“Traveling is only confirming my suspicion that this world is full of contradiction. Like the Zen Buddhists who browned the edges of their porcelain to only further make something beautiful look more decrepit and therefore more humble—you take the ying and the yang, the good and the bad, beauty and sorrow. The experience we had today visiting the photo gallery (which was the ground level of the artists home) showed the old wrinkling skin of the aging woman next to the soft brown skin of the toddler boy clinging to her folds. Grinning smiles and glistening tears, his photographs of traditional looking Vietnamese snapshots were truly captivating. It is the personal and more hands on intimate experiences like that one—where we got to actually meet the artist, see his darkroom and manage to keep a part of his photo he was going to throw away—that are sp rare and priceless to me.
Seeing the restored ruins today was cool but getting a glimpse at a traditional dance by young women in colorful dresses and brown pots balanced on their heads was what I will remember. Yet, even this was staged.
It is deciding to brave the market street food to sit on kid-sized plastic chairs in the midst of local Vietnamese people who are staring at your every bite to either ensure that you like it or out of their own curiosity of why four girls might have decided to settle down from some $1 pho for the afternoon amongst them. But they showed us that even they eat with a spoon and fork. Their eyes bulged when we asked for more hot sauce. Those are the unplanned encounters that make a trip.
And, seeing as it is only day two, there will hopefully be many more to come”
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