Heading out to the East Arm this weekend, to pull in a 200-year old Jackfish I'm going to dub 'old General Sherman.'
Seeing as I won't be around, here's another chapter in Jung's Asian Odyssey to tide you over. Here, Jung details his tour in 'Nam.
Cheers.
Damn,
SO we made it to Vietnam! Ho Chi Minh city, or as it used to be called Saigon.
Every morning when we wake up Ed asks me "what are you gonna wear today? I think you should go with the camo shorts, or maybe you should wear the camo shorts." OK, so I only brought one pair of shorts, and a pair of swimmin trunks. But I brought a bunch of drawers and a few shirts, so whats the big deal? But yeah, all the pics I eventually post will feature the same wardrobe. One of the 5 shirts I brought and the camo shorts. My hat needs to be thrown out yesterday too. The Asian broads at customs always ask me if I'm in the army. I tell em "no, but I carry a big gun." No I don't, I'm an idiot.
If I thought driving a motorbike in Thailand was crazy I couldn't even imagine thinking about doing it in Vietnam. I swear to god in Saigon motorbikes outnumber cars 100 to 1. I'm not lying. They have entire lanes that only bikes ride in, but the bikes ride in teh car lanes too. Thankfully everyone drives slow, and when you get cut off by a bike 65 times per hour you kinda get over the road rage that plagues us in Canada. We waited in traffic for 40 minutes to travel 3 blocks in rush hour the other day while I swear 10,000 motorbikes drove by. I'm fuckin serious, 10,000 bikes drove by, they go up on the sidewalk and just keep bike traffic moving while the meter kept running. Everyone drives a bike. If you drive a car in Saigon, you're either a cabbie, or a sucker. Or both.
So, the key in Saigon when crossing the street is to just walk in a steady pace and keep going, and no one will hit you. At least thats what I saw. Our cabbie stopped at three different hotels to find us one for $20 (which was actually pretty nice). I was like "oh shit, he just got hit, oh no he didn't" next stop, "oh shit, he's dead for sure... wait a second." By the third time I was like, this guy is a superhero or some shit, he moved through traffic like the wind through the willows. Literary gems folks. I'll be here all week.
In Asia no one tips especially the Aussies or Brits who comprise the majority of the stupid fat white people out here so when we drop a bit of a tip people are amazed. I had one old man who looked like he was 90 and had a back transplant done with a rubber spine by a blind guy try and carry my bags to our hotel room cause I tipped him $2. I said "sir, I don't even feel safe with you driving, standing, or even breathing, let alone carrying my bag." At least mine has next to nothing in it, so he didn't bend too much farther over as he piggy backed me up the 3 flights of stairs.
So after getting checked in we decided to get some fat (word to Jim Mullan). A while ago, Jim and I were talking and he said he wanted some fat. I asked him what he was talking about and he said "fat, you know, food." So we went to this diner in Kentville, Nova Scotia and got donair meat on a stick, which was then deep fried. If you're in Kentville ever, go to the diner on the hill by the hospital and ask for a "billy stick." If your arteries immediately harden as I've heard 1 in 7 do after a billy stick, the hospital is within staggering distance. Since that glorious day me and my crew just refer to all food as fat.
Alas, I digress.
On our way to fat (its also a verb), this lady stops us with a stack of books about 25 books high and says you want books? As I glanced at the stack I saw a few lonely planet guidebooks and since we of course have no book for India I asked her if she had India. She said "yes, hold on" which meant no, but I can get it. She dropped the stack of books at our feet and RAN across the insane traffic (not looking) to a store, then we watched as she ran across the street again to a store next to where we were standing. Then she came flying out the store and like a spectre flew through traffic a third time (why she didn't attack the stores on the same side of the road at once, I'm not sure) and then she showed up pouring sweat looking like she just got out the shower with the India lonely planet guidebook. She was so out of breath I was thinking, I could grab all her books and calmy walk away from her and she has no energy to catch me. So she handed me the book and gasped out "$10 sir." I looked at the poor woman who now needed a half hour in the shade and a cold drink and told her "$10? No way, I'll give you $3."
