Sweat In The City

Don't panic, but I have to admit it - Ho Chi Minh City overwhelms me. And not in a hip, braid wearing, backpack toting kind of way. I feel tense in its freneticism, dizzied by its speed and made drab by its colour. The noise and volume of traffic, even without the continual horn blaring, can drown out our voices, so that we are constantly having to repeat ourselves, throat scraping to raise the volume above the level of the road. Everywhere there is something happening, something passing, something moving and I simply can't keep my eyes focused long enough to absorb the impact of it.

 Ho Chi Minh is full of colour, life and noise. It's the sort of place that sounds wonderful when you rad about it, that makes you, at least in theory, want to plunge yourself into its sights and smells, its constant activity. The trouble is, with any kind of plunging, there is always some sort of shock involved. And how often is it acceptable to come up for air?

There are several important considerations here. One is to note that my anxiety, amid the bustle of the City originates purely from me. The City itself is friendly and non threatening. It just happens to move a bit faster than expected. 

Secondly, I feel like this in bustling cities anywhere. Both London and Bangkok can send me running for cover after a while, and they are less friendly and statistically less safe. 

Thirdly, we are on day two of a trip which will last nearly a year. This is not to say I am doomed to spend 11 months of constant overwhelmedness - give me a break, people, we're only two days in! What I mean is that I have all of 11 months to basically get good at bustling cities. (And actually, looking at our plans, this may be the stop with the highest scoring of the trip on my trusty bustle-ometer.) 

And fourthly, M sails through the City on his own unruffled and gentle waters. So clearly it's possible.

So, short of bottling essence of M, what's the answer? I reason that it was never our intention to spend all of our time here. There will be visits to My Tho, on the Mekong Delta, to the calm beaches on the China Sea, and we have an introductory yoga class booked this evening. (The morning class was in Vietnamese and might have been a little hard to follow).As I write this we are surrounded, not by roaring traffic, but by carved leafy dragons and elephants in the quiet serenity of Tao Dan Park. We watch teenagers practising dances in the shades, beefy men warming up and stretching on the grass, and a school trip shrieking with delight and an apparent level of innocence  not quite reached by UK school trips of the same age, though without knowing what we were watching, it is quite possible that this is a special school for particularly saintly children. This is the way to be in the City.

And on that note, this is not just about escaping out of it. It's about learning to find and exploit all the things that are so great about Cities - museums, eclectic food options, al fresco zumba classes, yoga sanctuaries, transport systems, multiculturalism and, again - simply stopping to watch it all go by.

This, perhaps, is how to plunge. No splashing, just a bit of gentle backstroke.