repeatedly will only cause stress, anger or possibly death!
Inflexibility - This is the first time I’ve done these kind of organised bus tour things on my travels and so I am going to wildly assume its not just in Vietnam that this happens. If you read some of my other blogs you will know that there’s a couple of times on my tour that I wasn’t keen or able to go with the group. I asked simply to be allowed to do my own thing, to be left alone to please myself. This was like asking for the sacrifice of their first born child. It threw the assorted tour guides into the kind of confusion I’d not seen before. A simple case was asking the tour guide in Hanoi if it was possible, given the dreadful weather to set off 30 minutes earlier to get to the airport than was previously arranged. I wasn’t even really asking for myself, but the other two people who were being collected at the same time as me were on a flight that was going 45 minutes before mine, and I was cutting it fine! She stared at me like I had just suggested we go on a killing spree, but didn’t answer. The result of this was that the car came at the organised time, the driver to the airport was so violent that one of the other passengers vomited the entire journey, and two of the people missed their flight. Of course by then, the guide was long gone.
“Disabled” Workshops - Everywhere I went, from Saigon to Hanoi, one of the compulsory stops was the factory producing anything from marble statues of the Virgin Mary, to lacquer-ware wall panels featuring the face of Elvis, to silk embroidery workshops. As we pulled up at the designated stop the different guides gave exactly the same speech about how the bombs and the mines and the Agent Orange was still maiming and disfiguring people today in Vietnam. Of this I have no doubt and it’s disgusting that the US refuses to pay any reparation or fund a clear up the the land-mines that still scar the entire country. But please, please, please don’t have half a dozen physically challenged people sat at the front of your shop and expect me to believe that they have produced all of these goods for us to buy to assuage our guilt. I saw the exact same, mass-produced crap everywhere - all of it identical. If this was handmade by anybody surely there’d be some slight difference in its appearance! At each place I dropped a few thousand VND in the collection box and disappeared to the local coffee shop. Please don’t insult tourists like this.
The Traffic - There are absolutely no rules here whether you’re driving a car, a bus, a scooter or you’re walking. It’s every man/woman/child for themselves. In some of the bigger cities there’s a few zebra crossing type things and a little green man comes up to tell you to walk. Ignore him, the motorists do. As a pedestrian all you can do is just step out and have no fear of death. The minute you hesitate to try to turn back you’re fucked mate. Keep in mind that the majority of the vehicles on the road don’t really want the hassle of scraping bits of you off their front bumper and so will do their best to avoid hitting you.
“Face” - This is not just a Vietnamese thing, it happens all over region. You ask somebody a question, and even if they don’t understand, don’t know the answer or know for sure that what you’ve asked for is impossible, they will still smile and say ‘Yes’. This is the closest I have come to getting an ulcer/having a heart attack in my life. It’s ok to ask me to repeat something, or admit you don’t know everything. Saying yes repeatedly will only cause stress, anger or possibly death!
Inflexibility - This is the first time I’ve done these kind of organised bus tour things on my travels and so I am going to wildly assume its not just in Vietnam that this happens. If you read some of my other blogs you will know that there’s a couple of times on my tour that I wasn’t keen or able to go with the group. I asked simply to be allowed to do my own thing, to be left alone to please myself. This was like asking for the sacrifice of their first born child. It threw the assorted tour guides into the kind of confusion I’d not seen before. A simple case was asking the tour guide in Hanoi if it was possible, given the dreadful weather to set off 30 minutes earlier to get to the airport than was previously arranged. I wasn’t even really asking for myself, but the other two people who were being collected at the same time as me were on a flight that was going 45 minutes before mine, and I was cutting it fine! She stared at me like I had just suggested we go on a killing spree, but didn’t answer. The result of this was that the car came at the organised time, the driver to the airport was so violent that one of the other passengers vomited the entire journey, and two of the people missed their flight. Of course by then, the guide was long gone.
Labels: Travel
posted by JoJo Smith at Wednesday, November 23, 2011
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