She looked so dejected and before she had a chance to say "no sir, $10" or what I would have said "you asshole, I almost got turned into roadkill so you fat white jerkoffs can go and get robbed in India" I said "i'm just joking ma'am heres your money." She also had 1984 by George Orwell, so I bought that too for $5. No thanks to Morgan, or Stu-Tang, or Predator, or Jackie, or any of the rest of you I asked to borrow it from. In truth I told them they needed to "give" it to me, cause the odds of it coming back are pretty minimal. When I told Morgan I wanted it he was like "well, are you gonna bring it back?" When I said no, Wade looked at me like I've never seen him look at me before. He said "did I just hear that right? You told Morgan he was an asshole cause he wouldn't let you take a book of his and told him you weren't going to ever bring it back?" I said "yeah, whats wrong with that?"
Thats how I roll, I expect a lot from my friends. But I give back in so many ways. Take these posts for example.
We decided that we were gonna go to the war museum after all, before the Bushes got their hands on the button, Vietnam was the war of our generation. Sure it ended before I was born, but I've seen Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July so I figured I was an expert. I realized that I'm just another stupid fat white person who watched these movies and believed that America was doing the right thing by being over there killing a bunch of people who don't look like me. GET SOME!!
For fear of treading on the cultural insensitivity I've been accused of in the past I won't get into the FACTS cause they get in the way of a good story, plus, some of the Americans might get pissed as they use this window to open a new porn browser (some of them videos take a while to load, or so I've been told).
The point is, America, FUCKED Vietnam. Plain and simple, they claimed the Vietnamese bombed a vessel of theirs in the surrounding waters so they had an excuse to open up complete genocide on these people, who I've grown fond of. Nevermind the fact that they killed 3 million people, 2 million of which were civilians, but they used a bunch of different Herbicides to defoliate the jungle in order to "gong the cong." Agent Blue, Purple, Green, Orange etc. Agent Orange was one of the worst ones as it had so much DDT poison in it. I'm sure this is not new to most people, but it was so upsetting to see the photos. DDT has now been banned by THE PLANET!
There is an entire section of the museum that showed all the birth defects that resulted from the Agent Orange. They sprayed it out the back of planes as they flew over the jungle, and unloaded something like 45 million litres of Agent Orange (and hundreds of millions of litres of other "agents") on the people that lived as peasants and rice farmers. The people are still being born backwards for fucks sake. There were pictures of people with three arms and half a spine and shit. There is a fetus in a jar, that I can't even describe it was so deformed and awful looking that I am gonna remember that for as long as I live.
I'm not gonna dwell on that shit, I mean, I can't say what I'd do if I was an American kid sent to war in Vietnam. I'd probably shoot anything that moved too. All in all, that museum was insane. There was a huge section of photos from American photographers who had been killed while taking pictures and some of them were crazy. One picture was of a group of Vietnamese peasants probably 3 families who looked genuinely terrified like they were literally staring down the barrel of loaded M-16's. The photo had the caption, and I'm paraphrasing here "we came upon this group and the guys were shooting anything that moved 'I screamed WAIT WAIT WAIT and took this photo, as I turned my back I heard the gunfire and couldn't bring myself to look back."
The picture had 5 or 6 children in it. I'm talking children, like too small to walk on their own, in their mothers arms. Brutal.
As an aside download the song Uncommon Valor. Its by Jedi Mind Tricks and its about the Vietnam war. The second verse is a true story about this guys dads experience in Vietnam. Towards the end of the song the guy says that his dad was so affected by agent orange that when he came back his mother gave birth to his brother and sister who were both born handicapped. The US still won't address any of the survivors of Agent Orange.
I'm wandering again, I know.
I bought another fuckin book outside the museum which was Robert Macnamaras IN RETROSPECT. He was the secretary of defense at the time of the Vietnam war and it was written after the war and he admits in it apparently that the US was so wrong and did so many awful things and should never have been there, I've got Orwell to deal with first though.
Oh by the way, I opened the books, every page has been photocopied and bound together. The people in Asia are mad resourceful, they photocopied 500 pages of a new york times bestseller and sold it to me for $5. I swear I'm gonna start lookin for work in Asia. I might actually buy a photocopier and set up shop in a $5 a night hostel and make a killing. I'm gonna start with the Da Vinci Code or Lord of the Flies maybe.
