June 13th, 2023. Saigon, Vietnam
Day 4 of the Southeast Asian Expedition
When I woke up the next morning, the main thing on my mind was Long An. Long An is a province of Vietnam about an hour’s drive south of Saigon. What can you do in Long An?
If you’re looking for crazy monuments or big buildings, in general, Long An is probably not the place you want to visit. The only reason we even planned to visit it is because we had relatives living there. Still, that doesn’t mean the province is a boring place. The people who live out here do have interesting lives and it’s just not as much of a metropolis as it is in Saigon. There are loads of people here and it kind of is a city to some extent but the buildings aren’t as tall.
I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect yet since I hadn’t been there (Okay I might have gone there last time I was in Vietnam, but I didn’t remember a thing about that since I was only 6) so I was eager to see what things were like in Long An. But we weren’t going just yet. We had… surprise surprise, more relatives to visit! (Seriously, who’s who?!) Who are we visiting this time?
I don’t even remember how we’re related to them, but the next person we visited was an old lady who lived in another part of Saigon. She was related to me from my dad’s side, but other than that I’m not sure how we’re related. We booked a driver for the whole day (it was too slow to just use Grab for every ride, we’d be moving around a lot) and we headed out to her house. After we arrived, we sat down and she gave us some food. The old lady also had another young girl in the house who was mostly quiet throughout the meeting. Due to the fact we had other relatives to visit (and probably my impatience) we left after about 30 minutes of eating and talking.
One more relative to visit, alright? Just one more relative and we’ll go to Long An! I promise! Well, we’re not exactly visiting relatives this time. We’re visiting a Buddhist temple that my dad regularly visited as a kid. The temple that I went to in the USA was a very large monastery. Its buildings weren’t very tall, and everything was spread out. It took several minutes to walk from one side of the monastery to another. I’ve been going to that monastery for four years, and there are still large parts of that monastery that I haven’t been to before. This monastery is also big, but instead of being a spread-out monastery— it’s a large four-story building. Just like before, me and Casey just let the adults do the talking while we sat down and did absolutely nothing. And NOW we’re going to Long An.
The drive to Long An was about an hour, so I’ll tell you a bit about that first. We had to drive through most of Saigon before going past the border of the provinces into Long An, then drive a bit further to where our relatives lived (I don’t know who’s who anymore). At first, we were still in the urban part of Saigon. We saw large skyscrapers that towered hundreds of meters into the sky and heavy traffic, plus lots of propaganda. Even after the war, propaganda for communism still runs pretty high.
As we started to leave Saigon, I expected to see fewer buildings and eventually just get to rice fields in every direction, but I was a bit surprised to see that that wasn’t the case! The area was pretty urbanized with one-story houses lining either side of the road. My mom (who lived in Saigon) says that there was a time when this whole area was just rice fields, but that time was not the time my mom was referring to. This area was pretty industrialized and even after we crossed the border into the Long An province, it was still quite crowded.
Eventually, we turned right off the main highway and headed into the town where our relatives lived. They lived in a fairly densely populated town that looked a lot like Saigon, only the buildings were shorter. This house, like a lot of the houses in the area, also doubled as a shop where the family sold products to customers across town. Most of the products included shoes, rice bags, and clothing. While we were there, our relatives gave us a pair of discount Crocs as a sort of “gift”. Mine ended up breaking later on in the trip when we were in Sapa (But that won’t happen for another 10 days or so in the trip, so keep reading) and Casey’s survived the whole trip.
We went upstairs where we all sat around tables and listened to the adults talk. This time, there was no place for me and Casey to retreat and do our own thing, so we kind of just had to sit there and wait for them to talk about whatever they wanted to talk about. After an hour of this, we had lunch. I don’t have too much to talk about lunch other than the fact that it was really awkward for me and Casey. We sort of just sat in the background and ate on our own, exchanging a few words here and there. Even Casey didn’t feel like the mood was right to do something hilarious, which is quite surprising because he can go into “funny mode” in serious situations.
