day 22 - general notes vol.3 - cultural differences

All those culture changes are making me dizzy already. We come from China where there is no English spoken at all we enter to Hong Kong that all is English based. Then in Macau there is Portugese and now we are in Vietnam that is totally different. Vietnamese language at least does not have hieroglyphs so we can read the signs. At first glance it seems that locals speak English more freely here than in mainland China.

Besides the language differences there is different money everywhere. Today is Sunday and the banks are closed in the city - so again we were moneyless. Luckily Riina was planning on withdrawing Vietnamese Dong from ATM anyways - at least those are open :) So she took 1,5 million out :D We both got shaky knees when we saw this in numbers :D Another thing is eating utensils - we can't pretty much remember when we last ate with chopsticks, must have been in Shanghai? In Hong Kong we were never given chopsticks, only fork and a spoon. The spoon thing is confusing though, they have done it couple of times - fork and a spoon, but no knife.

And then of course the toilets :) In mainland China there was mostly the modern version of "hole in the ground", which means that the whole in the ground was ceramic and you could pull the water on afterwards, but girls still need to squat. In Hong Kong I did not see a single one of those, there were only normal toilet seats, same in Macau. In Vietnam I see the same half modern "hole in the ground" thingies.

Then there is the thing with electricity and different adapter systems. The adapter I got for China was not the same in Hong Kong, in Vietnam I don't even need an adapter :) Traffic and the streets are chaos in China and even more so in Vietnam. In China it seemed that when the traffic got a red light and we could cross the street they still kept coming :) I figured that perhaps it is the same way as in some parts of US that you are allowed to make a right turn on red by yielding. Ok, that was fine. Now there we dealt mostly with cars which was a bit easier. Here in Vietnam on the other hand we are dealing with the same situation that they just keep going on red light, but the situation is ten times worse since here are mostly rollers - meaning that there are about 50 of them coming towards us at any time, usually at least 8 of them next to each other and they make strange turns every now. As rollers go very fast, it is quite scary to get across the 3 laners here :)

We were so hoping that in Vietnam they don't make those gross snorting noises and don't spit - well, we are out of luck as this is going on everywhere here as well :(