Tet

I arrived home from Thailand in the middle of Tet. Everything is closed. Everyone is gone. Traffic is slow. If you didn’t know better, you might think apocalypse, quarantine, evacuation?!? But, no, everyone’s just eating and drinking in complete excess. Think Thanksgiving: for two weeks. It’s pretty fantastic, really—unless you’re an American girl looking for a meal, preferably with an English menu. Then it’s a pain in the ass.

When I landed in Saigon, I spent a couple nights recuperating at the LanguageCorps house and after gathering my wits, was ready for the big move. Having only a couple backpacks and a bicycle, in just three short trips, I transported all of my Earthly possessions in Vietnam from LC to my new house. Moving has never been so much fun! Like every other expat in Saigon, my roommates were still away, so it was great to have the house all to myself those first few days. I would’ve booked longer travel had I known the extent of Tet’s closures (even the supermarkets close for a week and a half), but, at the same time, it was cool to be here to see it. Downtown, many streets are shut down to motorized vehicles and thousands of people gather to appreciate the decorations, beautiful during the day and stunning at night. There’s a giant carnival at the largest park in the city that runs all day with rides, food, drinking and entertainment. The spectacle was great to see, but the lack of regular commerce made the finding of meals and the killing of time a daily predicament. Really the options were: go hang out in the backpacker district where some shops and restaurants were open, read, watch TV, sit outside or bike around aimlessly and get really sweaty.

One such day, I begrudgingly headed down to Pham Ngu Lao (backpacker district). I generally try to avoid this area because I get the impression I’m recognized. Frequent drinking and the orange bicycle can be blamed here. But, this day over Tet, I had no other alternative. I had a meal at this Indian place and thought painstakingly about a plan to get postcards and stamps. I decided that plan was not comprehensive enough, so I had a beer at a different watering hole (draught is $0.25) where I committed to coming up with another idea for 2pm ‘til bed. It was there, with cheap beer and funny old men that I would manage to whittle away the day. These older Vietnamese gents insisted I come and sit with them and though I didn’t really want to, I also didn’t want to offend. What I had planned as a sit-here-til-i-finish-my-drink interaction turned into an entire afternoon lunar New Year drinking binge. These guys toasted “happy happy” just about every 2 minutes and would not let my glass get below 80% full. We feasted and drank and various other clients came in and out of our table’s conversations: some Nigerian drug dealers, a few Aussie travelers and plenty of Vietnamese partiers. Mr. Binh, the ring leader, paid for everything and was literally throwing money around the establishment. Vietnamese people save all year long for the extravagances of Tet. Petty crime goes up in the weeks leading up to the New Year because everyone wants to be able to finance their own Tet celebration. There is but one point of Tet: to enjoy yourself as much as possible. And I did. One of my afternoon companions even offered to be my sugar daddy. That was around the time I made my exit.

The evening progressed into hanging out with the guy who sat next to me on the plane back from Thailand—initiated by me calling out “hey! Guy who sat next to me on the plane!” He was a 33-yr old, divorced father of 5, ex-con from Sweden who works oil rigs off the coast of Norway for 6 months and runs a titty bar in Thailand the remainder of the year. We did drugs and hung out with prostitutes. But, that’s another story. For another day. Tet was a trip and even though the timing made my job acquisition a little more difficult, in the end, I’m glad I got to see what a city of 8 million people is like when it shuts down. For the purpose of partying.