Saigon for the soul
I sit on a stone bench outside my new home on a monotonous street of terraced houses ( which could belong to a Parisian Boulevard ) regularly and have long phone calls to relatives and friends. Without fail, during these blabber sessions, I am visited by rats and cockroaches who remind me just how far I am from home or, for that matter, downtown Paris. Their squeaks echo from holes centimeters from the bench and cockroaches try to explore the new pale hillocks which are my feet. (I don't let them succeed in this mission, I'm not feral ) My home in Ho Chi Minh is a Homestay, an apartment which is occupied by 35-40 Vietnamese students and 8-10 foreign teachers like me. In the Homestay I live and eat for free in return for teaching English for 3-4 hours per day. My homestay's street is not typical of the streets in Saigon but belongs to a housing estate called 'Cityland Centerhills' a residential project hinting at The American Dream which seems to capture the