The adults continued to talk, and me and Casey went to another room to wait it out. After a while, we went back downstairs to where all the products were being stored and found… a cat!
Our relatives owned a cat! It was a really small one and I’d say it was only a few months old. The kitten didn’t really care for guests. It just minded its own business most of the time and then started hiding the rice bags. Casey and I kept trying to pet it, but it would scratch us with its claws when we did. After a while we just let it do its own thing— it didn’t leave the rice bags for the rest of the time we were at the house.
We still had another hour to spend before we went back to Saigon and we decided to spend it at the market nearby. After about ten minutes of walking, we reached a market where they sold mostly fish and meat. It was a very active place, and transactions were going through very fast. A few dogs were even walking through the market on their own, which is something you wouldn’t see in America.
And then my dad suddenly found out there were even more relatives. My dad wasn’t even sure how we were related by this point— he just told me and Casey, “There’s another house here with people you’re related to,” without any more information. This house was across the street from the market and was another shop selling loads of rice bags. They also sold rice bags, and also rice bags… and more rice bags. We didn’t stick around for too long— Casey and I were bored out of our minds and I was starting to develop a cough. I was still pretty exhausted from the sudden flight to Saigon (even though it had been 3 days) and it was really hot that day. We pretty much just stayed in there to enjoy the air conditioner before then heading out again to go back to the first house (The one with the cat). Finally, we went back to the car to begin the 1 hour journey back to Saigon.
Once we got back to Saigon that night, what did we do? Visit more relatives. This time, I actually do know who we visited?
The past few days, we’d been staying at my mom’s parent’s house. My grandfather on my mom’s side had a few sisters that we visited that evening. The first house consisted entirely of adults, so I (again) got pretty bored of the adult conversations and sat and waited for them to finish.
Then we went to the second house which was not far away- only a couple minutes of walking distance. This house was much smaller and there were kids this time! Yay! Someone to interact with, right? When I say kids? I mean a four year old boy and a two year old girl who were more interested in playing with toy trucks than talking to their minor relative.
There wasn’t much to do here either, so after getting borderline crazy from boredom we finally went to get dinner. For dinner that night we had noodles with meat which was really good. There wasn’t much to talk about for the rest of the day since I just went back home and stared at the computer screen.
And then we get to probably my least favorite day of the whole month. My weakass immune system couldn’t handle the thousands of miles of travel, and by now it was starting to catch up to me. When I woke up this morning, it was clear we weren’t going to be able to get anything done today. Since we were changing cities the next day, we agreed I should just rest and recover for later. We planned to have lunch with Mia and Koia today, but that was quickly canceled when I clearly was not in a good condition.
I spent the whole day doing absolutely nothing other than staring at the computer screen. I had this weird taste in my mouth that emerged in the afternoon and wouldn’t go away. I pretty much threw fits every seven minutes when the taste got particularly strong. It very slowly calmed down, and in all that time I basically stared at my phone for another few hours, waiting for it to all end. I don’t even remember what I was doing afterwards that day because I was so tired and exhausted— I remember being forced to go for a brief walk and take a look around the block which was nice, but I kept complaining about the taste and so I was eventually told to go back inside.
By night time, the taste was a little less annoying, so I ended up finally being able to go to sleep. The fourth part of this blog series will be a huge turn. Up until this point, the vacation was mostly just visiting relatives. If you’ve read everything up to now, you probably thought Oh that’s cool, but where’s the real traveling? Well, finally, (yes, I also got tired of writing all this relative stuff) the real traveling can happen.
We’re about to take a flight straight to the city of Phuket in Thailand. I have no relatives living here, so you can now hear about the actual adventures. Even better, we planned to do this part of the trip with a group of our friends who are also Vietnamese. We’d see them in Thailand.
For all intents and purposes, the trip had only just begun.