Shallow Trenches

I will leave Vietnam in five weeks’ time. Between now and then I have only one weekend without commitments. My parents will be here for two hectic weeks at the beginning of July. The end is barreling down on me.

MCC has provided reading material to help us prepare for the process of reentry. We’ve been warned that returning home can be as difficult as moving away. We are encouraged to prepare for a different sort of culture shock.

So I’ve been taking stock of old memories, recounting the surprises I faced in my early days here. It seems probable that those same things, no longer surprising, will be shocking in their reverse forms. So what do I expect to surprise me?

I expect my most difficult task will be readjusting to relative solitude. Quiet streets — low in both senses of the word volume — with drivers insulated from each other by metal and glass, and startlingly devoid of families and young couples on motorbikes, will disorient me. Malls and box stores playing light rock radio will strike me as unpleasantly sterile replacements for markets and sidewalk stalls blaring Asian pop music. Assuming I’ll spend at least a short while living with my parents, the number of people with whom I share a house will drop from eight to two. Life will grow quiet. Perhaps too quiet.

That that house will be insulated both from the weather and from external noise will probably come as another subtle and depressing shock. It’s not that the noise of Hanoi is particularly enjoyable, or that I haven’t often felt like escaping it. But my tolerance for background noise and activity has been raised to such a point that a quiet Canadian town like St. Catharines may seem altogether eerily silent.

One other observation that constantly registered during my first month in Vietnam was how slender the Vietnamese are, both women and men. It no longer surprises me. A related surprise was how casually Vietnamese apply the term ‘fat’ to people who experience difficulty managing their weight (is the latter phrase oblique enough to be fashionable?). I will have to exercise discretion in comparing the height and weight of North Americans to southeast Asians.

And, of course, I’ll have to come to terms with being short again myself. On top of everything else, that may just send me fleeing back to Vietnam.

Someone known by the rather inscrutable handle “v!Nc3sl4s” has posted a pretty decent video of Hanoi traffic to the video sharing site Vimeo.

The time-lapse video of an intersection near Hoan Kiem Lake adds considerable excitement to an already dramatic experience by speeding everything up.

The video really gets good around the one-minute mark when you get an overhead view. Enjoy!

Hanoi crazy night traffic from v!Nc3sl4s on Vimeo.

I have uploaded two photosets from my trip to Laos. Click the pictures below to enter the albums.

The first is of Luang Prabang, which I wrote about previously.

Luang Prabang:

The second is of our MCC regional retreat in Vientiane. Expatriate service workers living in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos came together for a few days in April to share about our respective work and experiences, to visit MCC projects in Laos, and to enjoy the hotel swimming pool.

MCC Retreat, Vientiane:

How humid is it in Vietnam these days?

Shoes stored for a month on an otherwise dry tile floor end up looking like this (I cleaned the shoe on the right for comparison):

Mold grows on clothes, books, shoes. Anything, really.

That’s how humid it is in Vietnam these days.

How hot is it in Vietnam these days?

At a red light, motorbike drivers now jostle for a spot next to a truck or bus to enjoy its shade.

That’s how hot it is in Vietnam these days.

My photographs from India are finally online (I recently suffered a mild crisis of hard disk space). Clicking the picture below should take you to the album.

Alternatively, click here to go to the album on Flickr.

I’ve shown up in a few places around the web lately.  These links are mainly for friends and family who like to keep tabs on me.

• Rachel and Anna blog regularly about our shared experience in Hanoi with MCC’s SALT program.
• Erin, a SALTer in Cambodia, posted pictures of our exploits in Laos.
• Tim Nafziger, a young Anabaptist activist and writer, and Dale Suderman, a Vietnam war veteran, stopped by Hanoi on a recent tour through Vietnam.  Tim posted a blog entry about us. You can read about Dale’s reasons for visiting Vietnam here, and Tim’s here.
• Michal Garcia is a freelance photographer and friend of mine here in Hanoi.  He has let me use his big, expensive camera gear on a few occasions.  By a bizarre coincidence, we happened to meet each other in Luang Prabang, Laos on our respective vacations. Michal has posted pictures I took of him in Laos and at Minh’s Jazz Club on his blog.
• Just Massage, which I wrote about in an earlier blog entry, has a website featuring a picture of me receiving a Shiatsu massage.  You’ll just have to take my word that the back being massaged in the second picture on this page is mine.
• My friend, Lutheran vicar J.P. Cima has created a website for Hanoi International Church. I show up in a few of the photo albums, and many of the photographs in which I do not appear (only the good ones, mind you!) come from my camera.
• Anna, mentioned in point #1 above, is a communications officer with a small NGO in Hanoi.  As such, she occasionally uses her friends to promote various causes — like Just Massage in point #5.  Most recently she used the three Vietnam SALT volunteers as exemplary bicycle riders in a green transport campaign.
• After Tet I wrote a short letter to Charleswood Mennonite Church in Winnipeg, which was printed in The Grapevine, the church newsletter.  You can see a PDF of that letter here.