After a gorgeous weekend in Mui Ne and a stress-inducing bus ride with an awful company (Phuong Nam—never use them! Take Phuong Trang instead), coming back to Ho Chi Minh felt like coming home. All I wanted was my bed in my apartment in residential district 3. I wanted to say hi to my lovely airbnb hosts, visit them at the book fair where their publishing company has a booth, make more pho’ ga noodle soup with them, walk through our local marketplace in the morning, and finish the day sitting on a plastic chair on the side of the road at one of the local ice and fruit restaurants (can I call them restaurants?).
Ho Chi Minh is divided into districts, like arrondissements in Paris. They’re not squares, and they don’t always make geographical sense, but each neighbourhood has a distinct atmosphere. District 1 is where the hotels and fancy shops are, as well as the large tourist market, which turns into an only slightly less touristy market at night. It also has wine bars, fancy restaurants, silk and hand embroidery shops, malls, and some hole-in-the-wall places I actually do want to go.
Then there’s the backpackers district, which is where I walked to find Phuong Trang bus company but ended up at copycat Phuong Nam instead. The street is lined with tour companies, cheap juice, and so-so pho’ noodle soup places. It feels like any backpacker district—dirty, packed, cacophonous. But it does have some redeeming qualities: just down the road is a stellar chè place (iced fruit and sweet bean and jelly desserts) called Chè My 2, and a block up towards district 3 is the one lone dance shoe shop in the city. Even after getting ripped off tourist-style I’m getting two pairs of handmade shoes for $20 each from a lovely woman and her father whose lives have been dance in a city that doesn’t get it.
But let me tell you about district 3. I wander up side alleys and the families inside their 8×8 foot gates with the doors open stare. They’re not used to tourists. They sit and watch television and eat with their families. And on the hot summer nights that are every night this time of year, they talk with their neighbours, slowing as I pass. At the markets most people stare, but they don’t harrass me like they do all tourists at the Ben Thanh Market in District 1. They’re not jaded by expats here either. Rent is still low enough for locals to live. Condos are going in, but they’re not high rises. The area is gentrifying, but bearably slowly. The shops sell wholesale clothes but also skirts and dresses from local designers. You take off your shoes when you enter, unlike District 1 where tourists would be inconvenienced. There are no touristy restaurants where only white people eat.
Driving back into the city from Mui Ne, it took an hour and a half to get from the outskirts of town to downtown. The city is huge, but I’ll never visit all of it. I won’t see the dirty shacks that I’m sure are there. I do get yelled at in Vietnamese by random women on side streets, but I don’t know if they’re telling me to leave their country or buy their papayas. I enjoy blissful ignorance and assume the latter. Because my hosts are lovely. The people I met in Mui Ne were lovely. The man who sold me ice was lovely. The woman who sold me dance shoes was lovely, as were the 20 young girls who threw their arms around me and asked for pictures with me at the dance class the woman invited me to watch.
Smile. Be polite. Beg forgiveness for my cultural ineptitudes.
District 3. Home. For one more week.
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