Yogurt motorbike?

I’m retelling this story in a boring blog format because I’m too lazy to pretend to shoot and film stuff using my iPhone.

This story is about my silly interpretations of ways of living in Hanoi and it involves yogurt. It’s been running around my head for some time now but I never got to write it down until now.

You see, throughout my stay here, I’ve seen a lot of these signs everywhere.

This bothered me a lot and, being the inquisitive biatch that I am, I tried to connect dots by myself.

And this is what my stupid self came up with.

“Sua chua” means yogurt. “Xe may” means motorbike.

The shops with the signs “sua chua xe may” are motorbike repair shops. So I’m guessing that these repair shops give you yogurt as you wait for your motorbike to be repaired.

There’s a reason behind this insane logic because in the Philippines, whenever I have to have my car washed or repaired in a shop like that, I’m often given a glass of water or coffee for free.

Following the same logic, and considering the fact that the Vietnamese are generally health-conscious (they eat lots of vegetables; slurp down yogurt and beans for dessert), I came up with that silly conclusion.

You get free yogurt when you have your motorbike repaired. How fun is that?

Wrong.

As it turns out “sữa chua” means yogurt, whereas “sửa chửa” means repair (or edit, or mend, or something like that). And it makes sense because when I switched to Tieng Viet on my iPhone, I saw the word “sửa” in the iMessage app all the time.

The diacritics, an important aspect of the Vietnamese language that cue tones, totally screwed with my brain.

I should seriously stop being such a smart ass in the wrong time. I told my Filipino friends about this last night and they laughed to death. Because they, too, have been bothered by this but never really asked.

My Hanoi ‘Suburgatory’

I have been following an American comedy TV series lately. It is about this girl from Manhattan who was dragged by her father to move to the suburbs in a town called Chatswin.

I did not know it at first but after watching 22 episodes, I discovered that my fondness for the show is actually a result of how my life in Hanoi parallels with Tessa Altman’s life in Chatswin.

Both of us were whisked into a world that is entirely different from what we were used to. Both of us took on daily life with piqued interests towards the things that we found as new, and apprehension towards the things that we found odd.

Rainbow biking

I didn’t think that I would have enough energy join and ride my bicycle in the Viet Pride bike rally.

Heck, I didn’t think I would have enough energy to wake up, at all!

I slept at 3 AM after killing time in the Old Quarter with Toby for our usual Saturday night hang out.

But amazingly, I was able to throw myself out of bed at 8 AM.

What also blew my mind were my newly-acquired bicycle riding skills, which I think are inherently Vietnamese.

I was able to swiftly bike from Phung Chi Kien, to Dao Tan, to Kim Ma, and then to Giang Vo like a local. And by that, I mean, I dodged other bicycles and motorbikes and cars and buses without freaking out.

I was running late and I wasn’t exactly sure where the meeting place for the bicycle rally will be.

But I made it.

Throngs of bicycles and motorbikes were in position to commence the rally.

It was pretty exciting. I’ve never seen a pride parade of sorts before. And I’ve never joined one.

So being in Viet Pride 2013’s bike rally was a pretty cool experience.

Oh, you know, just another road accident

Well that didn’t take very long. Riding a bicycle in the crazy roads of Hanoi is an accident waiting to happen.

And today was when I had to experience my first (well, that sounds so sexual).

I was riding my bicycle from Linh Lang Street to Hoang Quoc Viet after a regular Thursday meeting.

I was cycling down a slope when my brakes decided to have a vacation and to care less about me.

I crashed against a motorbike. I heard myself muffle a scream. And that’s about it.

Like most Vietnamese, I cycled away with shame while this guy ranted incessantly.

I am still overwhelmed with feelings of trauma and I thought I would find comfort and refuge in talking about it with the people in the VET/The Guide newsroom.

I didn’t.

Instead, I was greeted with comments and jokes about the pink hoodie jacket that I had with me that afternoon.

I am appalled by how big of a deal wearing a pink hoodie is in Hanoi.

More importantly, I am appalled by how less regard some people had about my accident.

I have no problems about banters and jokes about color, fashion, and all the sexuality crap related to them. I just thought that these jokes can come to me at another day, and not when I am thinking about my bicycle accident.

I feel bad about the lack of comfort I received from the people that I turned to after my bicycle trauma. And maybe that’s because road accidents happen in Hanoi so often and very casually that people don’t make a big deal out of them anymore.

Are Vietnamese generally apathetic towards traffic-related accidents? I hope I am wrong.

How many motorbikes are there in Vietnam?

An article by the Vietnam News Agency mentioned that there are currently 37 million motorbikes in Vietnam.

There are also two million cars in use.

So how do you think does this make me feel about riding a teeny tiny bicycle down the street against the sea of bikers?

Scared. Really scared.

But my two months in Hanoi has taught me to grow an extra pair of balls.

The time that I have spent here so far has also taught me to learn to like long-sleeved shirts (I’ve started a lookbook by the way)

and to have a constant craving for this

Now if I could only stop freaking out about not being able to go out on a Saturday night, that’d be great.