(It's so not fun at all to hop on your new Vietnamese friend's mini motorcycle and ride around Ho Chi Minh City in search of yet more broken rice or egg sandwiches or French chocolate stores or sweet bean cakes at two in the morning or noon. It's not fun to ride to all the different temples in the city on one of those perilous machines that half the population in HCM owns — 8 million people, 4 million bikes — with a mask on your face to protect you from swallowing the black pillows of exhaust. It's so lame to hop on at night too, when all the lights of that fantastically lit city are beaming and all the people are out just to smile at you and offer you some food. Don't take the bikes. Unless, of course, you hate fun. Then smile at your friends and then the guys who say "moto ride?" and hand over some dong. Hold the back handle, look around.)

My first day in Vietnam I spent at the War Remnants Museum, the Ho Chi Minh City Museum, a lacquer ware factory and exploring HCM's nightlife. If I could do it again, I'd save the War Museum for the second to last day, and then on the last day I'd do something involving a lot of good food and colors. The Museum shook me. Here's what I wrote on the bus ride back:

-Nauseatingly graphic and detailed.
-Overwhelmingly tragic, horrid. Horror. Inhumanely horrid.
-SAS girls buying gifts at the shop and gossiping.
-Man asked his friend, "Are you okay?"
-Have felt horrified and been frowning for an hour or more. Since we got here.
-Felt a bit of relief while looking at children's drawings.
-Tiger cages pushed me over the edge. I had had enough.
-Girls sitting behind me are STILL talking about how they're worried if what they bought is really bam(expletive)boo or not.
-And we board an air conditioned bus on the same side of the road as a man squatting before his aluminum garage/house door/wall. It's raining.
-Girls are calling kids' artwork "cute" and they're distinguishing between what they think is art or not. (Something mean is written here.)
-(Some frustration spurred on by the consistent consideration of these adolescents who think each country is their personal party and shopping palace. Gah.)

I'm totally lost on this behavior of excessive consumerism the students exhibit on a regular basis and now feel even more part of a different world than theirs when they continue to show the actual disgusting amount of money they've inherited and are wasting on stuffy things and even more part of the same world as all these locals who laugh like me and are horrified like me and are completely happy with a good beer and some nuts just like me and who think the little kid on the corner who is selling packs of gum for six cents by way of dirty dancing and wriggling around like Michael Jackson and coming over and draping his tiny body over Anh-Tuanh's lap and staring up at him with no words but that face!

And then stealing Emily's umbrella so he can twirl it around in the air and gather more foreign and local attention because he's adorable in every big brown or blue or small black or electrically green eye that looks at him. So we had to buy some gum and chocolate filled peppermints. And also a rose. And Zoya bought a book. And I bought three oatmeal raisin cookies for a dollar from a man who came up to us in Zen Vegetarian Restaurant (there will be a photo posted of a kitchen; those three women were the only staff, and blushed as they nodded to my question "photo, you?") with no arms.

He sang, and offered all kinds of freshly baked and packaged goodies that Americans probably love to eat at all hours of every day, and he was right. Man, they were good.

People smile all the time. How are the natives looking at us? What are they thinking? I bought some grilled flattened banana and some kind of tart sugar covered nut centered chewy fruit from an elderly woman sitting on the sidewalk one night, and asked for both the banana and the fruit. She looked up at me, smiled a sealed smile, took my money and patted the back of my hand. I turned around, saw three kids looking at me, since my hair was curly, and knelt down to their level. I gestured towards the bag, and put my hand out to fill theirs with the chewy candied fruit. Their father, or uncle, or brother, or whoever the man was driving the motorbike all three of them were to mount, smiled and thanked me with a nod and his grey mouth. Everyone got on the bike, giggling, and smiling, molars sticky with sweet.

A man on a moto bike was for a moment riding directly below my bus window on the street. He didn't hesitate for a second to wink, smile and pat his empty backseat while all the time maintaining eye contact with me on a moving two-wheeled vehicle. By the way: the bikes are wild. So are the bicycles that are ridden right alongside and mixed in with the motorized ones. Some people wear bike helmets on the moto bikes, others wear construction hats. Some wear baseball caps, but most are covered in nothing but a large poncho which they tuck around the front of the bike, pull over their heads and let loose behind them in the rain. Vietnam has two seasons: hot and dry; hot and wet. We've come in the heart of the rainy season.

In every port so far it has rained. China, everyday. Japan, once or twice. Here it's more tropical rains: short and strong, and hopefully a bit of sunlight to temporarily, at least, show us the colors of this country. The glow of green everywhere outside of Ho Chi Minh. The reds and yellows of market; the brown of people.

There will be more, ti promesso. Tomorrow morning we port in Thailand.

PS: I got a haircut from five women at once. They shampooed/massaged my head for 30 minutes. The actual haircut took two minutes. It was fantastic.