I mentioned on my birthday post that I was on the move for my birthday, and I was. This may seem counterintuitive, but I took a week off and went to Oslo, Norway. In January. Yeah, I didn’t think through this one at all.

I’ve been struggling to write a quick summary of this trip, mostly because the trip was… well it wasn’t awful, but it was tough. It was an experience, and I do always like to see a new country and just feel what it’s like, see the little differences, look at the buildings and see where things came from, what the history was like, what was torn down and rebuilt and destroyed and grown. The very first time I ever left the country—a quick bus trip up to Canada to see the Shakespeare Festival in high school—I remember holding a metric can of Coke in my hand and feeling how it was different in some weird way, and realizing there were 190-some other places like this on the rock we call Earth, and they all had these little (or big) differences. I always like that.

But this trip. The lack of sunlight really put the zap on me, as well as the food situation (vegetables this close to the Arctic circle are not really a thing, and I’m not a fan of fish), and the general aloneness of being by myself in a country where everyone knows English, but don’t necessarily speak it. In many ways, I was way out of my element and it all felt very bleak.

So I didn’t do much. I struggled with time, nutrition, navigation, and weather. I was asleep while everyone was awake and vice verse. The news cycle last week was… not ideal. I had my birthday in another country where I think I said a total of ten words all day, and that included ordering the absolute worst vegan pizza imaginable. (Don’t ask.) And every time I start writing my usual bulleted list about this week, it ends up being this bitch-fest of negative things, and I start thinking, “Why am I doing this?”

So, let’s not do that. Let’s be as zen as possible about it, and let me write a list of what I did like about this trip.

• I stayed in the Centrum district, which reminds me a bit of my 2022 stay in Stockholm, dusted with a few memories of the 2023 Iceland trip. It’s a mix of contemporary Scandinavian three or four story urban architecture of muted pastels and light brick, but many appearances of super-modern aesthetics with sharp edges and metal and glass walls. It’s all ultra-designed, efficient and well-built and wonderful to see.
• Neighborhoods are all incredibly integrated. There’s always a little grocery nearby. Trains go everywhere. There are abundant little shops. I went to dinner at one place that was in a complex of buildings, all built into a hill maybe ten years ago. It was a maze of passages, underground parking, small grocers, barbers, ramen shops, upscale restaurants, gyms, a small music venue, small shops, and apartments for young professionals. In the US, we try to build these fake city center places, and they never work out; they’re all half-abandoned except for a token Subway restaurant and a dry cleaner that’s never open. This was a fully-integrated system, a very cozy arrangement, where I could imagine never having to drive anywhere to meet my basic needs.
• The weather wasn’t bad, maybe 20-30F all week, and snowing, occasionally turning to slush. But there was something magical about waking up and seeing all the Scandinavian buildings dusted with white. And while I wouldn’t want to do this for the next 100 days, it was nice to walk around and feel the snow in the air and watch the people strolling to work all bundled up in their Arctic jackets and hats.
• The Edward Munch museum was awesome. Seeing “The Scream” in person was great. But that building and the Opera House across from it, as well as the gigantic public library looked like matte paintings from the background of a Star Trek movie, just super-modern looking architecture. That whole area is absolutely striking with its futuristic buildings are all so perfect well laid-out. They didn’t just slap down square buildings next to each other for the whole block; they’re carefully placed, and then in between them, there’s an ice skating rink or a playground or some botanical garden or something, or it carefully leads up to a set of piers on the waterfront. And of course it’s all punctuated by frequent bus lines and streetcars and a perfectly laid-out subway system. The urban planning is absolutely next-tier there.
• Driving from the Oslo Gardermoen Airport to Centrum in the middle of the night was sort of amazing. Yes, I’d been awake two days, and yes it was not great weather for the drive. But that E6 highway, the 45 minutes or so of traffic is all carved into hills, surrounded by evergreens, and everything was blanketed in snow. This was only the third time I’d ever driven a car in another country, the first with my new international driving permit. (The other two are Canada and Iceland.) It’s always fascinating to me to see the new signs and minor details, and of course everything in Kilometers.
• I stayed at the Thon Rozencrantz. They gave me a top-floor suite with a separate living room, and a nice set of windows that overlooked the west part of Centrum, with the Royal Palace on the horizon in the distance. Free breakfast every day, and while there were some oddities (brown cheese?) it was the standard eggs and bacon and whatnot every morning.
• One night I drove to the Sandvika Storsenter, a large mall about 20 minutes outside the city. It’s interesting to see a place like this with basically no anchors or hypermarts and lots of local shops and brands, softlines and upscale apparel. There weren’t a ton of people out on a Tuesday, but it definitely wasn’t a dead mall at all.
• I’ve written about my obsession with Surge soda a while ago, and how it was one of the factors in me working on my second book. Anyway, Surge was in Norway, but it was called Urge. I tried a can, even though I can’t drink sugar like that anymore. It tasted like I remembered, though.
• I ate an absolutely excessive meal at this Michelin star restaurant and every part of the meal was stupendous and way too much and something I’d never eat (lots of fish, not just reindeer, but reindeer heart) and it was awesome, even if it took me 24 hours to recover. It made me realize these places are more like performance art, the way the server explains all the crazy combinations and where they came from. My server would rattle all this off, and it was great, but then I’d see her telling the same story a few minutes later and it made me think this was much more of a theatrical thing, in addition to culinary.
• This is dumb, but I always think it’s hilarious when I fly halfway around the world, and there’s 7-Eleven. I never thought back in 1988 when me and Ray and Larry were loitering at the now-gone 7-Eleven in Elkhart that I’d be going to one in Ho Chi Minh City or Singapore or Stockholm. The one thing I got in Oslo that I’ve never seen before were dried dates that had various flavors to them. The one I liked the most was sour cola flavored. No idea where I’ll ever see those again, unless I go to Denmark or something.
• Norway is 100% cashless. I never even got any local money the whole time I was there.
• I complain about the language and the complexity and the ø and å and æ and such, but I think Norwegian is maybe as complex as German, but in different ways. Some words are very similar, but I think pronunciation is a bit easier and grammar is way more simple. Maybe I need to spend more time on that.
• As much as I go on and on about the lack of sunlight and the weird angle of the sun during the day, there’s something interesting about seeing it, the odd golden hour that makes you feel like you’re on the surface of an alien planet in a Christopher Nolan movie. It’s not ideal, but it’s a real blast to experience it.
• I did meet up with a writer I managed back in 2021 who I’d never actually met in person. She was in Bangalore, but moved to Norway three years ago, and it was good to catch up. And I think that was one of the real high points of the trip, not only because she is awesome, but because I’ve been thinking a lot about community and connection, and these dumb trips shouldn’t be about going to see some random museum or record store or largest ball of twine. I should be planning these trips entirely around seeing old friends again, or new friends I’d never met. Why am I not doing that?

I didn’t get many great pictures, and I only captured a few videos on my phone while I was walking around. But the memories are amazing. I have a very clear view of sitting by the maritime museum in the snow. I’d arrived early, before the big tour busses rolled in, and hiked around the Bygdøy WW II Navy Memorial on the waterfront. The snow was whipping down, and I trundled around maybe four inches of fresh powder on the waterfront. I was entirely unprepared, jeans and New Balance tennis shoes, mid-cuff in this snow, walking around the Bygdøynes ferry terminal, looking at this 19th-century three-mast ship sitting in the water. The Oslo Fjord stretched out in front of me, the island of Hovedøya on the horizon. Everything was so crisp, cold, and quiet, the snow blanketing all sound. This was Norway, in the purest sense. I didn’t care about the food or the jetlag or the loneliness or the cold. This is what I needed.

And yeah, why am I not seeing anyone anymore? If you’re ever in the Bay Area, the email’s still jkonrath @ this domain. Or pitch me why I need to come see you. Let’s do it.

I don’t usually talk about works in progress, but just a quick accountability note here to mention that I finished the first draft of my 18th book. This is more or less a spiritual continuation of The Failure Cascade, and is 20 stories, but almost three times longer. I’m moving past flash fiction and micro-fiction, maybe. I mean, there’s one story that’s roughly half the length of Failure Cascade. I don’t have any distance from the thing to say whether I like it or not, but John read a draft and he did. Completely unmarketable, but I’ll keep going on it after I catch a breath and see when I can publish it. It already has a title and a cover image. ChatGPT can write the book description and marketing crap better than I can. Those three things are always the biggest blockers on getting a book out the door.

