Karaoke
American Karaoke
Collect group of friends, preferably your loudest and least inhibited. Go to bar, preferably after a few drinks to loosen up. Select obnoxious song that is worthy of your voice (i.e. Sex On Fire). Take shot. Sing and dance really loudly in front of a large group of people who you fully expect to never see again, except next Tuesday when you come back again to repeat this sequence of events.).
Karaoke in Vietnam
Expectation: See above, but better.
Reality: We were determined. Cobra shots had failed us so we went in search of something less physically daring but more mentally scaring.
Place 1: drinks upstairs, karaoke downstairs? No descending with drinks allowed? Next.
Place 2: Glowing blue and white club in which vodka was the only drink available. Posh Spice was probably there somewhere. I don’t know how we got in but I’m pretty sure we weren’t supposed to be there. Next.
Place 3: “Family room” Karaoke?? You get your own room?! Isn’t the point of karaoke to prove to the world, or bar, how very good your voice is when pretending you are Britney Spears? We returned to the hotel to teach the waiters how to take tequila shots.
Reenactments/Songs
American traditional reenactments/songs
Go to Plymouth plantation on field-trip. Watch actors in traditional garb churn butter, shoot guns, and sing, in the style of yesteryear.
Traditional reenactments/songs in Vietnam
Expectation: See above but with less butter and more interpreters.
Reality: We gorged on grapefruit and passion fruit. A couple sang us beautiful songs that have been tradition on their island forever. Man’s belt: bedazzled “BOSS”.
Zoos
American Zoos
Pay much money to see huge variety of exotic and not so exotic animals. Caged-in. While holding your parents hand.
Zoos in Vietnam
Expectation: A challenging but rewarding service visit with a group of deaf children and their teachers to wander a zoo for a bit of time. Learn something, have some fun.
Reality: 43 semi-deaf children (all under the age of 15 and most under the age of 8), 15 students (us), and a few teachers. I don’t know how many teachers there were because as soon as we were dropped off (assigned the care of 1-3 kids, carrying 1-3 bagged lunches of American style food that the children had no clue what to do with, no maps, and no ability to communicate–lip reading is not universal), they skedaddled. Elephants wandered loose with 2 care-takers following along. Rides and activity park abandoned.
Excerpt from diary: “We got boxed lunches and then were let loose to run after little kids chasing bouncy balls all over the place. Phuc (say that one out loud, then picture me screaming it across a zoo at the lil fellow as he chased his bouncy ball, or threw it in the water, and chose that moment to not listen at all), my previously adorable latcher-on’er #1, threw apples at crocodiles and attempted to climb onto moving mechanical rides because apparently that’s what little boys do (he wasn’t happy that I had no Vietnamese money to buy him a ride). By the end of the trip we were all too exhausted to move. Our responses had changed dramatically from running after escaping children into “oh yeah I think [the kid I’m responsible for] is under that bussed parked there”. We almost unanimously decided that this was the perfect form of birth control”‘.
Thunderstorms
American Thunderstorms
Works of nature that disrupt silence and darkness in magical ways.
Expectation: None, I learned my lesson.
Beautiful Reality:
Be it America or Vietnam, thunderstorms smell the same no matter where you are.
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