I'm all over the place with this one I realize, I'm being even more random than Herb. By the way check his blog out at www.slinginlingo.blogspot.com He's a cynical prick I went to University with, but funny as hell. Great guy too, even if he's a Canucks fan and a complete hater of the Flames.
After looking at all the insane artillery that the US dropped on the people we went to Cu Chin to see "the tunnels." I was drunk the night before and passed out about 3 minutes into the drive and apparently snored the whole way to the tunnels which were 45 minutes away. I asked Ed why he never punched me or something, and he said that him and the cabbie were laughing too hard to stop me. If anyone has heard me snore, that shit is no joke. I'm surprised Ed never pushed me out the cab. For the record, Ed snores like a bastard too so to counter the insomnia the malaria pills are inducing, we've started taking "other" pills to help us sleep, so if we do wake up in the night, its a nightmare to get back to sleep cause the other one is deep in sleep snoring like hell. In Asia the beds are close enough to touch each other, so basically, Ed and I have literally been snoring in each others ears for 3 weeks now. If I make it back alive from this trip I'm off everything, even Tylenol, I swear, I'm lying.
The Vietnamese dug these elaborate tunnels that were like 200km long and went all the way to the Cambodian border, which the US bombed the shit out of too by the way.
But yeah the tunnels are insane. People would stay in them for up to three months at times. Thousands of people underground to escape the Americans. They would eat, sleep, cook, everything in them. They were so narrow that I was feeling claustrophobic when I went in them. Eds tall ass was draggin and scrapin and gettin pounded in them, he was on his knees the whole way through as we went through them. The Vietnamese soldiers would cook early in the morning, and release the smoke at dusk 150 metres away from the cooking area so it looked like fog to the US planes. We saw a bomb crater from a bomb dropped from a B-52 bomber. The crater was 35 years old and grown over but was still 25 feet in diameter and like 20 feet deep.
Then they showed us the booby traps that the Vietnamese made with fragments from the US bombs. They were amazing. They would sharpen the shards of bombs into spikes and make all kinds of crazy trap doors that would end your Vietnam vacation pretty quickly. Not that I'm rooting for the Cong or anything, war is fucked, plain and simple, but they were ingenious. To fall in one of those traps, you wouldn't be begging to be pulled out, you'd be begging to be shot by your teammates.
Anyways, I'm done ranting about the Vietnam war. Do a bit of googling, or consult the worlds most reputable encyclopedia, WIKIPEDIA and read. Its amazing what you can learn when you use your eyes for things other than watching porn and doing liquid acid. Or so I've been told.
We went to the market for lunch the next day and walked through the fish section where we saw them gutting some of the weirdest looking fish I've ever seen. Some of them shits looked like fuckin dinosaurs I swear. It was bizarre. Flies all over the food, I was kinda like "should we be eating this?" Ed looked at me as if to say "whats wrong with you?" So we sat down and since no one spoke english we just pointed at our stomachs and then our mouths. Everyone sitting around us laughed at the two fat white boys, and pointed and yammered along in Vietnamese, which is one weird sounding language. What we got was two bowls of soup with some weird lookin meat and some weird lookin vegetables and some weird lookin shit floating on top. It was truly the weirdest lookin bowl of soup I've ever eaten, but it was delicious, absolutely amazing. It was so insanely hot in the market that the sweat was pouring off us as we loaded the hot sauce into it. I swear I'm comin back to Vietnam and next time I'm spending a lot more time here. Folks, I only went to one city for three days, and this is how I feel. I can't wait to see more of it. Predator gave me a list of cities to visit, but Ed and I are too retarded to plan a trip so we only made it to Saigon. But i'm coming back. No doubt about it in my mind.
So it was time to leave to go to Singapore. I bought a few things for my sisters (don't get excited girls its nothing major, as if they even read this shit) and wanted to mail them before I trashed the hell out of them in my backpack, which might actually be in need of replacement soon. There isn't much in the bag to pack around anything I buy so it will just get ruined in one baggage handlers toss. So I had an hour to get to the post office and get back to the hotel to catch our cab to the airport. Ed said "well I'll see ya when I see ya pardner." Ed is from the prairies of Alberta and was born with a gun in his hands and has been wearing cowboy boots all over Asia. He tipped his cap, chomped the end of his cigar and bid me adieu.