I just realized that if I get this book out this year (and I’m not worried if I don’t) it will be four years since my last book. The longest gap before this was about 20 months between Summer Rain and Rumored to Exist. When I really got on the horse and changed around my writing schedule and cadence and work ethic in 2010, I had it in my head that I needed to publish at least a book a year because of the algorithm (or whatever) and I did that from 2010 to 2020, with two years that had two books. Now, whatever. I have been writing more and changed around my schedule to make that happen. But I’m writing for me, not for a calendar or an algorithm. I’d like to get the long list of half-done projects out the door, but I don’t care how they sell.

---

I also don’t talk about future travel plans, but it’s time to get out of the country again, and time to renew my passport, while I still can. I was trying to book something this morning and realized this one’s expiring less than six months from when I’m leaving. Pretty much every country has a requirement that you have six months on your passport in case you end up in a coma in a hospital or whatever. Five and a half months left is not close enough according to an airline computer, so it’s time to figure this out.

It’s always oddly bittersweet when I do this. First, this will be the last passport when I have hair. Second, there was a six-year gap from the first stamp to the second. Lots of blank pages I wish I would have filled. This one has stamps from 20 countries, which is way more than the last one. (I think that had four or five.) This one also has three visas, including a work visa, which is new to me.

I honestly don’t know how much I will travel in the future. I think it’s going to become a lot more difficult, impractical, and expensive to travel internationally. And I’m not exactly enthused about spending my tourist dollars in a large chunk of the country. I really should spend more time in California, because there’s a lot of it I haven’t seen. There are nine national parks in California, and I’ve hiked exactly zero of them. Time to look into that.

---

I don’t talk about politics here, and it’s hard not to. There’s a lot of dismay and there’s a lot I can’t do about the situation. For my own mental health, I feel a great need to distance myself from it and focus on what I can do. I also don’t talk about work here, but I think the best I can do is to continue to manage and mentor people, try to grow my company and my little corner of Silicon Valley, and continue to support who I can. I grew up working retail and dumb jobs in the middle of the country, and was lucky to find a way out and get a real job and benefits and live in a beautiful place. I’ll stay here while I can. When I can’t, I’ll leave. I’m fortunate enough to have options, but I love it in California.

I think one other thing is I need to take a big step back from the news/terror cycle and redouble my efforts on writing. I’ve already had serious questions about my social media use, and this pretty much sealed the deal for me. I spent far too much time doom-scrolling in Reddit, and I can’t anymore. My last news source was the New York Times, and I cancelled my subscription (even though I get it free through Amex) because of obvious reasons a few months ago. Twitter got nuked a year ago, not that I ever used it.

I’ve given up on Substack. It’s become a political doom and gloom circle-jerk, but more than that, I don’t know what to post there. I feel like any writing I’m not doing for a book or for work should be here. I thought about having some system where I blogged here and mirrored it there, but it was too much work and I don’t really see the benefit. A lot of the writing content on Substack is either of the “look at me” or “make money fast” variety, and I care about neither.

At this point, my two biggest social media vices are Tik-Tok and Tumblr. I don’t do much content creation on Tik-Tok, and I have only two or three friends on there, but it’s fairly easy to push the algorithm away from the bad and just waste time watching people pressure-wash driveways or travel in weird places. I also don’t do much creation and have no friends on Tumblr, but I like it because I don’t even think the people working at Tumblr are aware it’s still operational. Because I don’t create and I don’t use my real name, I don’t chase likes and follows or look at numbers. That’s what’s good for me.

Same goes here. I have no idea how many people read this, and I have no need to “grow” things here. I’ll just keep on keeping on.

Had a quick trip to Barcelona for work a week ago. I did zero research before I left, so it was a bit of a rush. Here’s a quick summary:

• This was a work thing, and 90% of it was strictly work, and I don’t talk about work here, so this isn’t as all-access as I normally am with summaries. Anyway.
• I did not pack until the last second. I was not sure what to do about camera stuff, because I broke my arm and I didn’t think I could carry a DSLR. So I brought my Sony a6400 mirrorless and a couple of lenses.
• I left on the afternoon of Memorial Day, which meant I’d arrive in the late afternoon on Tuesday. This meant I absolutely had to sleep on the plane on the way out. Of course, I didn’t.
• I was lucky enough to have a window seat on the left side and nobody in the middle seat. My broken arm was maybe 80% better when we left, but It would have been problematic to have someone jammed next to me for twelve hours.
• I think eight or ten people from my company were on my flight, which is a bit unusual for me. I generally fly alone, or maybe there’s one other person on the same flight.
• Like I said, no sleep. Then I changed planes in Zürich, Switzerland for a smaller two-hour jump to Spain. Switzerland looked nice from the airport, but I didn’t see much. I also didn’t get to eat. I did buy a Coke Zero and totally forgot they use the Swiss Franc. I passed customs there in about two seconds. They have a very nice tram connecting the airport terminals.
• The airport in Spain was fine, with no baggage drama. The company had shuttle busses for us, so it was pretty painless to get from the airport.
• The whole thing was at a Hyatt that was right next to the University of Barcelona. I had a narrow room but in good shape and I had a fridge.
• We had 400 people from 20 countries there, and like I said, I won’t get into work, but the whole day was work and the whole schedule was work and there was lots of work, work, work.  (I was not “working” though; it was “tourism.” I don’t have an EU work visa.) On Wednesday through Friday, my schedule was pretty much all work stuff from six AM to one AM every day.
• Spain has never really been on my radar and I did not know what to expect. I mean, it’s a European country, and the base things are all European: the money, the voltage, the general look of the thing. There’s old architecture that’s definitively Spanish, but the area around the university looked and felt like any European suburb built after the war.
• One thing that threw me was Catalan. My two semesters of Spanish in an Indiana public school 40 years ago basically taught me that people in Spain spoke Spanish with a lisp. That’s incorrect. Catalan is a different language, and about 40% of people speak it there. So everything was written in Spanish, in Catalan, and maybe in English. It also meant the default outside the hotel was usually rapid-fire Spanish, and I had to just act stupid. I know maybe 200 words of Spanish, when it’s at glacial speed. I know zero Catalan. So that was fun.
• I did get a brief look at the university each morning, as I went for a quick walk before breakfast. I think UB is like twice as big as IU Bloomington, student-wise. It’s also like two or three times older. We were staying near the hospital facilities, and I think the main part of the campus is like a mile or two away. I absolutely could not figure out the layout of the thing, and I just tried to google it and I still can’t.
• Aside from the meetings in the hotel, there were three dinner/evening events. One was a rock band at a castle. Another was a beach event with a DJ (which wasn’t an actual beach on the water, but was an event space with sand), and the last was a sit-down dinner with flamenco dancers.
• I did have Friday off to spend with my team, so we went to Park Güell, which is this freaky park designed by Antoni Gaudí. It’s way at the top of this hill, and it’s a municipal garden with natural park features like trees and such, but it’s framed by trippy bridges and houses and stairs with tile mosaics and almost surreal shapes to them. The top of it has a terrace with a bench seat wrapped around it that’s in the shape of a sea serpent, its scales being an ornate tile mosaic. It’s way north up a hill, which was a back-breaking hike for me, but worth it.
• On that trip, I also got to use their metro system, which was not as nice as Singapore’s, but it was pretty good. I also got to stop at a Polish restaurant and get some pierogis.
• I had to check out of the work hotel Saturday morning, but I was not flying out until Sunday because I extended my stay, so I moved across town. American Express hooked me up with a room at The Cotton House in the Gothic Quarter, which was absolutely insane. It’s rated as one of the 30 best hotels in the world, and Amex was paying me $300 to stay there. I got a room on the top floor of the hotel, and had my own balcony that looked south over the Gothic Quarter.
• After settling in and eating a stellar lunch, I went walking and went to the Picasso museum. There’s a lot there, but if you made a list of the top ten Picasso paintings, I think one of them is in Barcelona and like seven or eight are at MOMA in New York.
• Spent a lot of time wandering the gothic quarter and taking pictures. It was nice to just wander. I was slightly on edge about walking on cobblestone and uneven sidewalks with the fear of falling again. I also didn’t get any great photos, maybe because of the arm. Lots of blur; I probably should have switched to S and moved a stop faster on the shutter.
• Went walking the next day and looked at the Casa Battló, another Gaudí design. Unfortunately I didn’t get tickets, so I just looked at the outside.
• Stopped at a McDonald’s, just to be the ugly American. It was largely the same there.
• Flight back was direct, 12 hours. I stayed awake the whole time and forced myself to watch five movies, so I would collapse when I got home and get back on regular schedule.

