Challenges of Travel

One of the hardest things about being in Vietnam (as a Westerner) is that you are constantly bombarded with new information through all of your senses. Simply walking down the street you can feel the sweat drip down your back due to the extreme humidity, the smell of various Asian spices cooking, and the sound of endless honking. It all hits you at once among many other cultural sensations that I have not even described here. Everything you see with your eyes is something new: such as the ankle foot stools that are used as chairs in the sidewalk for cafes and restaurants. I saw two business men dressed in suits sitting on these rather small "chairs" eating steaming hot "Pho" (Vietnamese soup) in the simmering heat right in the heart of Hanoi. 

The amount of newness of it all is overwhelming to say the least and nearly puts me, as a Westerner, on the defensive (what is going to happen next! And will I be able to handle it?). So far the answer has been: yes, I've been able to handle it, but not without taking a nap midday and falling - more like crashing - to sleep by 10pm. I think I've been getting the best sleep I've had all year here in Vietnam. I've been sleeping like a rock mostly because everything here takes so much out of me, all I can do at the end of the day is sleep!

But all of these challenges are nothing compared with the treasures that have been discovered. Most of them, I've been posting in the pictures. There's been a lot of (hopefully good) thinking that's been going on too, most recently I've been thinking a lot about gender roles in the Hmong community and in the USA, communism, and rapid development in communities. I hope to write more about all of this later, but for now I'm tired. Really tired. I could definitely go for a good cheeseburger and fries, but that doesn't exist here. It's exhausting when everything is new.