Unfortunately, the quickest way to get around the city is on the back of a motorcycle taxi. So guess how the fat white idiot got to the post office?
Everytime I leave to go travelling my mother tells me, "Jayyysunn, all I cyan sayy is, dat iss god dat you muss pray to at night becuh yuh in gods hands now." You know I'm not really into that religion stuff but after the trip to the post office on the back of a motorbike in a city of 6 million people, 7 million of which own a bike, I think she might be onto something.
I have to send my mother edited versions of these stories cause she almost cried when I told her about sleeping in a bombed out office building in Beirut, Lebanon years ago. Plus, the opium hunt would have her not only upset, but angry with me, and god knows I spent enough years doing that to her.
Long story short, there are a zillion motorbikes, and everyone drives slow but crazy. We actually saw an accident. The guy looked at the guy who hit him, neither fell off the bike cause they're going slow, looked at him as if to say, "hey asshole, I'd punch you if I didn't have 4 live chickens on the back of my bike, and since I'll never see you again, it doesn't really matter" and off they went.
So I got to the post office and asked for a tube to put the things in. I was told "no tube here, you go round cornah." I was thinking, OK no big deal, its just around the corner.
"Around the corner?" Ok I run out the post office, and my motorcycle cabbie is looking at me wondering why I'm running, I put my index finger in the air telling him wait one minute and run around the corner. He follows on the bike down the sidewalk and asks what the problem is. NEED TUBE FOR MAIL, NEED TO GET TO AIRPORT. There is a second post office around the corner, so I run in there, 45 minutes til our cab leaves the hotel. I wait in line for 5 minutes and talk to the nice lady, tell her where I need to mail it. She tells me go to station 1 for paperwork. Then take it to station 3, then station 6 to pay, station 4 to drop it off. So I go to station 1 and tell them I need a tube. "No tube here, you need go round corner." Fuck me.
I run out the post office, all the people are laughing at me, in a thick Vietnamese accent and brutal english someone yells "run Forrest" I turn around and everyone is laughing at me, a recurring trend. Cabbie looks at me like i'm retarded, I believe him immediately. He says "you need tube" and points across the street, I wanted to drop kick him, he sent me walking into a Mr. Bean skit. Across the street is a tube store. Only tubes. So this withered old Vietnamese couple help me out, the old man grabs a saw and saws off the unneccessary excess, sorts it out for me, I pay him 50,000 Dong (insert dick joke) which is the Vietnamese currency and equivalent to about 4 dollars Canadian.
SO we made it to Vietnam! Ho Chi Minh city, or as it used to be called Saigon.
Every morning when we wake up Ed asks me "what are you gonna wear today? I think you should go with the camo shorts, or maybe you should wear the camo shorts." OK, so I only brought one pair of shorts, and a pair of swimmin trunks. But I brought a bunch of drawers and a few shirts, so whats the big deal? But yeah, all the pics I eventually post will feature the same wardrobe. One of the 5 shirts I brought and the camo shorts. My hat needs to be thrown out yesterday too. The Asian broads at customs always ask me if I'm in the army. I tell em "no, but I carry a big gun." No I don't, I'm an idiot.
If I thought driving a motorbike in Thailand was crazy I couldn't even imagine thinking about doing it in Vietnam. I swear to god in Saigon motorbikes outnumber cars 100 to 1. I'm not lying. They have entire lanes that only bikes ride in, but the bikes ride in teh car lanes too. Thankfully everyone drives slow, and when you get cut off by a bike 65 times per hour you kinda get over the road rage that plagues us in Canada. We waited in traffic for 40 minutes to travel 3 blocks in rush hour the other day while I swear 10,000 motorbikes drove by. I'm fuckin serious, 10,000 bikes drove by, they go up on the sidewalk and just keep bike traffic moving while the meter kept running. Everyone drives a bike. If you drive a car in Saigon, you're either a cabbie, or a sucker. Or both.
So, the key in Saigon when crossing the street is to just walk in a steady pace and keep going, and no one will hit you. At least thats what I saw. Our cabbie stopped at three different hotels to find us one for $20 (which was actually pretty nice). I was like "oh shit, he just got hit, oh no he didn't" next stop, "oh shit, he's dead for sure... wait a second." By the third time I was like, this guy is a superhero or some shit, he moved through traffic like the wind through the willows. Literary gems folks. I'll be here all week.