Of course, I caught a cold or something on the way back. I’ve been dragging all week, but I’m back. Good trip, but I wish I would have had more time and more research. 20 countries down. Back to work.

So, I was in Vietnam last week. Yes, Vietnam. I spent a week in Ho Chi Minh City, aka Saigon. I think it was everything I expected, but a lot more than that in every way. Lots to explain here.

OK, so. As I’ve mentioned before, I have this situation where I find out I have a week I can take off, and with very little notice, I have to plan something, and I always rush to Expedia and do something asinine. The last few trips like this were Sweden, Iceland, and Poland. This one was a bit more stupid, given the travel time, but I had to do it.

The usual question is, “Why Vietnam?” A few quick answers:

• I’ve read way too much about the war and wanted to see how the country had transformed itself since 1975.
• My dad was there fifty-something years ago.
• Cheap(-ish).
• I wanted to go somewhere I’d learn something.
• It’s way out of my comfort zone, and I need to force myself to do things way out of my comfort zone.
• Anthony Bourdain would not shut up about how great it was.

The idea of visiting Vietnam has come up in the past, but I’ve always shrugged it off because I felt like I could not deal with it at all: the foreign language barrier, the accommodations, the safety aspect. It’s easy enough to pop into Canada where 99% of everything is the same except the speed limit is in kilos and Canadian bacon is just bacon. But getting turned completely upside down and backwards is something I didn’t think I could grok. After spending time in India last year, I figured I could probably get by with no major problems. So I booked my stuff, bought a couple of books, did my usual plan by marking pins on my Google Maps, and away we go.

Friday/Saturday/Early Sunday

I was scheduled to leave SFO at 11PM on Friday night, which meant it was actually midnight. I upgraded to economy plus or whatever it’s called on United. The week before, I burned a lot of cycles figuring out what to put in which carry-on bag, and ended up having to put both of them overhead, pocketing my phone and headphones, but nothing else. The first leg was about 15 hours, and I’d been awake since four in the morning. I can never sleep on planes, and with the aid of three different sleeping pills, I got maybe three hours of fretful sleep right after we left California. This trip was also the first where I basically spent two nights in the air, because we technically left on Friday and landed on Sunday.

I talked to my seat neighbor a bit. He worked for a big shoe manufacturer (I won’t say which) and had done the Boston to SFO leg prior to our flight, and then was flying to China next to tour some factories. He said he was in Vietnam a few times a year and told me I’d love it. It’s funny how any time I ask anyone about a vacation spot, they tell me I’ll love it, even if they are a total stranger. I understand that for a place like Hawaii or Iceland, but I’m waiting for the time I tell someone about a destination, and they tell me, “Sorry dude, that’s a shithole.”

While I couldn’t sleep, I watched Oppenheimer. Good movie, but it was weird because as the scene came on where they’re testing the first bomb, I looked at the in-flight map and I was directly above Hiroshima.

I landed in Hong Kong at five in the morning local time on Sunday, and everything was closed. The HK airport is this confusing maze of multiple levels, and is a jumbled combination of new technology and luxury, and not. It’s like if Chicago Midway got bought by the Saudi sovereign fund and they tried to make it look like the Dubai airport and gave up after six months. Good news is I got a shower in the Amex lounge. Bad news is my “breakfast” was beans and sausage. It was either that or some fish head curry that is only appetizing if you’re from the Mainland. Also. was I in China? I think depending on who you ask, I was. Or maybe not.

The jump over to Vietnam was easy. I think it was a two hour flight on a half-empty Cathay Airbus. The only other Caucasian was an older half-hippy looking woman who shops REI clearance only for her hemp clothes and is probably helping some communists dig a well somewhere. I had an entire row to myself, and mostly zoned out for the entire flight over. When I landed, it was now Sunday morning.

Sunday

The Tân Sơn Nhất airport is a perfect metaphor for Vietnam. It existed in some form since the 1930s, grew, collapsed, then grew again. The French built a terminal in the fifties, and then the US dropped in a pair of two-mile runways and a bunch of jetways and aprons. For a few years, it became the busiest military airbase in the world, and then that stopped when the war ended. After 1975, Pan Am noped out, and the airport only did light domestic duty for the next three decades. Then the capitalists started flying 747s to the city again, and things massively grew. They built a giant international terminal in 2007, expanded the old (now domestic) terminal tenfold, and traffic grew accordingly. But unlike the Hong Kong airport with its giant mall-like concourse, this one looked strictly utilitarian. It’s drab, with primary colors and outdated trim, and looks like the old Indianapolis airport circa 1978, or a Midwestern grade school built by the lowest bidder in 1981. The customs area was basically a non-air conditioned gymnasium full of lines of people fresh off a 20-hour flight, leading to booths with nothing automated, just clerks in military uniforms lazily stamping passports. I waited an hour, had my visa and passport glanced at, then got waved through with no communication whatsoever.

Yes, I needed a visa to get in the country, even as a tourist. There was slightly contradictory information about this, but it’s possible to do everything online. You fill out the “Do you have a passport? Are you a war criminal? Are you sick?” form, pay $25, and they email you back a single-entry tourist visa within a few days. The only oddity from the 1997-looking web site was that it had a mandatory field for religion, which is weird for a country that’s officially atheist. I’m not Catholic anymore, but I recognize that putting Catholic in that field might be a huge misstep, given the post-1975 situation over there. And I’m always tempted to fill these in with “Siðmennt, félag siðrænna húmanista á Íslandi” but I don’t want to get stuck in a holding room for six hours having to explain Icelandic humanism to someone who really doesn’t get the joke.

Once I got my bags, unzipped the legs off my convertible shorts/pants, and stepped outside, it all hit me: the wall of heat, the bright sun, the thousands of people outside, the lines of cabbies looking for fares, the motorcycles everywhere. I didn’t know what to expect, but my only point of comparison is my time in Bangalore, and Saigon is Bangalore times ten, if Bangalore had no height restrictions and said fuck it, you can build a 50-story tower if you give the right person a suitcase of money. (I probably need a different metaphor here since a million VND is about $40. A roll of bills as thick as your arm might get you a used refrigerator.) There’s the same frenetic energy, mopeds everywhere, people slaughtering animals in the street or selling dialysis machines from rickshaws or cooking food on an open pit on the sidewalk. The new stuff, it’s like India too, where someone randomly builds an all-chrome Prada store and it’s next to an open-air slaughterhouse. But the bones of the city - it’s every Vietnam War movie and documentary I’ve ever see, a mix of feudal architecture and French colonialism, with bits of Americana tacked on the site. I’m driving down the road in my Grab taxi, look over, and I’m suddenly in the second half of Full Metal Jacket. (Bad example - that was the Thames river doubling for Da Nang…)  But it’s such a strong deja vu. And then I’m walking around and I’m suddenly freaked out because why the hell is that hotel hanging a half-dozen North Vietnamese flags off their balcony? Wait, it’s a Vietnamese flag. They’re everywhere. McDonald’s has not been taken over by the Viet Cong. And then a guy is selling fruit off a moped, and he’s got a little bullhorn that’s playing a tape loop or something over and over in Vietnamese, and with the distortion and the traffic, I’m expecting him to start yelling “Fuck you GI! Fuck you GI!” like Apocalypse Now.

I got to my hotel in District 1, but it was too early to check in, so I dropped my bags and went for a walk. The heat was absolutely overwhelming. 95 but felt 100, almost nothing had AC; this was not Las Vegas or Singapore. My hotel was a narrow building in a row of narrow buildings at a night market. The entire block was filled with tents and awnings and people selling stuff: cases of soda, boxes of snacks, fish, slabs of meat, vegetables, bags, everything. Various food stalls were buried in the shops, and after the morning, it was always packed with traffic, mopeds, carts, motorcycles, and people shopping.

