Oscar doesn’t have it. Over the past 48 hours this kid has been a champ at acclimatizing to his new environment. He has flipped his sleeping and eating habits effortlessly, and snoozes soundly and peacefully while the rest of us find ourselves oddly awake at, let’s say, 1:48am. Our first day in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) began with us waking him up at 6:30am (the rest of our crew was up around 4am) to step out into the streets of Saigon. The learning curve with travel is steep and unavoidable, and in less than 15 minutes, we were already admonishing ourselves on how, “we should have been astute enough to read the look in our hotel receptionists eyes” when we suggested we were going to “walk” to our said location. Pungent scents, blaring horns, crumbly curbs and an overwhelming amount of motorbikes descending and weaving uncomfortably close. Within moments I saw a certain look descend over our Indie, a combination of jet lag and culture shock colliding all at once within her slender frame. This was a feeling that I clearly recognized within myself on our first trip to Asia over 25 years ago and it is overwhelming and underwhelming at the same time. To define the feeling of jet lag and culture shock to someone who hasn’t experienced it..my sister (who is also traveling alongside us with her family for the next 3 weeks) described it as, an overwhelming feeling of not being able to figure out her body's cues. A state of internal confusion as the body and mind try to reason with an invisible, yet startling change, all within a span of 24 hours. And so, for the first day in our new environment we worked at finding creature comforts, like a steamy bowl of pho soup and mango smoothie, as well as locating an open green space to stretch our compressed limbs, and to experience the lush beauty of our tropical surroundings. In a little over a week Vietnam will celebrate Tet, the Lunar New Year, and in preparation for it colourful flora is spreading like wildfire before our very eyes, spilling out onto the streets and filling the parks. It is here that our adventure has started.
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Oscar can make baby Atla smile in any given moment |
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A beautiful park we located in Ho Chi Minh |
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Exercising in the park is typical |
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A lot of this in our life lately |
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Making the best of the long flight |
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10 hours into our flight |
Sounds exactly as it should be! Hope you’re continuing to settle in. xo melissa
ReplyDeleteI am so happy to see your smiling faces! I am relived you made it safe! I can’t wait to see you adventures!! Miss you already!!!💕💕💕
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