In Asia no one tips especially the Aussies or Brits who comprise the majority of the stupid fat white people out here so when we drop a bit of a tip people are amazed. I had one old man who looked like he was 90 and had a back transplant done with a rubber spine by a blind guy try and carry my bags to our hotel room cause I tipped him $2. I said "sir, I don't even feel safe with you driving, standing, or even breathing, let alone carrying my bag." At least mine has next to nothing in it, so he didn't bend too much farther over as he piggy backed me up the 3 flights of stairs.
So after getting checked in we decided to get some fat (word to Jim Mullan). A while ago, Jim and I were talking and he said he wanted some fat. I asked him what he was talking about and he said "fat, you know, food." So we went to this diner in Kentville, Nova Scotia and got donair meat on a stick, which was then deep fried. If you're in Kentville ever, go to the diner on the hill by the hospital and ask for a "billy stick." If your arteries immediately harden as I've heard 1 in 7 do after a billy stick, the hospital is within staggering distance. Since that glorious day me and my crew just refer to all food as fat.
Alas, I digress.
On our way to fat (its also a verb), this lady stops us with a stack of books about 25 books high and says you want books? As I glanced at the stack I saw a few lonely planet guidebooks and since we of course have no book for India I asked her if she had India. She said "yes, hold on" which meant no, but I can get it. She dropped the stack of books at our feet and RAN across the insane traffic (not looking) to a store, then we watched as she ran across the street again to a store next to where we were standing. Then she came flying out the store and like a spectre flew through traffic a third time (why she didn't attack the stores on the same side of the road at once, I'm not sure) and then she showed up pouring sweat looking like she just got out the shower with the India lonely planet guidebook. She was so out of breath I was thinking, I could grab all her books and calmy walk away from her and she has no energy to catch me. So she handed me the book and gasped out "$10 sir." I looked at the poor woman who now needed a half hour in the shade and a cold drink and told her "$10? No way, I'll give you $3."
She looked so dejected and before she had a chance to say "no sir, $10" or what I would have said "you asshole, I almost got turned into roadkill so you fat white jerkoffs can go and get robbed in India" I said "i'm just joking ma'am heres your money." She also had 1984 by George Orwell, so I bought that too for $5. No thanks to Morgan, or Stu-Tang, or Predator, or Jackie, or any of the rest of you I asked to borrow it from. In truth I told them they needed to "give" it to me, cause the odds of it coming back are pretty minimal. When I told Morgan I wanted it he was like "well, are you gonna bring it back?" When I said no, Wade looked at me like I've never seen him look at me before. He said "did I just hear that right? You told Morgan he was an asshole cause he wouldn't let you take a book of his and told him you weren't going to ever bring it back?" I said "yeah, whats wrong with that?"
Thats how I roll, I expect a lot from my friends. But I give back in so many ways. Take these posts for example.
We decided that we were gonna go to the war museum after all, before the Bushes got their hands on the button, Vietnam was the war of our generation. Sure it ended before I was born, but I've seen Full Metal Jacket, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July so I figured I was an expert. I realized that I'm just another stupid fat white person who watched these movies and believed that America was doing the right thing by being over there killing a bunch of people who don't look like me. GET SOME!!
For fear of treading on the cultural insensitivity I've been accused of in the past I won't get into the FACTS cause they get in the way of a good story, plus, some of the Americans might get pissed as they use this window to open a new porn browser (some of them videos take a while to load, or so I've been told).
The point is, America, FUCKED Vietnam. Plain and simple, they claimed the Vietnamese bombed a vessel of theirs in the surrounding waters so they had an excuse to open up complete genocide on these people, who I've grown fond of. Nevermind the fact that they killed 3 million people, 2 million of which were civilians, but they used a bunch of different Herbicides to defoliate the jungle in order to "gong the cong." Agent Blue, Purple, Green, Orange etc. Agent Orange was one of the worst ones as it had so much DDT poison in it. I'm sure this is not new to most people, but it was so upsetting to see the photos. DDT has now been banned by THE PLANET!