I thought I’d walk to a McDonald’s for lunch to sort of ease into things, and the MCD was some weird standing-room-only alley with the kiosks and I guess you take your Big Mac and go sit in the street and eat it. They looked like the worst possible golden arches I’ve ever seen in my life, and that includes the ones in the lower Bronx. I went to a giant hotel and ate at the “French Patisserie” which was just paninis and pre-packaged salads, like the sandwich shop you’d go to in an office park in Schaumberg. 

After getting set up in the room and taking a shower, I suddenly realized it was St Patrick’s Day so I thought it would be dumb fun to find an Irish Pub. There was one place a mile away. It’s the same setup as what I saw in Poland last year or what would be in Bloomington or Brooklyn or anything else: the green shamrock, the sepia-tone pictures of Irish laborers on the walls, and so on. The first floor was the bar, which was full of bald expatriate blokes wearing football jerseys. The dining room on the second floor was completely empty. I ate a corned beef sandwich for dinner at like 3:00. Food was decent, actually. I don’t drink but I almost would have grabbed a Guinness because of the occasion, and oddly they only had Vietnamese beers. Probably for the best.

I didn’t talk to anyone and don’t really know the story about the expats in Vietnam. There are the obvious ones, young people on a gap year, backpacking across the cheap parts of Southeast Asia, staying in hostels and Instagramming the whole thing. I can distinguish them by their young age, their look, their tattoos, their gear. This was absolutely unattainable when I was that age; I remember a trip to Mexico was a major undertaking that I never managed to pull off. Maybe they have trust funds; maybe the internet has democratized this to a degree. I don’t know.

I think other people either come to Vietnam on a quest or in defeat. Like they punched out of corporate life after their third divorce and came here to live on ten grand a year and try to forget it’s Asia. Or they’re running some off-shoring business to kill off jobs in the US, but wish they were back in the US, so they find the one Irish bar and pretend they’re in Dublin or Dayton or Aurora. It makes me wonder if this is what the French did back when this was a colony, or the Brits in India. Make three stories of a narrow building look like Paris or London and try to forget where you are.

I stumbled home in a jetlag and meat coma and fell asleep at like seven. 

Monday

Didn’t sleep, of course. I was up for good at like 2:30a with horrible back pain, like I couldn’t even turn over in bed without spasms stopping me. I think it was the combination of the travel and dehydration. I had to spend hours massaging my spine until I could even get out of bed. By the time they started breakfast at 6:30a, I was largely ambulatory and past the pain, but it bothered me the whole trip

Breakfast - I was on the top floor, which is the 8th, but the G floor with the lobby is really the “second” floor, and there is no 4th floor (tetraphobia) and then 1-8. The restaurant is upstairs, so basically ten floors up. It’s half open, half a deck facing the river. In the morning, the temps are only in the mid-70s, the humidity isn’t there yet, and traffic is almost quiet. The panorama is this mix ranging from brand new chrome and glass skyscrapers, 80s Soviet-looking block housing, and colonial apartment towers that are eight feet wide and look like they survived an airstrike fifty years ago and were just fixed with tarps and chicken wire. Roosters crowed to start the day, but traffic hadn’t started yet, and it was otherwise quiet. 

I went for a walk in the morning, no camera, to grab some supplies and survey the area a bit more. I did not know this but I was in the red light district, which is disconcerting. Lots of ladies shoved flyers in my face and yelled hello at me, especially at night. This is not straight-up brothels, but more of the Japanese hostess bar model. Buy “lady drinks” for triple the normal cost and they pretend to be your friend. No thanks. The problem is the bars, “lady bars,” and expat restaurants all look sort of the same. Is Phatty’s Bar and Grill a Chili’s ripoff or a tub-and-tug joint? You don’t know until you’re in there. Also most restaurants are like 9 feet wide, no AC, and outdoor seating on little plastic step-stools that don’t jive with a bad back.

Anyway, lunch, I decided to go to Saigon Center, which is a big Westfield-style urban mall, seven stories plus an office tower. Tons of food and lots of American stores, like Coach, Nike, and an MLB store. (?!) I went to the basement food court and ended up at McDonald’s as a goof. I got the equivalent of a #2, which is the Cheese Royale. The fries tasted identical. Meat was passable. Something was wrong with the ketchup, though. It’s a totally different taste, which threw off the whole thing. 

I booked a photo tour, which really delivered. This French guy named Arnaud showed up on his moped at 2:00p. We talked lenses for a second, and then he gave me a helmet and told me to hop on. I really didn’t want to brave a moped on this trip, especially with my back out and a ton of gear on my neck, but we did. I hung onto the grab bars as we weaved through traffic, every turn unprotected, other mopeds inches away, some carrying groceries, dogs, lumber, a month of chopsticks in crates, whatever. Remember those stories about old ladies on the Ho Chi Minh trail dragging 500 pounds of medical supplies on an old Schwinn? That spirit lives on in Saigon. No econovans or Amazon trucks - they do it old-school. It was truly terrifying to be in the middle of it at 50 km/h, but the chaos was amazing.

We started at a Chinese temple, which was low light but the Jacob’s Ladder effect from holes in the ceiling letting in some light, then candles and tons of incense smoke swirling around. We talked a lot about exposure, enough for me to learn I’m doing it all wrong, but not enough for me to get practice in doing it right. There were not enough people in there to get good subjects, so we moved on.

We spent most of our time in “the maze.” This was a sort of night market and residential area, which I normally never would have ventured or even found. It was like an entire city block of tube houses where each unit was roughly 9x9 feet, and four stories tall. At street level, they had open doors like garage doors, and the rows of houses were maybe six feet apart, with a narrow alley that was used for walking, motorcycles, storage, cooking, work, and everything else. The ground floors were all random businesses: rice wholesalers, variety stores, salons, print shops, motorcycle repair shops, fish mongers, or just someone’s living room.

So a walk down an alley would be something like:

• Older woman on the ground in the alley, cooking a hundred eggs over medium on a small gas grill to ship off on a moped to a hotel. (Note to self: don’t eat eggs for the rest of the trip.)
• Ten feet away, a teenager drenching parts of a 50cc engine with brake cleaner and letting it run into the drain in the middle of the alley.
• Someone laying on the mat on the floor watching the lottery numbers on a fifty-inch Samsung.
• Four shirtless guys with lots of bad tattoos playing pool under a harsh single bulb like the interrogation room in a war movie.
• A teenaged girl watching TikTok and sitting in a room full of bags of rice as a Grab driver stacks a purchase onto the back of a Honda.
• A fish monger breaking down some random fish I’ve never seen in my life and putting the guts in a kettle of curried stew.
• A guy wants to show us his chubby little terrier. Cute dog. I look over and there are cages of roosters being raised for cock fights.

Etc etc etc. So many people on top of each other, so many businesses, such big families. There are also were so many kids in Vietnam. When we got out of the maze, school was letting out, and there were thousands and thousands of teens in uniforms, getting on bikes and talking on cell phones. There was a wall of mopeds, like every Honda built from 1947 to present was on this main drag.

We got the bike and headed across the river to a District 4 apartment. Crossing the Ben Nghe Canal on a little moped during rush hour was insane, putting along on this incline with cars surrounding us, looking out at the river and the buildings and the stark contrast of this new construction sprouting up everywhere. We went to this bombed-out old apartment complex for whatever reason - he liked the sun or the angles or something. It was a c-shaped place, open on the inside like an old motel.

The thing about Arnaud was he had 100% confidence and would walk up to someone and shoot a dozen pictures of them before they even noticed. Like he would show me his screen and say “look at this one” and I didn’t even know he fired off a dozen pictures, because he was talking to someone and had the camera at his chest or off to the side snapping away. Or sometimes they would notice him shooting and he’d keep going and did not care. He spoke Vietnamese and would start conversation and joke with people and smile, and he shoots the same places frequently so he knows people. Sometimes he would show the shot to a person and thumbs up them and ask “xing dep?” (It’s beautiful?) He also had an incredible eye for light and framing. I thought he was focusing on a motorcycle in the front of us, and he’d show me his camera and say “did you see that Buddha statue to the side in the apartment?” and he captured that layer in the foreground of the other layer. He had such a great eye and quick reaction.

