December 4

I'm starting to be able to pick out the English teachers from the tourists. They're either dressed up for class or they look casual, like they're hanging around the house or something. The tourists tend to either dress like they're at Club Med or they wear cloths from the souvenir shop: t-shirts with the Vietnamese flag or the Tiger beer logo, sometimes accented by a woven or silky something from one of the craft shops. Plus they're usually clutching guides.

Yesterday, I stopped to help a lost foreign teacher downtown, as she was wandering around looking for a restaurant.

"My friend said it's near Reunification Palace, and there's a sign that says 'delicious' in English and Vietnamese, but none of the signs here are in English," she said. So she'd been going around the park, interrupting the couples making out to see any of them spoke English and knew where the restaurant was.

I remember doing things like that. You're lost and feeling a little ridiculous, but it's sort of amusing. Because you're usually a reasonably intelligent person who can take care of yourself, and yet here you are, tromping through a foreign country where you haven't the faintest idea of how to say 'delicious' and so you've really got no alternative but to force snogging teenagers to come up for air and help you. It's pretty funny, actually, and anyway it can't be helped. You're in Saigon and this is part of your adventure.

"It's right there," I said, pointing. She'd been within a quarter block of it the whole time. "See, it says 'an ngon' on the door, that means 'delicious food.'"

And she was fine. You can go far on the kindness of strangers - you get rescued a lot when you have a certain confused look in your eye.

I miss that. My Vietnamese is pretty bad and I can't figure out our electric bill on my own, but I can get to whereever I need to go in the city and I have a good sense of what's normal and what's appropriate. And I know how to say delicious.

It was different when I was here before - by the end, I was at about the same level of competance that I am now, but I knew a lot more Vietnamese people, and what I knew about the language and the country was constantly being stretched by spending time with them. A lot of that was from the university - it's amazing how much community comes with being part of a school. Now that I'm on my own I belong to the city less, I think. And what I do during the day is just the sort of daily living things that I know I can handle.

I wonder how things would have been different if I'd head off in some totally random direction. I've been thinking that when the year is out, if I'm not sick to teaching English I might head off to Prague or Russia or someplace like that. I have no idea how to say "delicious" in Russian.