There is an entire section of the museum that showed all the birth defects that resulted from the Agent Orange. They sprayed it out the back of planes as they flew over the jungle, and unloaded something like 45 million litres of Agent Orange (and hundreds of millions of litres of other "agents") on the people that lived as peasants and rice farmers. The people are still being born backwards for fucks sake. There were pictures of people with three arms and half a spine and shit. There is a fetus in a jar, that I can't even describe it was so deformed and awful looking that I am gonna remember that for as long as I live.
I'm not gonna dwell on that shit, I mean, I can't say what I'd do if I was an American kid sent to war in Vietnam. I'd probably shoot anything that moved too. All in all, that museum was insane. There was a huge section of photos from American photographers who had been killed while taking pictures and some of them were crazy. One picture was of a group of Vietnamese peasants probably 3 families who looked genuinely terrified like they were literally staring down the barrel of loaded M-16's. The photo had the caption, and I'm paraphrasing here "we came upon this group and the guys were shooting anything that moved 'I screamed WAIT WAIT WAIT and took this photo, as I turned my back I heard the gunfire and couldn't bring myself to look back."
The picture had 5 or 6 children in it. I'm talking children, like too small to walk on their own, in their mothers arms. Brutal.
As an aside download the song Uncommon Valor. Its by Jedi Mind Tricks and its about the Vietnam war. The second verse is a true story about this guys dads experience in Vietnam. Towards the end of the song the guy says that his dad was so affected by agent orange that when he came back his mother gave birth to his brother and sister who were both born handicapped. The US still won't address any of the survivors of Agent Orange.
I'm wandering again, I know.
I bought another fuckin book outside the museum which was Robert Macnamaras IN RETROSPECT. He was the secretary of defense at the time of the Vietnam war and it was written after the war and he admits in it apparently that the US was so wrong and did so many awful things and should never have been there, I've got Orwell to deal with first though.
Oh by the way, I opened the books, every page has been photocopied and bound together. The people in Asia are mad resourceful, they photocopied 500 pages of a new york times bestseller and sold it to me for $5. I swear I'm gonna start lookin for work in Asia. I might actually buy a photocopier and set up shop in a $5 a night hostel and make a killing. I'm gonna start with the Da Vinci Code or Lord of the Flies maybe.
I'm all over the place with this one I realize, I'm being even more random than Herb. By the way check his blog out at www.slinginlingo.blogspot.
After looking at all the insane artillery that the US dropped on the people we went to Cu Chin to see "the tunnels." I was drunk the night before and passed out about 3 minutes into the drive and apparently snored the whole way to the tunnels which were 45 minutes away. I asked Ed why he never punched me or something, and he said that him and the cabbie were laughing too hard to stop me. If anyone has heard me snore, that shit is no joke. I'm surprised Ed never pushed me out the cab. For the record, Ed snores like a bastard too so to counter the insomnia the malaria pills are inducing, we've started taking "other" pills to help us sleep, so if we do wake up in the night, its a nightmare to get back to sleep cause the other one is deep in sleep snoring like hell. In Asia the beds are close enough to touch each other, so basically, Ed and I have literally been snoring in each others ears for 3 weeks now. If I make it back alive from this trip I'm off everything, even Tylenol, I swear, I'm lying.
The Vietnamese dug these elaborate tunnels that were like 200km long and went all the way to the Cambodian border, which the US bombed the shit out of too by the way.
But yeah the tunnels are insane. People would stay in them for up to three months at times. Thousands of people underground to escape the Americans. They would eat, sleep, cook, everything in them. They were so narrow that I was feeling claustrophobic when I went in them. Eds tall ass was draggin and scrapin and gettin pounded in them, he was on his knees the whole way through as we went through them. The Vietnamese soldiers would cook early in the morning, and release the smoke at dusk 150 metres away from the cooking area so it looked like fog to the US planes. We saw a bomb crater from a bomb dropped from a B-52 bomber. The crater was 35 years old and grown over but was still 25 feet in diameter and like 20 feet deep.
Then they showed us the booby traps that the Vietnamese made with fragments from the US bombs. They were amazing. They would sharpen the shards of bombs into spikes and make all kinds of crazy trap doors that would end your Vietnam vacation pretty quickly. Not that I'm rooting for the Cong or anything, war is fucked, plain and simple, but they were ingenious. To fall in one of those traps, you wouldn't be begging to be pulled out, you'd be begging to be shot by your teammates.
