Posted Nov. 4:
End of day 5 and we are still alive! Traffic doesn’t give us heart attacks anymore. However, 90+ degrees with 80% humidity, and an afternoon stroll of 2 miles from the cathedral through cho ben thành (Saigon market), and back to our hotel can be a little risky. We were tired, red-faced, and thirsty.
I have a long ramble here, so feel free to skip to the photos.
Things are happening much faster than I expected, certainly faster than I can record here. Up until tonight everything had gone so well that I began to wonder when the dream would end. It seems that the extreme weather of the last two days, combined with frequent transitions into air-conditioned spaces, has given me a cough and some nasal congestion. I’m not down yet, and still have high hopes for tomorrow and our jaunt to My Tho to visit someone my wife has known for nearly 6 decades.
We intended to use our first 2 days as downtime to recover from jet lag, but found ourselves off to a rousing start immediately, seeing our friend [name removed], who became a second time grandmother on the day of our arrival in Saigon.
My primary reason for coming to Vietnam was to connect with my wife’s past. Indeed, our first few days have done an excellent job. Yesterday we saw the house where she lived during the years after the fall of Saigon. Our driver took us to the exact address that my wife remembered, but she didn’t recognize anything and was certain that we had the wrong location, until she realized that the building had a fourth floor added! Today we saw her high school, met some new friends, and then visited a nursing home for nuns where my wife met a few Sisters she knew from decades ago. These women are living 8 or 10 to a (large) room, in various stages of mental and physical decline, and the one we were most anxious to see was slow to recognize my wife. I was overwhelmed with what I can only describe as grief, and suddenly left the room. Part of my grief, if that’s what it is, comes from seeing the state of these women who gave their lives to serving others, and another part comes from the realization that part of my wife’s past is at the edge of disappearing. You see that this is not simply a vacation to a beautiful country, but an experience beyond what can be planned by us or repeated by anyone else. |
