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Brother talked to me before we got here about Vietnamese coffee. It's pretty much a shot of espresso mixed with lots of sweetened condensed milk, served with so much ice it's almost more like a slushie (though just in general they serve everything with too much ice, which is fine with me because I've always loved too much ice). Sometimes they'll have it with lots of sugar but no cream. It's good but incredibly thick and sweet, and I'm constantly tempted to pour the tea they serve it with in the cup to water it down, only I'm a little afraid they'll all think I'm weird (though I'm not sure if it would be any weirder to them than the way Clay insists on drinking his coffee with NO SUGAR OR CREAM.)
What Clay didn't warn me about was just HOW MUCH coffee they drink. This probably does have a little to do with the fact that we live next door to the cafe, but still. Every time you go to someone's house (which we did a lot the first few days), they will insist you drink coffee with them. Every time you've been on the road for a little while, someone will insist on stopping at a cafe. Every time you're sitting around at home around the time intervals at which you might be offered water or something else to drink in America, someone will come at you with a coffee. I think I had under ten cups of coffee my first day here, but not MUCH under. And that's with trying to turn them down.
Usually, at least, there's a pot of tea with it to drink afterward, but never water. It's always a little surprise to see water when we're out (at home there's a big jug of it we can drink from, though I've almost never seen anyone else in the house but us do so), especially in restaurants. A couple days ago we were having some sort of fruit-salad-drink-thing at a roadside stall and they actually served some to us, though.
But they served it with shot glasses.
And that's usually how it seems to go. Coffee = large glass, tea = small cup, water = pewny tasting vestibule. I guess I shouldn't be surprised I've almost never caught anyone here actually using a bathroom.
Maybe after reading all that you know better than to wonder, but in case you had any doubts and are trying to figure out what the children drink, I did indeed see a maybe-seven-or-younger already hyperactive child served the espressosweetmilkdrink (later, she spent a good couple hours tirelessly spitting on us and trying to pry the digital camera from my hands. In a friendly way, though) together with all the adults. When Clay tries to tell people he's had trouble sleeping and doesn't want to drink coffee at 10pm, sometimes they answer back, “Why?”
When he tried to look up the word for caffeine in the Vietnamese dictionary, he instead found a phrasal definition that said, “stuff that is inside coffee.”
Since we've been visiting people less and they're maybe starting to learn we don't want to drink coffee that often, I think my coffee intake has gone down to four or so cups a day. Someday, when we can, we hope to sneak away to the market to buy bottled water to smuggle in our rooms. Till then, I only feel sickly dehydrated sometimes.
( Read more... )
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(This picture contains foreshadowing. What do you think is about to happen?)
After we got out of the airport, we were greeted by our family and taken home in a rented van. From my seat in the middle of the second row I had a really good view of the road in front of us, and consequently spent the entire trip trying to suppress the urge to laugh.
Most people here get around on scooters. As I watched them, I kept getting the suspicion no one on the road was headed anywhere really important. Probably anyone who actually cared about getting to their intended destination in this lifetime would not travel around so many other scooters and cars either without having or without following any rules regarding speed, distance from other vehicles, turning, passing, or trying not to die Traffic signals seemed more a suggestion to stop rather than an obligation.
The sheer, constant life-threateningly dangerousness of it all was fantastically, horrifyingly amusing. Any time at which I as a driver would have slowed down to make sure not to kill someone (multiple scooters I would have sworn must have grazed the vehicle, people on foot running across the road and looking likely at their present speed to cross paths with the van, swarms of scooters turning in front of us to get to the other side of the road), my uncle would honk the horn and otherwise decline to react in the slightest.
I know humans are all the time disconcernedly doing things that are bad for them or will lead them to an early death just because that's how they've learned to act, but I have never seen such an incredibly immediate display of that behavior. If I had been at the window seat, I could have reached my arm down and patted crazy people on the head (or helmet, rather. In the few years since Clay's been here, it seems they've started actually requiring the scooter riders to wear helmets for some reason) the entire way home!
Only I'm a crazy person, too, because I rode around Saigon on the back of one of those things earlier this week now. And also later while my driver uncle was drunk, because I had no other ride and didn't know any way to insist on some other means of transport, which ended with us stopping to discuss a drink at the cafe (just after we slowly and calmly drifted into a near head on collision with a large blue truck, though I don't think anyone else noticed).
Earlier while we were chatting with the family back home, Clay tried to suggest to Cousin Liem that he should go swimming in a canal, to which Liem said back, “I don't want to die early.” (This conversation also included Thao discussing her hopes for her baby's gender with us: “My husband, he say if baby is girl he happy, if baby is boy he hit me.”) I liked his response, only now it keeps running on loop in my head as we swerve to turn in front of buses and screech to halts as we nearly hit other swarms of scooters on the other sides of buses.
If we get to go to Saigon again, I want to go by bus. This doesn't actually mean I *will* get to go by bus. I'm just saying.
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pukiban's journal
