New mode of transportation

After a brief weekend off, I started another tour today.  This time I am riding north from Saigon to Nha Trang along the coast and in the coastal mountains ... by Vespa.

Okay, these are posed pictures.  In the morning, they gave us a tour of Saigon on the back of a Vespa.  It seemed so easy when our drivers were zipping around, weaving in and out of traffic.  After lunch they took us to a deserted street to practice driving ourselves.  I was pretty sure I wanted an automatic, but tried an original Vespa manual just for the fun of it.  Hmmmm.  Maybe I was a little more coordinated in 1971 when I last drove a Vespa.  I stalled a few times, could not manage to make turns, and never got out of second gear.  The automatic is SO much easier.  It's like riding a bicycle, hand brakes and all, although I'm not very good at turns yet.  I am either going to kill myself or have a blast this week.

My new tourmates are Dick and Kathy from Melbourne.  A few interesting things I saw while riding around Saigon this morning.

A very moving memorial to the monk who set himself on fire in 1963 in protest against the government.

Check out the electric wires.  I feel very safe.

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It is very hard to see in this photo, but the man reading the newspaper is perched Asian-style on the plastic stool, squatting with his knees up and tush not quite touching the stool.

I had a few hours free this afternoon so I walked to the park to watch kids playing the Vietnamese version of hackysack.  They use a shuttlecock that looks like a salt shaker with wings.  While I was sitting on a park bench, three young college students came over to me to practice speaking English, so I had a delightful conversation with them for an hour or so, with a few more students drifting in and out of the group.  They asked me a lot of questions and I asked them just as many.  One girl was studying English, but could not seem to speak English, and could not tell me a single thing she had read in English.  A young man told me he was studying Vietnamese history so I asked him something that I didn't understand from what I have learned so far on this trip.  He couldn't answer and said he was only in his first year; he hadn't learned much history yet.  The most verbal and personable was, surprisingly, the young man who was studying electrical engineering.  I was rather stuck when they asked me about my work.  How do you make tax law sound interesting to twenty year old Vietnamese kids?

I asked the kids where I could buy those shuttlecocks, so they eventually walked me across the street (very solicitously, not realizing I can walk in front of traffic now), took me to the store, and helped me buy some to take home to my team.  It will be interesting to see if they appeal to my Mexican kids.

In the evening we went back out for a progressive dinner and club hopping on the Vespas.  It still seems really easy with someone else driving me.  First we went to a seafood restaurant for appetizers - crab legs, clams, mussels, a noodle dish, and jumping chicken (frog legs).  After a ten minute ride to digest all that, we went to a Vietnamese restaurant for spring rolls, salad rolls, and Vietnamese pancakes.  Then it got interesting.  Down an alleyway and up a long staircase to a cafe that looks like a speakeasy.  A pianist and violinist played classics and old standards, and accompanied various singers in Vietnamese and English.  Then we went to a basement club where a band played rock music.  They were playing the Beatles and Bob Dylan when we first got there, but switched singers and moved forward a couple of decades losing me.

Tomorrow we are off to ride up the coast.