I shot maybe 300 shots and I’m sure 295 of them were useless. And I think the main lesson here is I’d have a lot of work to do  to get even vaguely confident in portraiture or street, But I learned a lot from him and saw a part of Saigon way out of my comfort zone I’d never have found.

Came home exhausted but had to eat. I wandered back to the mall and went to some little Korean place among the pseudo-hawker faire they had in the basement. It was basically mall Korean, but I was starving and just needed calories. Wandered around a bit more and then collapsed at home.

Tuesday

I got almost a full night of sleep. Grabbed some breakfast upstairs, then I read and horsed around on the computer for a minute, downloading photos and looking at maps. I went over to Bitexco Financial Tower, which is a 68-story skyscraper right on the river, built as the tallest building in Ho Chi Minh City in 2010. (It’s since been surpassed.) I had a ticket to go to the 49th floor observation deck, which I got for free from Expedia. It was about worth that price, honestly. It’s a very sterile environment, and reminded me of going to the Sears Tower as a kid: you’re in this building with a million offices, but you don’t see anything or have any context; you’re just shot to the top in an elevator and it could be a hundred or a thousand or a million or twelve stories, who cares.

And most of HCMC is largely flat, with a few taller buildings. It’s like being at the top of the tallest building in Indianapolis, where there are a few shorter buildings, then a ton of three-story buildings out to the horizon. Also, maybe it’s me, but I think with the advent of Google Maps and Earth, the aerial view has lost some of its excitement versus when I was a kid. It was good to get that sense of scale of the city, and see how District 1 (where I am, the downtown) is this mix of old areas like The Maze pocked with giant towers built for banks or cell phone companies or whatever. Across the river, District 2 is - weird. It looks mostly vacant, except for the occasional Soviet-era brutalist building, or a brand new apartment “community” that looks like it was thrown up in a Denver suburb in 2007. I’m thinking this was a poor district that got completely ignored for ages and now development is just starting now that there are bridges over there. 

I tried to snap a few pics, but the windows were filthy, and there was this pollution haze over the city. I didn’t notice it at ground level, and even though everyone complains and wears masks, I just looked it up and Oakland’s twice as bad. What’s odd is my allergies were 100% better in Vietnam. I’m not sure if there was less pollen, a different growing season, or I’m only allergic to the domestic stuff. It was a nice break, though.

Anyway, I wandered after that, and went to the Hotel Continental. Ducked inside to look at the lobby, and didn’t stay long. It’s one big room, a straight shot with four people at a desk staring at me as I’m hauling around a full-sized camera and lens. I took a quick look at the history mural next to the gift shop (all jewelry in there, no logo polo shirts) and they mention Graham Greene living there, but of course gloss over Hunter Thompson’s brief stay in room 37. By the time I left, it was noon, a hundred degrees out, and the sun was pounding down full force.

In my quest to eat everything but Vietnamese food (not really, but that’s how it’s been going) I went to the only German restaurant in town. It was straight up old school American Bavarian food, full menu. Asked for a speisekarte, bitte - turns out they speak less German than English. Fair enough. Got a bretzel mit käse, und currywurst. Tasted like the curry was made with their weirdo ketchup, so I scraped it off and used a bottle of “US mustard” (generic yellow mustard). Sausage was also slightly off in consistency, like the fat ratio was wrong. Oh well. Great posters on the wall, probably from eBay, or actually they were all lo-res and maybe they just printed them from the JPEGs on an eBay listing.

Wandered around more to take more pics. Went to the giant statue of Uncle Ho and it’s more fun to pretend to take pictures of the statue but actually take pictures of the people posing in front of the statue, and try to catch them before or after they stiffly post for their spouse or tour guide. I’d run into westerners and say hi, and most were tourists from New Zealand or France or some other European country. Sometimes in front of the HCM statue, I’d see an old Vietnamese guy my dad’s age, weathered face, zero BMI, and wonder if he was a PAVN regular on a once-in-a-lifetimes trip down from Haiphong Bay to see the south before he went off to see Uncle Ho in the sky. Or maybe he was from Singapore and I’m an idiot.

Tuesday night, I had a street food tour. The tour was… something. It was maybe an hour walk from my hotel, off in district 3. I left at 5:00p and got to experience rush hour in full force as the sun was going down. There was a section toward the end of the walk where there was literally kilometers of mopeds stopped at traffic, eight wide, shoulder to shoulder. Imagine the entire Indianapolis 500 track filled wall to wall with Honda 50cc scooters, all idling. 

Met up with this guy Tâm, about my age, and we ducked in an alley and got to work right off. We ate I think four different plates and then two drinks (a cane sugar thing everyone drinks, and a smoothie from their weird alien fruits here.)  It was terrifying. Women who have never washed their hands in their lives cooking over open flame in the street handed me unwashed leafy greens, sauces that had been sitting at room temperature, and unknown organ meats. At one point, I had a bowl of Hủ tiếu, which is basically a bone broth with two kinds of noodles and then about a half dozen of the absolutely most horrific meats you can think of thrown in it. Mine had kidney, liver, tongue, shrimp that probably wasn’t cleaned, and something else. That was the point where I politely tried some of the broth, ate one piece of tongue, and then said nope, out. A lot of the food was great, but that was the line.

The guide was interesting. His dad was an ARVN Huey pilot. When the shit went down in 75, his dad left his entire family, loaded up a chopper with a dozen buddies, and flew to the USS Midway. He ended up getting moved to a commercial ship, then to Clark, then to Guam, then Arkansas. He’s in Lancaster, CA now. I don’t know if this whole story is made up, but we talked a lot about post-1975 Vietnam. He was Catholic, and he talked about how the government shut down Catholic schools and things went a bit quiet after the communists took over. There are more Catholics now, but there’s more of everything here now. It’s hard to believe it’s a communist country.

The walk home at night was one of those scenes of heavy contrast that burned in my brain forever. It was a Tuesday and the streets were full like Times Square on a Friday. It was beautiful to see all the signs lit up, kids out, people eating and shopping, mopeds zipping around, and the skyscrapers in the distance. I listened to this ambient album by Jon Hopkins and strolled through the night, surprised at how strange and different this town was from what had been put in my head the fifty years before.

---

There’s not an easy way to ease into this, but one of the main thought loops running through my head on this trip was what my idea of Vietnam was as a child of the Eighties, and how the Vietnam I was in was completely different. I felt a bit aloof or ashamed about that, how I was the Ugly American wondering why I didn’t see more stars and stripes everywhere.

I was fourteen years old on the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and I think that was an inflection point on the sentiment of Vietnam in America. Maybe I was too young in 1975, but I felt like immediately after the war, it wasn’t talked about and it was mostly forgotten or buried. But as Reaganism flourished and the military expanded and the cold war heated up, things were revisited a bit. I think some Americans were ashamed at how we treated or forgot the military after the war, and there was a massive shift in the other direction. And in various media, especially media consumed by a teenaged boy in Indiana, Vietnam was seen as a two-dimensional enemy and little more.

So Vietnam in my head in the 1980s: Rambo: First Blood Part II; Chuck Norris and Missing in Action; Mack Bolan novels. I built model airplanes with red star decals for each Vietnamese MiG the plane shot down. There were songs on the radio and MTV by Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen. They built the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. A lot of people didn’t like it, so they added a trio of statues next to it. By the end of the 80s, it seemed like everyone had a Vietnam movie: Platoon, Full Metal Jacket, Casualties of War, Good Morning, Vietnam, Hamburger Hill. Vietnam went from being a taboo subject to a complete saturation point.

I never learned about the Vietnam War in high school. I think in the last week of US history, we spent like two days on everything post-WW2, so it was vaguely mentioned, but that’s it. We didn’t talk about who actually won or lost the war. That seems silly, given that it was now one country, and it wasn’t a democracy, so it was fairly obvious that someone won, and it wasn’t us. I think if pressed on the issue, a lot of Americans would hem and haw about how the US left victorious in 1973 and the South Vietnamese later lost, or the US won all the major battles, or the US lost fewer people, or it wasn’t really a war anyway, or what exactly is winning? I think the bottom line though is that this wasn’t openly questioned and definitely wasn’t discussed, except maybe to say “let’s not have another Vietnam” any time military action came up, and spend more money on the military and tie on more yellow ribbons and have more parades and try to get it right next time.

