Vietnam, June 2015 Arriving to the airport of Hồ Chí Minh City, I sat down on a plastic chair to gather my bearings and to take a moment to get used to the heat. Feeling a bit nervous and uncertain of what to do next, I suddenly got a phone call from an unknown number. A cousin of a half-Vietnamese friend of mine had agreed to show me around the city and I answered the call, expecting it to be from him. A young man’s voice greeted me and I replied, still thinking this was the cousin speaking until the voice started demanding repeatedly:

“When are you coming to my hotel?” I realised that the almost angry-sounding voice belonged to a friend of my friend’s family whose hotel I had been arranged to stay at. I tried to tell the man that I was still at the airport and wasn’t sure how long it would take me to get to the hotel. The man ended the call, telling me to wait, and then started calling back, constantly asking what time I’d arrive to the hotel. Beginning to grow more annoyed than confused, I kept on telling I wasn’t sure until the phone calls ended.

I took in a couple of deep breaths and decided that I was starting to feel more self-confident and so picked up my backpack and took a bus to the city. Driving through the busy streets, I marvelled at the crowds of people and the insane traffic. It was like nothing I had experienced in Europe or the States and I found it all very exciting and was eager to get to explore the city. Grinning to myself, I sat back to enjoy the bumpy ride and the blissful A/C of the bus.

Everything was going smoothly. Until I missed my stop.

Trying to get off of the bus was a bit tricky. By this I mean that I seriously had no idea how to do it and so ended up sitting there, feeling like an idiot, and just waiting for another passenger to get off. At last this happened and I found myself in the opposite direction of my hotel. Lucky for me, it takes a lot before I start panicking and so, just a little nervous, I got myself a taxi to take me to the hotel.

As the taxi pulled over, a new cause for extreme confusion presented itself. I was figuring out how to pay the driver with the strange Vietnamese notes when an elderly couple suddenly ran towards the car and I, a bit startled, wondered why these people were in such a hurry to get a taxi. To my further confusion, they opened the door and paid the driver.

“Hanna?” the man then asked and I felt great relief when I realised that the couple was there to show me to the hotel. I followed them through a narrow, dirty alley which made me wonder what kind of a hotel I was actually being taken to. To my pleasant surprise, however, the place we arrived to was very clean and charming.

Another pleasant surprise was to find the owner greeting me from behind the front desk with a big smile and happily welcoming me to his hotel. The anger I thought I had heard on the phone had apparently been misinterpreted. The young man handed a key to the old woman who led me upstairs with a ceaseless chatter in Vietnamese.

After we had reached my room, the old man joined us and the couple sat down, staring and smiling at me in complete silence. Okay then. Getting more and more confused as moments passed by, I asked myself who these people were and why did they stay in the room. After a minute or two of this, the man pulled out his smartphone and showed me a video chat on Skype. The video presented me my friend’s mother from Finland who then told me that the man was her brother and the woman his wife. Well, that explained some stuff.

The warm welcome helped me forget the jetlag and exhaustion of the trip from Finland to Vietnam. After the old couple left, I started unpacking and, feeling refreshed and curious to see this unfamiliar city, I left the hotel to go for a walk. As I emerged from the little alleyway, I had the choice of turning either left or right. Just a two-minute walk would take me to a large street from where I could easily walk to the city centre. I turn right. The wrong direction, of course.

After being completely lost for quite some time, I eventually found my way to the park I had originally intended to go to and I gave myself an imaginary high five. There I remembered how tired I actually was and sat down on a park bench. Soon a Vietnamese boy walked up to me and shyly asked if I wouldn’t mind speaking with him to help him practise English. Delighted, I started a conversation and answered the boy’s questions about myself and Finland while other people started stopping by to listen.

I had been told beforehand that this happened very often between tourists and the young Vietnamese, but I still wasn’t prepared for the crowd of twelve youngsters gathering around me. Each new arrival asked me the same questions about myself and I answered them while questioning them about Vietnam in turn. Without noticing it, I had sat at that same park bench for almost three hours.

It was getting late and by the time almost everyone had left, I decided it was time for me to go as well. The second I rose, however, first drops of rain started falling. I saw locals running to a shelter and joined them. I thought it was a bit of an overreaction maybe, thinking that the drizzle was nothing, but soon it started truly pouring down. I knew I had signed up for the rainstorms when travelling to Vietnam during the rainy season….. but still.

After a while, I decided that I really had to get back to the hotel. And so I braved the rain and started jogging through the streets, every now and then stopping underneath canopies. While standing under one, I saw a very grumpy street-seller who had some plastic rain coats in her booth. I walked to her and pointed at a rain coat. The old lady wasn’t happy just opening the plastic bag for me and slapped my hand away when I tried to take the coat and dressed me in it herself. I gave her a bright smile which she returned after a while.

