24th June 2006 – Saturday – Home / HCMC
Today is my 14th day in HCMC. I did not have enough chance to travel around. The only day I traveled in the city was last Saturday. I have spent almost every evening last week to look for an apartment. I met with four different real estate agencies and checked more than 10 houses. The result is almost perfect. I rented an apartment with a reasonable price. It has a large living room with a nice kitchen. There is a lofted bedroom and there is an empty area on upstairs. The agency will contact with the local companies to install ADSL and cable TV as soon as possible. There were many houses like this but somehow this one is cheaper than others. We even did not need to buy so many kitchen utensils for this apartment because the land lady left most of the kitchen tools. After having two noisy weeks, this is like being in a vacuum for a short time. There are no more motorbike engine sounds, no honks and no yelling. Here is definitely another place in HCMC. According to some friends, there are many Korean nationals in these blocks. Most of them are investors or high-ranked company employees.
Today is also our first shopping day in Vietnam. We went to a near supermarket to buy basic things to start off. We bought rice cooker, iron, some cheese and bread. I was hoping that bread in Vietnam could be more delicious than bread in Thailand but today I realized that I was wrong. It is as bad as the bread in Thailand. Actually, I had to try other shops before making a claim like this. Anyway, we came home but J said we forgot to buy some basic things for Thai cooking. I went to supermarket again and bought fish sauce, Soya sauce, oyster sauce, garlic, onion and other things which are essential in Thai cooking. At the end, I realized how much I miss home-made Thai food.
I got my timetable from the school. I work from Tuesday to Saturday. I will be off on Sunday and Monday. It will be very interesting to have Monday off since everybody will go to work but I will stay at home as if it is Sunday. Now, my beautiful Sundays turn to beautiful Mondays. My schedule seems easy and I hope I will have a lot of time to read, write or even study for actuarial exams. Eventually, I will be teaching statistics which I have been teaching for last six years as a part of high school mathematics curriculum. The only difference is I should avoid theoretical parts and focus on applications in Business. The level of the curriculum is a little bit higher than high school level. The Program Manager told me that students are very good in Math. This means my job will be easier than I thought.
Yesterday morning I saw a man with a 2 meter-long snake on his shoulders. He was walking on the streets and showing his snake to the people. I was irritated but the people around him seemed to be very relaxed. He also had a basket in his hands in which there were snake skins and other things which can be considered as ‘snake products’. Later I learnt that this guy sold the snake. The potential customers are Vietnamese people of Chinese origin. They drink some kind of whisky which is made of snake’s body and other ingredients. Disgusting enough but they believe that drinking this whisky makes their life longer and it also has aphrodisiac effects. Besides, it is obvious that the image of snake as an immortal being spreads all over the world. Because snake renews its skin and rejuvenates itself, people in ancient times praised snake as a symbol of immortality. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the immortality ixir is drunk by a snake just after it was discovered by Gilgamesh (or Lokman in Islamic legends).
There are a few people using helmet in HCMC. It could be 1% of whole motorbike drivers. This only explains why the casualty rates are very high. Our school gave us free helmet and made it compulsory to wear while coming to school on bike. It is good since people sometimes need obligations to understand the value of life. Once you enter the main roads of the city, the first thing to see is a thick and black stream of motorbikes moving in all directions. They do not mind small accidents. When I went to pick J from airport, I took a motorbike taxi. Because the driver of the motorbike did not stop at red light, one girl coming from right direction needed a sharp brake. She could not stop and her bike slipped on the wet asphalt. She fell but my driver did not react as he had to (another prejudice, isn’t it?). He just laughed as if it was her mistake to fall. I told him that it was because he did not stop at red light. Then he said something in Vietnamese which I could not understand. He continued laughing while I was worrying about the young girl. (Probably a high school girl who should not drive motorbike by herself.) This happened when motorbike had hit me too. They don’t stop unless it is a real bloody scene. This might be one of the reasons for constantly moving traffic. There is no waiting on the roads of HCMC but death waits at every corner for their ignorance.
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