Sweating it out in Saigon

Vietnam can stun you – but not if you grew up in India, like me. To me, Vietnam feels like home, and more home than India sometimes. But Vietnam has so much in common with India, at least superficially, that on my very first evening here, I forgot I was in another country!

Until my first morning, when roosters woke me up to a cacophonous crowing match at 5 a.m. Now that does not happen in Indian urbania.

That’s how a typical day in Saigon begins for me. You’d think it was an unearthly hour for roosters to be crowing, but look out the windows, you’ll see old men already sitting down for a game of backgammon, women sweeping the alley, men grooming their roosters (yes, the same dreaded roosters that wake me up every morning), teens heading to the park for a game of badminton or ‘shuttlecock’, and school kids sipping pho and chanting trigonometric theorems.

Earplugs in, curtains drawn tight to block out the warmth of the sun, back to sleep.

The harsh Saigon sun manages to pierce through my dark brown curtains around eight. There’s no point in staying in bed anymore. I wake up and head downstairs for a drink of soy milk. Fresh milk is hard to come by in Vietnam, and expensive. For a dair-oholic like me, it’s a tough choice between no milk and soy milk.

It’s a weekday. I don’t have to go anywhere. I teach ESL classes in the evenings.
But I need to plan for lunch. The street outside my alley (everyone in Saigon lives in alleys – well, almost everyone) has a vegetable market every morning.

I step out into the searing heat, armed with a bamboo beach hat and sunglasses, at half-eight, but by then, the freshest vegetables are already stewing in someone’s pho. Yet, the tomatoes, onions, garlic, ginger, avocado, eggplant and okra I buy are some of the finest specimens I have come across.

I stop by at a friendly flan-seller’s stand. It’s not really a stand. She sits on a low stool, her glass case is in front of her, just big enough to hold twenty plastic cups of flan and icy lentil drink.

She can’t speak any English, but I love her ready smile, and she makes a mean flan-ice-coffee. First, she packs half a cup with crushed ice, carefully scoops a caramel flan into it, and tops it with a few shots of Vietnamese black iced coffee. Now, if you know anything about Vietnam, you’d know there’s a strong coffee culture here, and Vietnamese coffee is among the best in the world. That flan-ice-coffee is as good as it gets on a sweaty morning.

Back home, marinate the Basa fish fillets, sauté the veggies, and lunch is done.

There’s not much one can do in the oven that is a Saigon summer afternoon. Sit home, bask in the breeze of the air-conditioning until it’s time for school.

I’ve been here a few months, and I’m over the period where I’d be slaving away over lesson plans. I don’t usually go to school before 5 pm, and I’m out by half-ten. My evening students are teenagers – mostly friendly, mostly fun. High school students in Vietnam often have 12 hour days. Apart from school, they have extra classes, English classes, physical education classes, and even army training! I feel terrible having to teach the sleepy-heads, and the only way of getting round it is to play a ton of games and make the lesson less like one.

9.30 p.m. – It’s pack up time. A ten minute walk brings me to the backpacker district of Saigon. Pham Ngu Lao is a bustling two-block metropolis at night. The doner kebab stand looks enticing but they’ve hiked their prices twice since I’ve been here (just about four months).

Mmm.. the French pancakes beckon. For d25,000, or $1.5, that’s still steep by Saigon standards. The Sri Lankan restaurant, which opened this March and scored a spot among the most popular new restaurants in town, is closed now. This city is certainly in flux. The national bowl of pho gleams neoningly down at me from a dozen restaurants, but nah.. tonight’s a night for being adventurous, I decide.. geckos perhaps, or duck fetus.

With ice-cold beer of course, which really means, beer with ice in it, which inevitably waters the beer down, and then you’d have to order more, and more, and more…