The country, not the war

I went to Vietnam for a couple of days with my Cambodian family. We first traveled to Ho Chi Minh city by bus, and stayed there for two days. Then we went to Dalat, a sleepy little mountain town in the middle of the country, and stayed for three days. It was all and all a wonderful trip, and made me realize how little I really do know about Vietnam.

Like most Americans I am sure, my knowledge of Vietnam is limited to a very short span of time in their history where it crosses over with that of my own country. and I am sure what I have learned has been very slanted, and that my misconceptions of the people and the country run deep without me giving much thought to them at all. And now that I have spent a couple days there, I don’t feel like I am much more enlightened on the subject, but I do feel that I have once again been humbled by the limits of my education.
Traveling with my family was very interesting as well, as I would not have traveled in as high style if I had not been with them, staying in nice hotels and going on tours as opposed to the 5 dollar guesthouses and fumbling my way through places with pockets full of free maps as I would generally do as a single traveler. But we did get to go on a really great tour of dalat, which involved traveling through the mountains, waterfalls, art galleries, trying some crazy foods including worms, crickets, and snake wine, and a really interesting silk factory. I have seen silk farmed, spun, and woven in Cambodia, but all done by hand, and seeing a factory where it was produced was quite fascinating.
Resentment between Cambodians and Vietnamese runs deep, and with my family I saw both sides of this, through the comments made by them about Vietnamese people, as well as some of the things that were said to them by Vietnamese people there. And the two cultures are so different. It’s amazing that it’s so easy for westerners to group all of these disparate cultures of “Southeast Asia” as one, which is probably just as offensive as referring to all of the nations of Africa as being the same.