Welcome to Saigon. Population: 7.2 million (now +1)

 

Three weeks ago, having completed 5 days of quasi-relevant in-country training in Hanoi, I bade farewell to my fellow Australian volunteers and boarded a Vietnam Airlines plane bound for Ho Chi Minh City. The sole volunteer from this program to be posted in HCMC this intake, the lonely flight to Ho Chi Minh City – where I will volunteer as a project officer at the International Organization for Migration the next 12 months – was oddly exhilarating and smelled vaguely of fish sauce. 

Ho Chi Minh City - or Saigon, as the locals like to call it - is approximately 6700km from the south-east coast of Australia (read: Home). And what a difference 6700km makes. Allow me to demonstrate ...

This was my street in Melbourne: 

Below is my street in Saigon, complete with yappy dogs, a confused cockerel which will crow at all hours of the day and night (I think it’s broken) and a lady across the street who belts out Vietnamese tunes into on her karaoke machine until the wee hours. 

A few nights ago, there was a funeral procession outside my house at 3 am. The cacophony of cymbals, wind instruments and general tooting only lasted 30 minutes, so it wasn’t too bad. 

I have yet to fully master the correct pronunciation of my street name, which poses a few problems, not least when you are trying to get the taxi-driver or xe-om (motorcycle taxi) to take you home. To the correct address. According to my housemates, the challenge is to repeat our street name no less than 10 times using varying intonations (butchering the Vietnamese language in the process) until the taxi-driver or xe-om understands you, or pretends to so you’ll shut up. Success rates are not high, so I prefer to have the address written down on a scrappy bit of paper which I just show the driver. Apparently, that’s cheating and not in the spirit of the game.

This was my local market in Melbourne:

 

Here is my local market in Saigon: 

Melbournians will note the absence of gelato, skinny soy lattes and annoying Melbourne hipsters.

A few minutes walk from my place in Melbourne would get you here:

Yarra River, Melbourne

Take a two minutes leisurely stroll from my home in Saigon, and you might find yourself here:

The local slums with its very own poo river.

Since you’ve seen the neighborhood, it would be incredibly rude of me not to show you my home as well:

Mi casa. It’s a four story, five-bedroom house with two roof top terraces. 

 

Resident turtle.

The living room that doubles as a motorbike show room.

My room:

My room comes with its very own library. Before you get excited, the library largely consists of books like this:

I got excited when I misread the title of the second book from the left. "Jesus Pictionary?!?!" 

No. It wasn’t.

And, lastly, probably the best feature of the house, the roof-top terrace:

We are thinking of investing in hammocks.

View from the second roof-top.

 

So that’s my new neighborhood. I’ll show you the rest of the city later. For now, I’ll just leave you with this youtube video clip of Saigon peak hour traffic: 

It’s the kind of crazy you could grow to love.