“And now for something completely different.” Saigon. Vietnam. It’s been a while since I’ve been in a country I’ve never been in before.

Recently I’d been watching a video of a lecture from a university course on “Personality” in which the lecturer talks about how we first see things as what they mean to us before we see them as objects. For example, we see “thing to eat” before we see “sandwich”, “monster” before “car that might hit us.” “thing to climb on” before ladder, and so forth.

Arriving here made that clearer than ever. I arrived, and I couldn’t see much. I could just see: chaos.

It seems an obligatory thing to do for a new arrival here to take a movie of some traffic because it’s just so crazy. The amount of honking you hear is so constant as to be comical.

I’ve been here about three days now. I have various accomplishments under my belt such as: feeling reasonably comfortable crossing the street. Know where to get food. Know how to walk around. That’s about where I set the bar for my first day and a half in a place that’s completely new.

Now, onto such things as, looking for a serviced apartment to stay for a couple months. And so it goes.

Also, the food here is great. And cheap.

I’ve arrived near the Tet holidays- Lunar New Year. It’s the year of the rat. I’ll see people on bikes carring myriads of flowers. Folks dressed up. gift baskets with snacks on sale. Hopefully it doesn’t make it too hard to look at serviced apartments. We’ll see.

Before this it was a nice ~3 week visit back home in the States. First time I’d been back in winter for quite some time.

Such a different experience than now. Hard to even know what to say about it.

Feels a bit like taking yourself apart and putting yourself back together again. It’s hard, but it’s hard in a way that I like.