Playing "Frogger" - Saigon Style

In Saigon, I am a frightened squirrel - a twitchy, frantic, frazzle-tailed, crazy-eyed rodent that plain and simply cannot cross streets.

I'm sitting in an open-air internet cafe in Saigon, sweating (as usual) while watching a woman right outside the door run sugar cane through an industrial looking roller (ideal for catching fingers) to make a drink of pure sugar. I have yet to try the drink yet, because, as I told you, I am a nervous squirrel.

For the past two weeks I have been yearning for a place to settle down, rest my head, call home - even for just a moment. Naturally, we have picked the craziest city, I think, in the world.

I think I wrote in the previous post that I had never seen more motorbikes in my entire life. That was an understatement.

Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) is home to some 8 million people - none of whom, as far as I can tell, work. From my 2 day observation, it seems to me that every single person in this city spends their entire day riding on their motorbike. Truly, there are moments when the group of motorbikes get hazy it stretches so far and seems to become a solid mass of steel and exhaust they are packed so tightly.

Here lies the problem. Despite the eternally long blocks here, the sidewalks all - inevitably - come to an end yielding to the street - almost liquidy in its concentration of motorbikes. Yet when the sidewalks come to an end, there is generally no signal to cross. The method here is much like frogger, or, in my case, squirreler, in which one has to slowly creep across the street while cars and motorbikes honk at (and yet miraculously bend around) you. Just as in Frogger, it's the first step that is the worst. Once you're on the lilypad, there's generally very little turning back, and instead you are basically committed to crossing. It's pretty horrifying to see a horde of maniacal motorbikes buzzing your way, and yet I cannot begin to tell you the rush I feel on the other side.

Really, the past two days have been a crash course in surviving the city. Though many of us are beginning to get the hang of the whole street crossing business, many (including myself) have yet to master the art of sleeping past about 6:30 A.M.

In my guesthouse, the man next door (whose every move I can hear perfectly through my wall) begins to hawk loogies around 6 every morning. About that same time, two very ill-tempered cats resume a war of which both have probably forgotten the origin. The cleaning ladies begin their rounds, knocking on doors to deliver hot water, whose purpose at 6:30 in the morning I have yet to determine. Additionally, a lady likes to sit outside my window and pick her new cell phone ring for the day, while the single parking spot a few feet away from our building becomes home to a honk-filled traffic jam.

I suppose that all the commotion does have its advantages in that it gets us up early enough that we can accomplish innumerable amounts of things (so far that list of "things" has included exploring the market - filled with everything from knock-off Lacoste shirts to cow brains - as well as finding the perfect coffee shop (Rob and I tried a place today that served a coffee mixed with sweet condensed milk...basically like drinking caramel)).

Just as in Frogger, while the day may be filled with crocodiles and large delivery trucks aimed at your destruction, we have started finding our lily pads and every night (somehow)seem to find our way across the other shore.