As far as my own upbringing, my family was largely apolitical. My dad did serve in Vietnam, but didn’t talk much of it. None of my family went to college or was anti-war. I didn’t go to protests as a child, didn’t know anyone educated about politics or history. In today’s polarized political landscape, there’s a lot more emphasis on taking sides, and if you’re not on one side, you’re on the other. And the truth is, when I was a kid, most of the adults around me didn’t really support either side. They just worked their jobs and tried to feed their families.

The media narrative around Vietnam going into my college years was a wide range of sentiment, from glorification of war to regret to discussion of the futility of war. The American veteran gained a more nuanced role over time, as the country moved to this “support the veteran but not the war” stance. One can pull this thread on the sweater forever, but the main thing is that the view of the other side wasn’t entirely changed, at least in my head. Those common movie tropes and two-dimensional views of people were still in the back of my head.

And now, here I was, in Vietnam, surrounded by Vietnamese, in the country that won the Vietnam War. And it wasn’t just the backdrop of a Rambo movie, with character actors from Hong Kong playing cliched Viet Cong villains. It was… just people: shopkeepers, chefs, students, bellhops, bankers, mothers, tailors, teachers, mechanics. I burned a lot of mental cycles trying to integrate the Vietnam in my head with the Vietnam around me. It was good to be wrong, to see what it really was. But having the map not match the territory, so to speak, was something on my mind for the rest of the trip. And there was a strange combination of feelings around this: shame? Amazement? Regret? Wonder? I don’t know. I just wondered what the 1985 me would think of me being in Ho Chi Minh City almost 40 years later.

Wednesday

I was very surprised that I did not get sick from the street food during the night. I grabbed breakfast upstairs, then headed out for a long walk and to hit a few landmarks, most notably the War Remnants Museum.

I get it, history is written by the victors. I wasn’t expecting the museum to be entirely unbiased. And yeah, America is the bad guy, and they were the assholes, and everyone just wanted to farm rice, and they ended up with decades of 24/7 24-hour-a-day bomb runs on their villages. I didn’t expect a photo essay on American exceptionalism. But the museum was a bit much.

The only reviews of the museum you’ll find online talk about how graphics the exhibits are, and how it shows the truth of the conflict, and the horror of war. And it does show the war from the other side, the Vietnamese side. All of this is true. But as someone who’s wasted too much time reading history books, the whole thing was riddled with errors, and went to great lengths to not cover the South Vietnamese government, it really threw me. And it’s hard to say anything about that, because then I’m the asshole. Right?

The museum took great pains to never refer to South Vietnam as the South Vietnamese government. In every display, Vietnam (not North Vietnam) fought against France, then America. When they had to refer to the Republic of Vietnam, they would call it the “puppet regime” or “the illegitimate American-backed government.” Those semantics are understandable I guess; it’s their war. But I kept wondering what errors were bad translation or straight up propaganda. I mean, American museums are often similarly jingoistic or simplify things, and I’m not into that either. But at a certain point, I had too much, and had to call it a day.

One funny thing - they made a big deal out of the American anti-war protests, and there was a section with a newspaper showing how people in the US didn’t support the war. The newspaper was the Goshen News. It had Elkhart high school football scores as the above-the-fold headline. This “we should not be in the war” thing was probably written by a Goshen College professor. It was funny though to see Elkhart County depicted as this bastion of liberal tolerance. Anyway.

---

There was something disconcerting brewing in the back of my head, other than the usual mental distractions that take up too much real estate running in tight loops and draining my energy. I guess the only easy way to explain it was I didn’t know who I was in the scheme of what I was doing in Saigon, and if I was truly welcome.

First, I was somewhat skittish about mentioning to anyone that my dad was deployed to Vietnam. I really didn’t know the sensitivity level of this. On one hand, a lot of people in the south have family who were ARVN or worked for the RVN. And 60% of the population was born after the last Americans left in 1975, and weren’t alive for any of it. But I’m sure there’s a large amount of the population who has resentment about the war, and aren’t happy to see dumb American’s plodding around the country, flashing their money and talking loud when people don’t understand them.

I understand there’s a big problem with the “sexpats” and the drunken idiots causing trouble. And I know there’s the “savior complex” of people acting high and mighty because they’re “helping” by spending their money in country. In Europe, there’s a lot of the “if it wasn’t for us, you’d all be speaking German” attitude. In Vietnam, well, the Americans were the ones who dropped seven million tons of explosives on them. It’s tough to argue we saved anyone there.

My street food guide was nice and cordial and interesting to talk to. But there was a moment when he talked to the people at the table next to us in Vietnamese, and I know he was talking about me. He said “blah blah blah San Francisco blah blah” and sort of laughed. And I don’t know if he was saying, “Check this out, I’m going to make this dumb white guy eat a cow tongue” or what. Maybe it was nothing. But it made me feel stupid for being there.

The war museum reinforced that thought. It was designed to make me feel guilty. Why was I even in Vietnam? Did they even want me there? Why do I go to any country? What was I doing?

This dovetails into this feeling that I have in general with why I travel and who I want to be. I’m often unhappy with who I am and want to change things, want to get better or write more or do something else or be something else. And when I’m traveling alone, I’m looking at sophisticated business people and happy families together and affluent travelers and everyone else and wondering what I am. I book these trips maybe in some hope of thinking travel will make me happy or define who I am or teach me something. When I’m on day four of a long trip, I often realize this is definitely not true. Would I have been better off sinking this money into a new guitar or donating it to orphans or investing it in the stock market, or what? Why was I overheating in a land where I couldn’t grok the language or deal with this food, especially if I didn’t even know who I was or if I was even welcome there?

---

I walked more, but quickly felt like I was getting heat stroke. I went to Book Street, which is a pedestrian mall where a bunch of open-front book stores face this one street, along with a few cafes and such. It was cute, but the last thing I needed was to drag around twenty pounds of books in the hundred-degree heat. I wandered around dehydrated and went to another giant mall and ended up at a fake Italian place where I got an almost passable mall pizza. I then stumbled back to the hotel, hit a 7-Eleven on the way to get caffeine and junk food, and sat in the air conditioning until dinner.

Dinner was once again crazy, but in the opposite direction. I went to Anan Saigon, which is HCMC’s only Michelin-star restaurant, and it was coincidentally just a few doors down from my hotel. It’s chef Peter Cuong Franklin’s place, and it’s in a tube house in the wet market. It has a bunch of different floors for a noodle shop, a bar, and the actual restaurant. I ordered the chef’s menu, and they put me at this bar, where I was shoulder-to-shoulder with other eaters, but we didn’t talk to each other. Also, two of the girls there were influencers (or whatever) and had this whole setup with tripods, gimbals, and lights, which was sort of disconcerting.

The food was great, but very performative, I guess. Lots of single bite food, esoteric combinations, everything done with interesting textures, like little works of art. This is typical for this type of restaurant, and the nice touch here was that this eleven-course meal basically followed food across the country, like it told a story with the journey. The best item was a foie gras spring roll. The weirdest one - they had a pigeon roulade. Yeah, pigeon. Tastes like chicken. Really bad chicken. Overall though, the food was pretty good, and very beautiful.

As is usually the case with these things, I finished 11 courses and was still hungry after. I stopped by Circle K on the way home for an ice cream bar, and avoided all the cat-calling from the women trying to get me into the lady bars and separate me from my cash.

Thursday

On these solo trips, I always get to the point where I hit the wall. The planned excursions are done, things around the hotel are looking a bit too familiar, and I’m done with the food. I always end up feeling very alone because I don’t speak the language, I’m too much of an introvert to hunt for expats or people who want to talk, and everyone online is asleep when I’m awake. I try to avoid this by booking more stuff to do, but I didn’t get anything set up for Thursday. I looked at Expedia a bit after breakfast, thinking maybe I could get some kind of last-minute boat cruise or an air-conditioned van tour, but I didn’t want to deal with a twelve-hour trip filled with me trying to be social with old people from the Midwest or tour guides who only act nice for a tip. (I also really did not want to explain for the 17th time why I don’t live with my parents or have kids.)

