Encounters of the French Kind

We met sunrise on the beach this morning. Pale,smooth aqua, a white-grey sky and a glowing ball or orange. Shoes off, toes plunged into the pale brown sand, one foot in front of the other, we run. The locals are just waking up, pulling wooden tables onto the sand, unstacking beach chairs and hiking up umbrellas. Gangs of old women with pale, brown skin and clear plastic bathing caps bounce in groups in the shallow waves, raising their arms, lowering them, turning heads from side to side. Their movements a subtle, elderly exercise, they smile wide at the two tall, white joggers passing by.

A peaceful start for a wonderful day. We pack our few belongings and head for Phu Quoc Island airport for our flight to Ho Chi Minh City, more charmingly known as Saigon. Everyone, and I mean everyone, in the airport has just finished a marvelous vacation. Smiles, sun-kissed skin, fishing rods, shopping bags. We meet a Frenchwoman named Veronica, fifties or early sixties, unstoppable smile, 25 days of solo holiday around Vietnam, loads of trip recommendations. I’m frantically taking mental notes and we wind up talking all the way to Saigon. Chris and I had planned to just park it in the airport for the hours between flights, but as we touch down,Veronica suggests we join her in her hired car to the middle of the city to enjoy the sights she’s recommended. There’s no question of being strangers when you’re on the road. We hop in.

Whizzing through the streets of Saigon, we watch the carefully choreographed circus of moto and car traffic. Dozens of near misses, but somehow it’s harmonic. The three and four story buildings remind me of my architect friend’s famous use of the expression ‘human scale’ in reference to cities. I know Ho Chi Minh City sprawls for hundreds of kilometers around us, but we are in it’s heart, and many thanks to the legacy of the French, it is a welcoming, lovely place. We stop at Veronica’s hotel and kiss both cheeks.

The driver doesn’t understand what he’s supposed to do with the two dirty voyagers he’s left with. We tell him “post office, post office” attempting to communicate our wish to visit Saigon’s most beloved tourist attraction, the neighborhood known as Asia’s Champs Élysées. He takes our backpacks out, we put them back in. We try again to explain. He phones a friend. An english voice on his cell phone clarifies our intentions and off we go.

After the clamor and jarring of Bangkok, Saigon is a smooth, gentle breeze all wide boulevards, tree lined parks and tidy sidewalks. We feel like we’ve landed in a dream and when the driver stops, we beeline for a bistro by the park deciding that today our budget is not of concern. We feel like we’re on a movie set. At a small, round, sidewalk table, we drool over the menu. Whole grain baguette. Mixed greens. Goat cheese. You have no idea how deeply we crave this food. I order lamb and Chris has a classic, American-inspired turkey and cheese. Our fellow diners speak French while traditionally-dressed women in rice paddy hats march past selling cheap Chinese trinkets and coconut juice. In between their careful orchestration of the neighborhood’s parallel parkers, young men drink tea out of thermoses and smoke cigarettes in the summer swelter. An ethnic-looking Vietnamese man performs street side construction work with archaic tools. Audis fetch well-heeled white and Vietnamese women who totter in slim, tailored dresses and heels, glossed waves shimmering in the sun. A study in contrasts.

We’ve completely destroyed our lunches and the people watching is too good to stop. So, we order iced Americanos and the waitress effortlessly convinces us to get the three-dessert sampler platter. Each of us.

After our hedonistic lunch, we go admire the replica of the Notre Dame Cathedral and a lovely statue of Mary. We cross the wild streets to the palatial Central Post Office. Chris gets bag watch duty while I snap photos. The ponderous painting of Ho Chi Minh. The extravagantly-tiled floors. The golden-era calling booths repurposed into glamorous ATM machines. On a mission to mail a package, I am shuttled from window to window, one for wrapping, one for weighing, one for payment.

During the last transaction, I feel eyes on the side of my face. I turn to find a friendly, college-aged girl hoping to engage with the foreigner or ‘farang’ as the Vietnamese call us. While we enjoy a chat, the woman behind the counter periodically barks things at me. But, my conversation with the student persists. She’s from near the legendary town of Hoi An where traditional lanterns still light the streets at night. She’s studying finance, her boyfriend is Fillipino. Her parents do not like it.

At long last, I return to Chris and our modest heap of luggage. I find he has been the subject of much english language practice while I was gone. Three toothy teenagers huddle around him with wide, expectant eyes, pens poised over tiny notebooks as he shares the finest slang our nation has to offer. They make us promise we will accept their requests on Facebook. I have plenty of doubts as to the point of all this ‘friending,’ but if it accomplishes nothing other than a common currency to fuel encounters like this around the world, well we’ve had a lot of laughs over it and who are we to complain?

With wide smiles, we don our packs and stroll the stairway down to the street. Under the shade of plentiful trees, we hold hands and slowly find our way to the opera house. Wandering the finest streets in Saigon, we are sure we’ve found a very Asian Paris and while the French will never be first on my list for their hospitality, I feel deeply grateful for the beauty and pace they leave behind.