You would be forgiven for thinking that Hanoi is totally set up for American and British expats, who are everywhere here, and that everyone in Vietnam speaks fluent English and the whole language-barrier issue will be a nonissue. If you’re like me and this is the impression you took away from your internet research before coming here, you would be dead wrong. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t expats here. There’re about 101,500 expats living full-time in country. But with a population of 98.2 million, Vietnam has a lot of people. Hanoi, which, according to the native informant I met at the Aeon mega mall, is a “mellow and relaxed” city, has more than five and a half million people. Someone who’s better at math than me would have to figure out what percentage of the people here are expats, but I think it’s safe to say they are by no stretch “everywhere.”

But they are here. You can find evidence of them in some of the bars and restaurants that otherwise have no business being here at all. Take, for example, the Belgian beer bar on our street, BBeer: The Culture of Belgian Beers. Every time we walk by this place, the seating out front is packed with Vietnamese men, hanging out, smoking, doing what Vietnamese men do. But none of them are drinking Belgian beer, which by beer-in-country standards is outrageously expensive. And there is nobody inside drinking Belgian beer, either. Ever. When we walked in and ordered beer from the two Vietnamese Belgian beer girls (who are nothing at all like the Vietnamese Vietnamese beer girls), they were pretty confused. 

So how could this be? I have a theory, and, like all my theories, I think it’s dead-on. This establishment clearly belongs to a Belgian expat or otherwise robust Belgian beer enthusiast expat who loves the food and culture and party girls in country but thinks the bia hoi is just okay and really missed the more robust and high-alcohol Belgian beer styles he had in real life. And since it probably doesn’t cost too much in Euro or Pound or strong American dollar to open and maintain a really quite premium Belgian beer bar in Hanoi, he went ahead and did just that. 

Point is, there are not expats everywhere and you will have to do a lot of gesturing and pointing at menus and also pointing at what other people are eating and drinking to order food and drinks here. You will also be laughed at by everyone you try to order from in Vietnamese because they will think you’re cute and you will think they are cute too because their laughter is in no way malicious, but is rather charming and endearing, and you will either fall in love with the Vietnamese people and culture and want to become an expat or you will want to go back to real life and sit on regular-style stools and drink from the selection of 87 IPAs at your local beer bar, which would be a crying shame. 

Expats settle down and make a home for themselves in their new country of choice. They open beer bars and eventually start to look like Nick Nolte in that mugshot online. Gina and I are not expats. We are deracinated. Homeless, if you will. But we’re not tourists, either. Well, at least, I’m not. Gina’s more of a tourist still, which is A-okay. 

On the boat trip back from visiting the Perfume Pagoda, which is a cave in a mountain where the king’s daughter went to live the monk life of there is no spoon and died and was turned into a statue by nature and whose statue corpse you can see sitting there with the other statues of monks who died in the pagoda . . . on our boat trip back, which took an hour of rowing under the heat of a thousand suns coming from a single sun, which is the sun of Vietnam, which rowing was done tirelessly and without complaint by a lovely lady who I just dare you to challenge to an arm-wrestling contest who loaned us an umbrella so we didn’t pass out, which is a good thing because I’m pretty sure it’s SOP around here to throw the FNGs who pass out overboard . . . on our boat trip back I had to vocally revise my opinion of tourists, who I’d pretty much always thought were obnoxious and sort of embarrassing in their pastel clothing and with their selfie sticks.

Because on our boat trip back I realized that the tourists in the boat with us were really cool—cooler than me, for sure—and in no way resembled the obnoxious tourists in pastel clothing with selfie sticks who visit NYC and walk slowly with their whole family and block the whole sidewalk, which unlike in country they have in abundance in NYC, and who all say the same thing: “New York is fun to visit but I wouldn’t want to live there,” meanwhile they live in whatever state they just happened to be born in, and who really are pretty often obnoxious and sort of make you embarrassed to be an American, which New Yorkers pretty regularly claim to not be, instead telling people in other countries when they travel, “I’m a New Yorker,” rather than “I’m American.” Point is, I think the kinds of people who are tourists in Vietnam tend to be pretty cool. And who as Gina very astutely pointed out tend to be from Australia or New Zealand or even from other Asian countries, which makes it hard to say if they’re locals or tourists or what.

Like our group on the boat trip back, which included the retired Frenchman from Australia in the striped Frenchman-style t-shirt they always wear who has clearly lived quite the life and who’s totally kind and gentle and whose level of physical fitness is something to be admired and inspired by and to strive for and which basically put my own physical fitness level to shame. I felt, as we hiked up the steps to visit the various pagodi, which weren’t even the 3,000 steps we would have had to have climbed to see the Perfume Pagoda had we not taken the cable car and which the Frenchman was totally keen on climbing—“I want some action,” he says—if I would do it too, he says . . . I felt, as we hiked up the steps, practically dying and sweating profusely, like I should have been wearing pastel and taking selfies with my selfie stick because I was sweating and dying and about to pass out and clearly not as physically fit as I imagine myself to be as a New Yorker, which is how I identify, and nowhere near close to the physical fitness level of the Frenchman, who really is very cool. 