Anyways, I'm done ranting about the Vietnam war. Do a bit of googling, or consult the worlds most reputable encyclopedia, WIKIPEDIA and read. Its amazing what you can learn when you use your eyes for things other than watching porn and doing liquid acid. Or so I've been told.
We went to the market for lunch the next day and walked through the fish section where we saw them gutting some of the weirdest looking fish I've ever seen. Some of them shits looked like fuckin dinosaurs I swear. It was bizarre. Flies all over the food, I was kinda like "should we be eating this?" Ed looked at me as if to say "whats wrong with you?" So we sat down and since no one spoke english we just pointed at our stomachs and then our mouths. Everyone sitting around us laughed at the two fat white boys, and pointed and yammered along in Vietnamese, which is one weird sounding language. What we got was two bowls of soup with some weird lookin meat and some weird lookin vegetables and some weird lookin shit floating on top. It was truly the weirdest lookin bowl of soup I've ever eaten, but it was delicious, absolutely amazing. It was so insanely hot in the market that the sweat was pouring off us as we loaded the hot sauce into it. I swear I'm comin back to Vietnam and next time I'm spending a lot more time here. Folks, I only went to one city for three days, and this is how I feel. I can't wait to see more of it. Predator gave me a list of cities to visit, but Ed and I are too retarded to plan a trip so we only made it to Saigon. But i'm coming back. No doubt about it in my mind.
So it was time to leave to go to Singapore. I bought a few things for my sisters (don't get excited girls its nothing major, as if they even read this shit) and wanted to mail them before I trashed the hell out of them in my backpack, which might actually be in need of replacement soon. There isn't much in the bag to pack around anything I buy so it will just get ruined in one baggage handlers toss. So I had an hour to get to the post office and get back to the hotel to catch our cab to the airport. Ed said "well I'll see ya when I see ya pardner." Ed is from the prairies of Alberta and was born with a gun in his hands and has been wearing cowboy boots all over Asia. He tipped his cap, chomped the end of his cigar and bid me adieu.
Unfortunately, the quickest way to get around the city is on the back of a motorcycle taxi. So guess how the fat white idiot got to the post office?
Everytime I leave to go travelling my mother tells me, "Jayyysunn, all I cyan sayy is, dat iss god dat you muss pray to at night becuh yuh in gods hands now." You know I'm not really into that religion stuff but after the trip to the post office on the back of a motorbike in a city of 6 million people, 7 million of which own a bike, I think she might be onto something.
I have to send my mother edited versions of these stories cause she almost cried when I told her about sleeping in a bombed out office building in Beirut, Lebanon years ago. Plus, the opium hunt would have her not only upset, but angry with me, and god knows I spent enough years doing that to her.
Long story short, there are a zillion motorbikes, and everyone drives slow but crazy. We actually saw an accident. The guy looked at the guy who hit him, neither fell off the bike cause they're going slow, looked at him as if to say, "hey asshole, I'd punch you if I didn't have 4 live chickens on the back of my bike, and since I'll never see you again, it doesn't really matter" and off they went.
So I got to the post office and asked for a tube to put the things in. I was told "no tube here, you go round cornah." I was thinking, OK no big deal, its just around the corner.
"Around the corner?" Ok I run out the post office, and my motorcycle cabbie is looking at me wondering why I'm running, I put my index finger in the air telling him wait one minute and run around the corner. He follows on the bike down the sidewalk and asks what the problem is. NEED TUBE FOR MAIL, NEED TO GET TO AIRPORT. There is a second post office around the corner, so I run in there, 45 minutes til our cab leaves the hotel. I wait in line for 5 minutes and talk to the nice lady, tell her where I need to mail it. She tells me go to station 1 for paperwork. Then take it to station 3, then station 6 to pay, station 4 to drop it off. So I go to station 1 and tell them I need a tube. "No tube here, you need go round corner." Fuck me.
