Good Morning Vietnam

Posing for the camera

Another cozy flight. Another adventure.


We landed in Ho Chi Minh Airport in the early evening. I walked down the long empty corridors of the arrival terminal into the immigration hall. Next in line. My immigration officer looked more like an army officer in green coveralls and a cap.. actually he had the look of an Eastern version of Castro. He click, click, clicked through his computer for what felt like an hour. He told me nothing and sat rigid in his chair.. Click. Click. Click. Click..  What's the problem? Is it my hand-written visa from the embassy in Doha? Have I been air marked? Am I on the next Locked Up Abroad? Oh God. Am I sweating?! 
Click. Click... "OK."
"OK?"
"OK."
"OK!" I smile at the officer hardly able to contain myself as I try not to skip and jump past him to collect my baggage. Five minutes suspended in front of a Vietnamese immigration officer is long enough. There is something nerve wracking about a new place with a totalitarian government, a language barrier, and notorious jails, even if all I had to declare is that I packed too much clothes for my two-day stay.


I met up with the Captains wife and we chatted about where to shop while we waited for the crew. One hour later we were at our palatial hotel and off to grab a bite on Pham Ngu Lao St., a bustling strip filled with restaurants, coffee shops, boutiques, and still decorated with red flags and lights for the Chinese New Year days before. 

The food in Vietnam is delicious, spicy, sweet, complexed, with ginger, garlic, chili, odd shaped mushrooms, bok choy, baby corn, pork, calamari, fresh fruit juices, iced green tea,  gỏi cuốn (spring/summer rolls) and bánh mì (French baguettes!.. a culinary remnant of the French colonial rule which ended in 1954). 




We woke up early the following morning and perused the streets lined with stores selling copies of books, dvds, paintings, designer t's, copper buddhas, chop sticks, woven bags, silk, jade bracelets, all at the fraction of the price we're used to in the West. For $100US you'll get $2,000,000 Vietnamese Dong. After the initial sticker shock with items priced in the hundreds of thousands you realize that picking up a handful of things (t'shirts, shorts, shell covered boxes, and bracelets), each with six figure price tags, you get to the cash and realize you've just spent $5US for the ten items in your hands. Dinner? $11US for us both, including alcohol, and that was on the expensive night.




Vietnam... crazy, traffic, smells, dust, markets, narrow streets, bicycles with heavy loads, cool, hot, tangled power lines, red bunting, fruit vendors, crowded markets, chickens, motorbikes, slippers, socks with toes, mani/pedis for $3us, rooms for rent, backpackers, vespas, rickshaws, drugs, cheap designer bags, cheap t's, cheap shorts, cheap food, cheap beer..

Every now and then you visit a place where you can see the cultural stains of war. This usually translates into beautiful and sometimes political story-telling artwork, frescoes, or influences seen in architecture. During this visit we saw national pride, red flags, 'war remnants' museums, and the Thalidomide-like disfigurement of those physically affected by Agent Orange-- second generation war victims born after the end of the Vietnam War. We visited the War Remnants Museum. It was originally opened as "The House for Displaying the War Crimes of American Imperialism" and later renamed as the "Museum of American War Crimes"the name was changed again after the normalization of US relations. Its exhibits included a yard filled with military equipment, tanks, a UH-1 Huey, A-1 Skyraider (my husband told me not to call it a 'bomber' so -- 'Skyrader'... insert eye-rolling smiley here), an F-5A fighter and unexploded ordnance in the corner (!). Inside, the museums rooms were filled with propaganda posters, gory exhibits of graphic photographs of the guerrilla warfare, sadistic acts of violence, and the use and effects of the napalm and phosphorous bombs and Agent Orange. There were visitors crying, others watching in fascination, disbelief, and abject horror, and a very large American woman dressed in a black tracksuit with "making the world a fitter place" written on the back just to lighten the mood.










What makes Vietnam Vietnam are the people. Their warmth and hospitality made every hustle-and-bustle-filled day feel like a fun-filled, hot, sticky adventure.


Good morning Vietnam. See you again soon.

Meet the Burkini

Meet the burkini... freedom, flexibility, confidence..

Flying & The Saudi Businessman

"Dad, I have a jumpseat request, I'm going back to Doha and I see you're operating the JFK flight, can I get the jumpseat to New York pretty please?"

"That seat is already taken."

"Don't f around."

"Hahah, just kidding, the jumpseat is yours."

There is nothing like the kind of flying I do now compared to what I used to do. "Chalk and cheese" said the Saudi businessman sitting next to me. I never quite saw it that way, but he was right.

"Winged Victory"/ "Nike of Samothrace" 200-190 BC. Lourve, Paris

I used to sit in the front of the plane where the view and all the buttons and levers are. Every day I had to sit next to a disgruntled Captain and play glorified-bus-driver for 9+ hours. They bad-mouthed me for speaking well, for being too feminine, too outspoken, for expecting too much, for having a good posture, and reading the check-list in a female voice. I was told I was "too proper" and "so much of a woman that I was gay to fly with;" no, I'm not talking about the Middle East, they treat women better than that out here, I'm talking about my old airline job.

The kind of flying I do now involves champagne and seats that fold out into beds large enough to accommodate a camel. I can't count the number of times I've been asked if I miss flying, nor the amount of times I've said "no". It's not rocket science (no pun intended to the guys that still fly the Dash-8 like it's the space shuttle), what was there for me to miss? The taking off or the landing bit? Showing a man that I can do what he did at work in a "mans world" isn't a good idea I found out (I got that line on my flight test... from my check-airman). My ancestry didn't help much either, one Manager told me "you white people ran this place for years, it's we turn now" (hey, I didn't say they had the best grammar, did I?). And 3,000 landings and take-offs later I can safely say I've "been there, done that."

I suppose growing up riding shot-gun on my way to Europe with my captain-dad didn't really prepare me for the reality of the aviation world twenty years later, well after the era of the Sky-Gods. The price I paid for being a young, educated, white woman with a voice in this place? I never got to fly with my dad... but boy did I get a good life handed to me.
And ... I still get to travel with daddy, just like old times.



The Saudi Businessman 



After the initial embarrassment of having a Saudi man try to make small talk as he sat next to me in first class, I realized he was talking to me because he recognized that I am a western woman (that might sound daft, but most people here think I am arab because I dress so conservatively and it is rude for a man to approach an arab woman). I had never chatted with a Saudi man before because of the cultural lines drawn here. He was cool and laid back. We chatted about different cultures, traveling, politics, children, education... I asked him about the way people dress in the Middle East, the difference between the mens white ghutra and the red checkered ghutra (no difference,  but Saudi men do not starch their head-dress where Qatari men do), why some women wore abbayahs while others only wore hijabs (personal preference), what the solid-gold beak-like things the older women wore across their faces were (an old bedouin tradition). I told him that my husband said that if I was naughty that he'd make me wear a face-cage. He laughed and said "yes" and I laughed thinking "the guys at my old job might agree."