Thus protected from the rain, I continued my journey. The walk from the street-seller to the hotel took only ten minutes. Or it would have. Walk straight ahead and turn left, you can’t get lost, I had told myself. Sometimes I undermine my lack of sense of direction.

Eventually, about forty minutes later, I was back at the hotel, dripping wet, tired, and happy.

I travel. A lot. And to the worry of many people close to me (sorry mum, sorry dad!), I usually travel alone. One of the biggest advantages of travelling on your own is that you meet new people more easily. And the important part of this is that when travelling, it’s not the sights you see that you remember, it’s the people you meet. Seeing Central Park and Times Square in NYC was great, but what I remember the best is how I got confused with the trains on my way to the JFK airport and saw an American couple with luggage, looking just as lost as I was, and I briskly marched up to them and asked if we could be lost together. I ended up spending the next two hours with this couple, telling them stories of my journeys around Europe and the US and in return listened to them tell of their life in the countryside.

Vietnam introduced me to quite some characters that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

To start off, here’s a quick impression I got of the Vietnamese as soon as I got there: friendly and loud with no sense of personal space. From the perspective of a tourist, the type characters of the Vietnamese include for example angry bus drivers yelling at the traffic, young people with endless questions that often get much more personal than any Finn would feel proper to ask, and old motorbike taxi drivers in basically every street corner, smoking cigarettes and shouting after you to ask if you need a ride. The Vietnamese seem to be divided into two very distinct groups: the quiet and shy and the very loud, the latter being the large majority. Both groups are very friendly and I have mostly good memories of the people I met. Obviously there were also those with the haha-stupid-tourist attitude which unfortunately also sticks to your mind, but good memories do outweigh the bad.

I mentioned the lack of personal space that characterises Vietnamese people. Finnish personal space is roughly the size of Canada, but during the trip I had to learn to accept the women I was talking with putting their arms around my shoulders or holding my hand. The most memorable personal-space-what-is-that moment came from a girl selling clothes at an indoor market. While haggling, she held my shoulders and kept on repeating “don’t worry, be happy!” and when at last I agreed to buy a pair of trousers, she friendly patted my ass and then gave it a quick squeeze for good measure. No, I don’t think that’s exactly typical for Vietnamese people, but gives you a fair idea of what I had to get used to.

Language barrier wasn’t a huge problem when making friends. I very fondly remember the middle-aged lady who sat next to me on a long bus drive with whom I communicated mostly by waving hands and using the little Vietnamese I had learned. I’d show her pictures of my friends and family on my phone, pointing at the people and explaining my relationships to them with words like “em” (a younger sibling), “má” (mother), and “bạn” (a friend). The lady fed me mangos and candy during the four-hour journey and towards the end of the drive held my hand tightly, stroking it with her thumb.

A short list of other interesting people I won’t forget: the soft-spoken cousin of my friend who drove me around Hồ Chí Minh City on his motorbike; one of the loud bus drivers who woke us up at 6am after a night-long journey by suddenly blasting out Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance at max volume; the girl and boy whom I managed to persuade to join me in a restaurant, promising to treat the meal, but who cheated by paying for all of us while I was in the restroom; an old shop-keeper and his wide smile as I tried speaking a bit of Vietnamese with him. These people and many, many others.

Of course it’s not only the people you’ve met that you remember. My picture folders are filled with photos of the cities of Vietnam, the mountains I visited, and the beaches I strolled in. I’m a city person and love to spend my vacations just walking around, looking at people passing by. This gave me a bit of a limited view of Vietnam, however, which I regret a little. But I did get to experience some of the Vietnamese nature in the mountains of the city of Đà Lạt which I’m very happy about. The beautiful scenery surrounding the mid-sized city combined nicely my love for cities and the pleasure of seeing mountains and visiting waterfalls, both of which really appeal to me considering you don’t really see those in Finland.

While being able to revisit the sights by going through my photographs, memories of Vietnamese food bring a tear in my eye as I try to imagine the amazing tastes in my mouth. Vegetarian version of the famous phở soup is something I particularly like to recall. Being a hopeless cook myself, I doubt I’ll ever be able to recreate the dish myself although I’m determined to try as soon as I gather enough courage to. Hot spices, fruits I had never tasted before, the strong coffee, and overly sweet desserts are also something that I love to remember. The food alone seems like a reason good enough for me to dream about travelling back to the country.

All in all, the crazy traffic, crowds of people, the interesting language, all the times I got utterly lost, the stares following after me that I had to get used to, the rainstorms I learned to predict like locals, all the noises and smells, and the culture so different from what I’m used to all hold a very dear place in my heart. I most definitely intend on going back.