I run out the post office, all the people are laughing at me, in a thick Vietnamese accent and brutal english someone yells "run Forrest" I turn around and everyone is laughing at me, a recurring trend. Cabbie looks at me like i'm retarded, I believe him immediately. He says "you need tube" and points across the street, I wanted to drop kick him, he sent me walking into a Mr. Bean skit. Across the street is a tube store. Only tubes. So this withered old Vietnamese couple help me out, the old man grabs a saw and saws off the unneccessary excess, sorts it out for me, I pay him 50,000 Dong (insert dick joke) which is the Vietnamese currency and equivalent to about 4 dollars Canadian.
25 minutes to make it back to the hotel.
I run back to the post office, and begin the station hopping, each of which has a lineup. They bubble wrap it for me, I drop a bunch of Dong on that, then I start paperwork. Its insane. One thing after another finally, I'm ready to pay.
15 minutes.
Its like 300,000 Dong. No problem, except of course I don't have enough money, why would I have money? That would be logical. Since the beginning of the civilized world people have been using money, legal tender, cowery shells, whatever you wanna call it to purchase things. For some reason, that sentiment has escaped me at this particular moment. But I have US dollars. That should be good right? WRONG.
I start pleading with people around me to sell me some Dong (insert dick joke #2). No one wants anything to do with me, I'm running around in my camo shorts and a wifebeater, sweating like crazy cause I'm in and out of the post office, its 40 degrees outside, everyone is pointing at my tattoos and talking, I'm hoping its the tattoos they're talking about. Not likely. I'm the only sweaty white boy who can't speak Vietnamese in sight.
10 minutes and the cab and Ed are going to be waiting outside the hotel to take us to the airport. When you travel with someone you kinda can't fuck them over on splitting a cab to the airport for a connecting flight. Kinda.
Finally, I run outside and beg the cabbie for some Dong (yeah I know), I'm tryin to do the math quick, I need 100,000 Dong and its like 16,500 Dong to one US dollar, try doing that with a million things running through your mind, I hadn't even packed, cause I figured it would take 20 minutes to go to the post office. I say fuck it, give him a ten US, take 100,000 Dong and run back in to the post office. I push my way to the front of the line, panting, sweating, completely under-dressed to be in a public institution in downtown Ho Chi Minh city make eye contact with the lady who was serving me earlier who is now helping a man sending about 30 boxes the size of milk cartons. I give her the money, she looks at me confused, people behind me are waiting patiently and the sweaty white boy has jumped the line and handed her a wad of money the size of the ones Tony Soprano used to carry.
I say "Its for the TUBE going to CANADA, I love you, I'm sorry." I look around the post office I'm clearly the center of attention which is retarded at this point. I blow kisses to everyone as I run through the post office to get out, remember its a city of 6 million people, so its a huge post office, PACKED with people. I'm so happy the ordeal is over I say in general to everyone, "I'm sorry, I have a flight to catch" I blow more kisses. As I reach the door, the same jerk off from earlier yells "run Forrest" I turn around and figure, fuck it, I'd probably say the same thing, blow some more kisses, give the thumbs up and jump on the back of the bike. The entire population of the post office now thinks we're lady boys in Canada. Sorry guys.
I'm betting 2 to 1 odds that package never makes it to Canada.
"QUICK QUICK QUICK" I yell to the cabbie. Somehow we make it back sorta on time, about 3 minutes late. Ed is packed and ready. I'm hot and sweaty and wish I could shower before flying. Ed looks at me, can tell I'm frustrated and said "I was gonna tell the cabbie to go on without us there cowboy."
I said "I would have met you at the airport." He said, "the last time I saw you, you had no helmet on, riding into traffic on the back of a motorcycle in Saigon, Vietnam holding a bunch of shit in your hands and not holding onto the bike."
He's one cool assed hillbilly, he was willing to take one for the team like a champion and it didn't even look like it would have bothered him. When we were in Spain together years ago and our homie Eldon broke his jaw outside the bar one night. Ed sat in a hotel room with him for a week before he flew home to Canada. While we were boarding the airplane he said he actually thought he was gonna spend the next week in a Vietnamese hospital feeding me ice chips. I'm glad my mom is praying for me cause Ed don't got much faith in me.
I got on the plane, and once again woke up in a new place, this time Singapore, with my seat and tray-table still in the upright position.
No fuckin Opium in Vietnam either. I'll keep you posted.
Love you all,
Jung
1 comment:
these Jung stories are great, keep 'em coming!
reader in IQ
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