I went for a walk before the temp really heated up. Just south of my hotel is the location of the first US Embassy. It’s at 39 Hàm Nghi Boulevard, and that four-story got hit by a VC car bomb in 1965 or so. That building did survive the war, but I found it’s now razed and there’s a construction project going on, probably some anonymous 40-story office complex. I walked near the site of the second embassy when going to the museum the day before, the one with the helicopters on the roof, the VC sappers under the wire at the perimeter during Tet, etc. It’s a park now, torn down in the 90s. There’s a new consulate next to it, opened in 2000. It’s a single-story thing behind a wall, and looks like the community center at an inner-city housing project built in 1974. It was so weird to me because I just saw in my journal from today in 2016, I saw the embassy in London. And that place is a real “Mini-America abroad” situation, with a limestone building that looked like it was teleported from Georgetown, ringed with bollards and anti-terrorism gear, MSGs toting MP-5s in a gunless country. I’m guessing the embassy in Hanoi is the deployment Marines have to endure before they get a nice one in Europe.

I went to an art museum nearby. It was an old colonial compound and not air conditioned. It was like looking at oil paintings inside a brick pizza oven. No cameras allowed, but cell phones were, which is annoying. I only made it halfway through the first floor and then left. There was one funny room of all paintings of Uncle Ho, pictures of him playing with kids or standing majestically on top of mountains. 

Went back to the Saigon Center mall for lunch, hoping to increase my salt intake to help out the heatstroke. I was the Ugly American and went back to McDonald’s. The McNuggets are identical in Vietnam, and they have regular sweet and sour sauce, unlike India. After lunch, I walked top to bottom through the mall to check out the stores in the half-million square feet of retail space. Every time someone starts talking about the evils of communism, I’m going to post a picture of empty store shelves in a US Target and then a picture of this giant glass and chrome tower filled stem to stern with gear from every luxury chain store imaginable. You could perform surgery on the floor of the mall there, and I even saw a little robot sweeping the corridors. This very much was not the Vietnam of Chuck Norris movies. It reminded me more of the super high end malls of Singapore.

Back at the hotel, I didn’t do anything until 5:00 when the sun started to set. I went on a random walk and then realized I was very close to the Pittman Apartments, which is the setting of the infamous picture of the “last chopper leaving the embassy.” It wasn’t the last chopper to leave, and it wasn’t the embassy. It may or may not have been a CIA building, depending on who you ask. It’s now next to another giant mall, and I had to see if I could get a shot of it.

To get a view of it was bizarre, and I’m glad I found an article describing it. You go in an alley between two storefronts, walk up a set of stairs, traverse through an apartment building, go to an external staircase, walk up six floors, crane all the way over, and you can see it from a 90 degree angle, which doesn’t look like the pictures, because you can’t see the elevator shaft from that angle. Someone said if you go to some rooftop bar two blocks away with a 300mm lens and the right light, you can see it better. Or go to the chemical company that now operates in the building, give the doorman a half-million VND, and hope he looks the other way so you can catch the elevator. The whole thing was so weird, because the building looks like a typical CIA building from 1959, but there’s this gigantic mall next to it, and every other slot on the street below it is like a Circle K or Sunglasses Hut or whatever.

After that quest, I went to the Continental, and ate dinner at their big bougie restaurant where Graham Greene would have eaten every night, or HST would have drank a dozen Singapore slings. There were a couple of old people there, but it was otherwise empty. Had a decent but ho-hum chef’s menu with a lobster bisque and a steak, and ate in silence, watching the traffic outside, in front of the opera house. The view was nice. The dinner was like $180 for basically what I’d get from room service at a Hilton in Pennsylvania. The view was nice, though.

The way home was crazy. It was just a random Thursday night, but it looked like New Years Eve. Lights and spotlights and people everywhere. There was some weird Pepsi thing, a giant can of Pepsi ringed in neon, loud pulsing techno music with Vietnamese lyrics blaring, lights everywhere like a rock concert. Maybe it was a rock concert, or a lip-synced thing with their version of k-pop stars. (v-pop?)  Or maybe they had a Tupac-style hologram of Uncle Ho up there, dancing with Hanoi’s version of Taylor Swift. Saigon is anything but a sleepy little city, especially in District 1.

Friday

Friday was my last day. In WTF news - Vo Van Thuong, the President of Vietnam, resigned the day before. Or “was asked to resign” maybe. Turns out there’s a big anti-corruption campaign he was in charge of, to stop the rampant bribery here, and he did something that made the party say, “yeah, maybe you need to go spend some time with your family.” I know nothing about politics in Vietnam, but I’m guessing the bribery culture here isn’t cool to multinationals looking to invest.

---

After my last breakfast upstairs, I started packing, throwing things out, shifting stuff between my three bags, planning the long trip, wrapping it all up. While I paced and packed, I gave my dad a call.

Like I mentioned, my dad was in Vietnam, under different circumstances, in 1968-1969. He was never in Saigon; he flew to and from Cam Ranh AFB, then spent his tour at Phan Rang AFB. Both are on the coast, five or six hours from Saigon. Cam Ranh is now an international super-airport; Phan Rang is a VPAF air force base. There’s a lot of nothing surrounding it, and not any way for me to get close enough to do some then-and-now pictures. In the 55 years since he was there, a lot of the American presence is gone, torn down or overgrown.

I was hesitant to go to Vietnam because I didn’t know what my dad would think, and didn’t want to offend him or bring up anything bad. He went from seldom talking about the war when I was a kid to really embracing the veteran’s movement in recent years, always wearing a hat or a jacket, talking to others who do the same. I guess I didn’t want to appear to be giving back to the enemy or anything like that. I don’t really know how much the Vietnam of Ho Chi Minh and 1975 has to do with the Vietnam of 2024. It feels like they are different countries, different states of mind. He seemed almost excited I was there, and told me some stuff about his time in Vietnam. It was a good chat.

My dad is my connection to Vietnam, but the obvious connection is I would not be here if it wasn’t for Vietnam. My parents met when my dad was in training outside St. Louis, and when he was about to ship out, they quickly married. I didn’t come up until the next stop along the way, after he’d returned. But there’s the connection. If the military wasn’t a thing and my dad had stayed in his small town in Michigan and worked at a lumberyard or pumped gas, he never would have met my mom, and… well, who knows what would have happened with me. So I felt some strange duty to see the place that was responsible for me, and I did.

---

The last day’s festivities included a three-hour jump to Taipei, a three-hour layover in Taiwan, then the 11-hour flight over the Pacific. I did upgrade to the “premium leg room” or whatever they now call it. Because of the time jump, I would land in San Francisco on the same day, four hours ahead of when I took off.

The flight back was okay. I had a rough cab ride to the airport, through lunch traffic on surface roads, lots of stop-and-go, affording one last look at the city. I got checked in with no problem, although the two people in front of me had their carry-ons plus fifteen bags or boxes, all pushing the 50-pound limit. I luckily got pulled into another line as they went through all the labor to get those weighed and sorted.

Ate at a Burger King at the HCMC airport. It was largely the same as a US one, which means it was pretty blah. Actually, it was just the “greatest hits” menu (Whopper, etc) because every time I go in the US, there’s a cornucopia of random new things on the menu that week: tacos, sliders, donuts, chicken sticks, etc. 

On the flight to Taipei, I was sitting next to a guy who I swear was the Vietnamese version of my dad. After the war, he worked for 20 years as a fisherman in Seattle. He kept showing me pictures on his phone of like every fish he’d ever caught and all of his friends’ cars, and started the whole “when you come to Seattle, we get seafood” thing, and I really didn’t want to exchange phone numbers with him and start getting random texts every time he had a Facebook question. Actually, it would be funny if he and my dad became friends and talked about fishing.

The Taipei airport is fairly insane, gigantic. Every gate is basically a sponsored lounge of some sort, themed or filled with artwork. Like it’s not just gate C7, it’s a Hello Kitty-themed Sanrio lounge. It’s also got a duty-free supermall in the middle of it. For whatever reason, I went to the McDonald’s to eat. They do not have their act together there for some reason; everything tasted way off. I don’t know where they get their meat, but it’s wrong. I only ate maybe a third of my burger and threw the rest out.