Likewise, the Frenchman’s wife, whose family left Vietnam after the Fall of Saigon for Australia by plane, not by boat, because the boats were so, so dangerous. The Frenchman’s wife was the Frenchman’s sponsor in Australia, which is about the total opposite of what many people would probably imagine, and which is just one of the many things you can learn that will upset your prejudices and assumptions if you get out in the world and talk to people. She spoke Vietnamese, of course, which is how she knew that we were meant to tip the boat people who paddled our tour group to the pagoda area. It’s worth mentioning that the boat lady who paddled our boat was unimpressed with the tip we all pitched in to give her, which we thought was pretty generous, and she seemed to blame the Frenchman’s wife for our collective ungenerosity, apparently. The Frenchman’s wife, who was struggling terribly with the heat, but who held up admirably, responded to the boatwoman’s displeasure with the tip with a remark in Vietnamese that we didn’t understand and a look that we all understood perfectly well to mean, “Fuck that greedy bitch.”

The Frenchman didn’t understand her remark, either, because he spoke absolutely no Vietnamese because Vietnamese is impossible for anyone who’s not a native speaker to learn and all the laughter doesn’t inspire the kind of confidence one would need to keep on trying. This is fine because the Frenchman’s wife doesn’t speak a lick of French, either. So they speak English, which is great for us because our French is really bad and our Vietnamese is laughable, apparently. It’s worth reiterating, here, that English is not the lingua franca of Vietnam. Vietnamese is the lingua franca of Vietnam. Hands down. 

Besides the Frenchman and his Vietnamese wife, the other tourist on our boat was Ruksana. She’s the woman in the photo above who has the pretty rare quality of making already particularly stunning scenery more stunning. You can tell she’s a tourist because she was wearing the exact same pants as Gina was wearing, which are the blue and white elephant-patterned gypsy pants that are the standard issue uniform for FNGs who came to country thinking they’d wear jeans and needed pants that are way lighter and wispier and more comfortable in the, frankly, extreme heat and humidity here in country. I don’t know if we just had vibe—which I think we did: Ruksana’s one of my life travels soulmates, I can just tell—or if Ruksana’s just generally the kind of person you learn a lot about in a short amount of time, but I learned a lot about her during the tour. Ruksana, by the way, is well aware that I am writing a blog and that I planned to write about her because she’s a totally remarkable person and I think everyone should get to know her if they can. I explained that I remember everything, which is one of the occupational hazards of being me, and so she may be surprised at what makes it in here, which is everything I learned about her.

Here goes. 

Ruksana grew up in the foster-care system in the UK. She has brothers, but I’m unsure if these are biological brothers or foster brothers or what. It’s clear that she’s more adventurous than her brothers, though, although she wasn’t always that way. She studied Media at uni because she failed her A-levels, which I find surprising given her clearly high level of intelligence and proficiency at taking selfies. I gather that Media is the UK equivalent of Communications in the United States. Then she studied Radiology, which field she worked in for a bit but wasn’t too keen on because it was depressing to be around people in pain all the time. She said, Well, that’s about enough of that, and lit out to Soweto in South Africa to volunteer for three months working with kids, which was a pretty big deal for her, and which inspired her to become a teacher. And so after teaching for a while in the UK and being pretty frustrated and unfulfilled, Ruksana was all like F this nonsense and lit out of there to Qatar, which is in in the Middle East near Saudi Arabia, and which is a Muslim country that is ungodly hot but otherwise pretty chill, Qatar is, and which if you paid attention to the Olympics a few years back you know that you’re probably mispronouncing Qatar. Ruksana left the UK for Qatar to work as a teacher, and she ain’t never going back. Ever. Unless it’s for a family-type situation. But never again to live. Ever. Moving to Qatar was a big deal for Ruksana, indeed. 

It’s worth mentioning that Ruksana also likes Saudi Arabia, which she assures us is totally safe and where the men are exceptionally respectful to women, which is important to Ruksana because she travels alone and doesn’t like any touchy-feely nonsense. There’s a good chance that Ruksana’s impression of Saudi Arabia is the total opposite of what you might believe Saudi Arabia to be like. Ruksana’s discomfort with the whole touchy-feely nonsense thing, which goes a long way towards explaining why she doesn’t like monkeys and avoids them in her travels, is a little bit of a head scratcher because she loves massages and could have a massage every day and frequently gets massages when she’s traveling in a country where they are cheap and readily available, like Vietnam or Thailand, which Ruksana likes a lot, particularly Bangkok. She assured me that I will enjoy the ladyboys in Bangkok, where they are everywhere. Although I’m pretty sure she thought ladyboys are hermaphrodites and was confused about why Thailand has so many hermaphrodites when it’s a pretty rare condition elsewhere in the world. And so I explained about the bolt-ons and man bits taped to the leg under the miniskirt situation, which cleared a lot of things up for her, and so she gave me the pro-tip that you could tell the difference between ladyboys and real ladies by the ladyboys’ large hands and feet, which pro-tip could be pretty clutch for avoiding an embarrassing-for-everyone situation while partying in Bangkok, which is not the capital of India as the American schoolyard prank will have you believe. And so it doesn’t take long after meeting Ruksana and getting to know a lot about her before you probably do want to get all touchy-feely with her in a non-creepy and more like friendly type of way that involves hugs and trust falls. The frequent massages along with her preference to have a day of R&R between long and hot and sweaty tours to visit cultural places of interest goes a long way toward explaining why Ruksana and I are life travels soulmates. Because same same.

Ruksana is not a very adventurous person, if you let her tell it. But Southeast Asia Escape Plan is not Ruksana’s blog and she’s not telling it. I am. Therefore, Ruksana is one of the most adventurous people I’ve ever met. She inspires me to be more adventurous, and I’m already pretty gosh darn adventurous to begin with. I think Ruksana and I are a lot alike in that we both made pretty significant life decisions that sort of blew our worlds wide open opportunity-wise. I lit out of Tampa in my late 20s to move to Brooklyn and go to college, and Ruksana lit out of the UK for Qatar to teach primary school and use her long and frequent holidays to travel the world. She’s visited 45 countries so far and she’s aiming for 150, and I have no doubt she will see them all.

If she doesn’t have kids, that is. Which is not to say that you can’t travel the world and take amazing selfies that improve on the landscape after having children. But it definitely can slow things down. And at 36 years old Ruksana’s biological clock is ticking like Marisa Tomei’s in My Cousin Vinny and the way things are going she ain’t never getting married. And, of course, as she points out, women aren’t like men in that there’s a statute of limitations in terms of viability and she’s starting to look around at some of her friends and thinking, “Your genetic material will do.” It’s worth mentioning, too, that Ruksana pointed out that, at 42, I’m not much older than her, which I took to mean that my genetic material would also work in a pinch, and maybe if I wasn’t already still married to my wife who still loves me, we would make a pretty cute lovechild together using advanced artificial insemination techniques and not using any of the touchy-feely sort of old school meat and potatoes techniques by which we were conceived, probably. But, good lord, that baby would be cute. 

Ruksana sticks to a Halal diet, which would maybe be a dealbreaker meat and potatoes-style relationship-wise, particularly if that meat is pork, which in country it tends to be, but which is no problem at all life travels soulmates-wise. Except that finding chicken that you can be sure is Halal in country is even more difficult than finding vegetarian food (which are all way more difficult to find than food that you can be fairly sure is really pork) and so that’s how she discovered Domino’s vegetarian pizza for the first time while visiting Vietnam. And so the street food situation wasn’t really her thing for dietary reasons and also because she’d like to avoid a BOHICA situation during her vacation, if possible, because Ruksana is a tourist who would like to enjoy the cultural sites and taking selfies and massages and days of R&R between outings instead of suffering the entire time the way I did during her time in country before going back to real life. Ruksana is a very cool tourist, indeed. 

Gina is also a tourist. This is one of the major differences in our approach to being in country. Gina has the touristic impulse to plan stuff. She likes to research cultural-type places to visit—the Perfume Pagoda, the Temple of Literature, the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum where you can, no shit, see the great man’s embalmed body, but not at the moment because it’s under renovation, the body, that is—and books tours to go to them. I, on the other hand, am not a tourist. As our native informant, Miracle, so elegantly put it, I am a traveler, a free person: “You want to learn the culture and get to know the people and really live in a place.” The real world for me isn’t life before my tour in country. The real world for me is right now. So instead of planning and booking tours to visit cultural heritage-type places, I make plans like this: “Hey, babe. Let’s go to the movies and watch Mission Impossible, Dead Reckoning Part One in the totally premium Gold Class CGV movie theatre.” Or like this: “Hey, babe. Let’s hit up the local Winmart to see what the local grocery situation is like and maybe cook some jarred Barilla bolognese sauce with rotini pasta for dinner tomorrow night because tonight we’re ordering Kentucky Fried.” Gina likes to walk places, which is not the Vietnamese way. I take the motorbike, because this is the Vietnamese way. None of this is to say Gina doesn’t enjoy immersing herself in the real-deal street-level Vietnamese culture. She’s all in. But I get the sense from her that she’s still visiting country, and not yet living here, even if it’s just for a month before we travel to somewhere else.

She will get there.