On the EVA flight home, I got a seat on the exit row, the ones that have like ten feet of leg room, but nowhere to put your stuff. I did not want to sleep, but I couldn’t get my computer or do anything else. I watched the first five minutes of ten different movies, and took some vague notes on my phone for this story. I couldn’t really process everything that happened, but knew I would in the weeks to come. I still haven’t. I need to do more work on this.

I landed at SFO in the pouring rain, the temperature roughly half what it was when I left. After standing in the rain to catch an Uber, I got home, ate a burger, and collapsed. My Apple Watch said I had 34 stand hours on that Friday.

I’m back. My brain is still there. I’d quote the “When I was here I wanted to be there” line from Apocalypse Now, but it doesn’t entirely make sense. Or does it?

I had a business trip to Anaheim a few weeks ago and felt some need to document it, since it’s the first time I’ve left the house since Christmas, and it was an unusual journey. But I don’t talk about work here, and 95% of the trip was work, despite its unique location. And I don’t want to sound ungrateful about the opportunity. And I am not a super-fan of the location, but I’m not an anti-fan either. So, there’s a conundrum here, which is why I did not enthusiastically belt out five thousand words of copy while my plane was still in the air on the way home. How do I approach this one?

---

OK. I first went to Disney World when I was twelve, on a family voyage where we loaded up the station wagon and drove from Indiana to Tampa for a week at Busch Gardens, then on to Orlando for a week at Walt’s thing and the then-new Epcot center. The plan was to escape the Midwestern cold for Florida sun and heat, but they had a freak storm of the century where it actually snowed while we were down in Orlando. I think I’ve told this whole story before, but anyway, that was my childhood experience with Disney and my first experience with Florida.

Smash-cut to 1997 I went to Disneyland in Anaheim with my then-girlfriend. She was a Disney person and wanted to do the whole deal, so we stayed at a hotel across the street from the park and I spent most of the time shooting with a Hi8 video camera and comparing the much smaller park with the distant memories of the bigger and newer Florida version. Oddly enough, I wrote about this trip in one of the first entries in this blog. Even though it was 15 years after my childhood journey to Orlando, I felt like this 1997 trip was in the same general era, because both of them were in the analog era, and before explosion in size of both parks with all the Pixar, MGM, Star Wars, adventure land, animal kingdom, and whatever else is going on now.

---

Semi-related: when I was at a trade show in San Diego in 2000, I drove up to Anaheim for some stupid reason. Actually, I ended up going to Santa Monica to have dinner with a fan and on the way up, I thought it would be interesting to zip up Harbor Blvd and see if my 1997 memories jived with my 2000 feels. I know that’s stupid, but whatever, this was before I could just look at Google Street View to depress myself. I stopped at a McDonald’s there and wrote some thoughts down in a notebook, mostly that it all looked so familiar and yet so run-down and beat, that strip of fast food and aged motels just outside the purview of the Disney corporation. This little run ended up being in another book, probably because it was one of those colliding-worlds thing. That 1997 visit was very wound up with my time in Seattle and my girlfriend in Seattle, and the 2000 visit was very much a New York world thing.

I doubt any of this makes much sense, but it somewhat tees up a 27-years-later visit from yet a different world, maybe.

---

I did absolutely zero planning for this trip. I would fly down Monday afternoon and back out Thursday afternoon. I had to schedule the flight and the Uber to the airport, but everything else was arranged by the company as a package deal. They told me to download the Disney app, put in my work email, and I’d magically have everything set up. That was the case.

I flew into LAX, and normally have the usual I-miss-LA flashbacks to 2008. Maybe the 2021 trip down partly cured me of that, but I didn’t think about it at all. I brought a single duffel bag and my usual computer laptop, no camera gear and no personal laptop, just my work stuff. The trip down and back was quick, and nothing remarkable.

The whole deal was at the Grand Californian Hotel, which I think was a parking lot when I was there in 1997. It’s on the west side of the park, and the first thing I noticed was that this side was not near anything. I think I’d have to walk at least a mile to get to anything non-Disney, and that would be just other hotels or the convention center.

I spent almost all of my time at the Grand Californian. My room, the work event, and all the meals were there, so not much to report. Breakfast started at like 7:30am and meetings and dinners lasted until 9 or 10 (or later) each night. It was pretty much the same as if we were in a hotel in San Mateo or Denver or Indianapolis or anywhere else. The only weird thing was that we saw troves of people walking around the hallways wearing mouse ears and with strollers and fanny packs and all the other tourist talismans and gear, which was odd amongst the sales talk of ARR and MAU and everything else. There was such a strange collision between the two worlds, and I wonder what it was like for these people who flew in from the Midwest or whatever to go on vacation and see all these startup people with laptops wandering around their Disney experience.

---

I had exactly four hours on Wednesday to experience Disney. We each got a pass for the park and a fifty-dollar gift card to use on refreshments or whatever. Someone asked me earlier that day what my top two rides would be. I said the Haunted Mansion and Space Mountain. Both were closed. I didn’t know what to do, and ended up in a rush to find rides I wanted to ride and figure out some game plan to get on them.

My first observation of the post-analog Disney is that everything is monetized to the point of absurdity. One used to get admitted to the park and then ride everything all day. Now there’s a whole maze of passes and bands and services and tiers and things in the app, where you have to buy Genie+ and find reservations and sign up for slots and get in different lanes and… I don’t even know what. I think you had to wait an hour, or smash a bunch of buttons and put in a strong enough credit card and take the pain. I paid about sixty bucks to get on four rides in four hours.

Having a phone in the park was an obvious plus. I don’t know how I would have been able to find and coordinate with others without it. Also, the app has a map, plus shows all of the wait times, which is half useful and half an incentive to shovel more money at them for the FastPass or EZPass or whatever. Another plus was that while I was standing in line forever, I could play Duolingo and pump Slayer straight into my brain to drown out everything and everyone.

Another thing the phone changed was that nobody had cameras at all. I think maybe I saw someone with a mirrorless here and there, but nobody carted around camcorders or big cameras. That was a fascination of mine, a peoplewatching fixation point, looking at what giant Sony kit people were lugging around to tape their four-year-old dropping ice cream on the ground. Those kids now have kids. I wonder what happened to those old tapes, just like how I wonder what happens to all the video that people shoot on their phone, upload to a cloud service that will go bankrupt in two years, and then forget all about it.

The park closed at 8:00 because of some valentine’s thing. I went back to my room to go straight to bed and prepare for a 04:00 product release the next day, then realized in the mad rush of trying to get on rides I’d totally forgotten to get dinner. I ordered a greasy pan pizza from room service and tried to watch TV. I think they purposely make TVs in Disney properties horrible so you will leave the room and spend more money. The pizza was not bad.

---

I said I was not a Disney superfan, and that doesn’t mean I’m an anti-fan. I honestly don’t have any strong feeling either way. I don’t think it really burned in when I was a child, and I was already out of college and working when the first Pixar movie came out. I know people who are Disney superfans, and honestly, I’m slightly envious of those who can have that strong sense of joy wrapped up in a place they can go and see and visit. It’s the same way I feel about people who have a strong sense of camaraderie about sports, where a stadium is “home” and they can be with tens of thousands of people who dress alike and have the same shared experience. I’ve tried, and maybe it’s because sports was not in my childhood, but I’m not wired for it. I wish I was.

I’ve spent a lot of my midlife crisis pondering this, wondering if I just bought a boat or started collecting baseball cards or got a cabin in Montana or went to coin shows if I would find my people, if I would find joy in something I could easily purchase or fixate on. And that’s not the answer. It’s great if it works for you, but for me, I know I can’t get lost in it, and that’s what I need.

And that put me in this unfortunate position, surrounded by people who paid large amounts of money to be at their Happiest Place on Earth, and I’m not exactly there at gunpoint, but I am there to work. So, yeah.

---

There was no time to go see LA. I didn’t even leave the grounds of the park. On Friday, I did an Irish goodbye, grabbed an Uber, and had an overly enthusiastic Korean driver who wanted to be my new best friend when I told him I used to work for Samsung. On the loop in to LAX, I did feel a very slight nostalgia/homesickness as we cruised through Hawthorne and El Segundo on the way in. Had a quick flight back, and then a quick Uber home in time for dinner.

I have a much bigger trip in a week. More on that later.