Up and down in South Vietnam

To be alone again.

I was looking forward to the first day and thoroughly enjoyed catching up on all the things that would otherwise simply fall by the wayside, such as planning and organizing the rest of the trip or reporting back to many friends. I also immediately met another nice German woman, but decided to move around Hanoi alone, simply because I needed the time for myself. In the evening an uneasy feeling began to spread, which unfortunately lasted subliminally for the next 1½ weeks. At first I thought, and perhaps it was, that it was due to Lara's sudden absence. What was missing was her presence, the conversational exchange and the habit of her character, which simply could not be replaced by anyone in the short term future. But I got used to it quite quickly, but an uncomfortable feeling, which mainly included homesickness, remained.

I drove to Hoi An, a cute little fishing town with an old town lit by lanterns and a charming ambience, although the heavy tourism took away from the charm. Because I missed Lara, I was briefly socially intimidated again and found it difficult to talk to or approach other people. In the evening I sat in a small restaurant where a pleasant-looking Britten sat down next to me and after 10 minutes of overcoming it I spoke to her and we quickly fell into a longer conversation in which we finally agreed to meet up the next day to rent a scooter and pickle around a bit. And she was pretty :)

With a high spirits, I strolled around among the lanterns hanging in all shapes, colors and designs and just thought a bit while James Blunt sang in my ear who he loved in 1973. The next day we drove to a temple complex with caves and even more ruins with waterfalls, so a typical day out in Asia, although I don't know much about any of that anymore because I was more focused on the conversation. We talked non-stop all day, made stupid jokes and then spontaneously met again late in the evening to have another meal together. She convinced me to get a henna tattoo and I convinced her to sing karaoke. When we said goodbye, I was on the verge of telling her that I really liked her, that she was pretty or asking if I could kiss her. After a long period of eye contact and silence, I still couldn't bring myself to say goodbye and so it was a normal farewell. I was a little annoyed with myself, but I knew exactly what it was. There was still this feeling in my subconscious and the fact that I would see Valentina again the next day. I found out the day before that the Colombian woman with whom I had a lovely meeting in India was traveling in the opposite direction and so we quickly decided to meet in the middle. I was a little excited, but I was especially happy to find out what our reunion would be like, since the kiss last time aroused more interest on both sides.

After I arrived at the hostel in the evening and showed a group of Russians and an Algerian in a bar who was the best at playing cards, I met Valentina in the rain in front of the hostel as she was getting out of the taxi and we fell into each other's arms . We sat on the roof of the hostel and talked until 5 a.m., grinning at each other the whole time and trying to maintain a visual duel from the outside. We communicated to each other that we really, really liked each other and wanted to get to know the other better, although we were too emotionally involved for either of us to have any value in having something now and again in two days Directions to travel. It also happened that she had just gotten over a long-term relationship and didn't want to cry after someone again, so she gave her the greater motivation to keep it platonic for the time being, whereby we realized that we would be in Thailand at the same time and then together for a longer period of time can travel around and see what develops. I was a little confused by her ambivalent feelings, which I think only made me want to get to know her better.

Even though she gave me a kiss as a greeting the next morning and we spent a wonderful day together, she continued to distance herself in the evening and after we talked again, it was suddenly unsure whether we would see each other in Thailand. I was mostly confused and fell for someone a little too quickly. I wrote her a short letter in the evening and then drove on to South Vietnam before dawn with a little heartbreak.

During the night trip, the bus driver spontaneously decided to turn on all the lights at 4:30 a.m. and play his favorite Vietnamese pop song playlist on YouTube at full volume in every sleeping cabin, while I was half crazy and everyone just wanted to sleep. When I arrived in Da Lat, I rented a bike with a Belgian woman and we whizzed through the pine forests that suddenly existed and around lakes that were so similar to the dams of my homeland that I had a very pleasant feeling, although it was still from that unpleasant feeling was affected.

Above all, it was a time when I sought happiness from other people because I couldn't achieve it on my own and unfortunately I just didn't know what I could do about it. During the time I was out with the others, I was in a pretty good mood and happy, but that immediately diminished when I was alone again. And that in turn made me even more frustrated, since I've been learning damn well how to cope on my own and be happy over the last few months. It also doesn't mean that just because I found other people interesting shortly after Lara left that it diminishes the importance of our relationship. Rather, it was confirmation for me that I just don't long for a permanent one at the moment.

In Saigon, aka. In Ho Chi Minh City, I then visited the national war museum about the Vietnam War, which didn't really improve my mood any further. The war crimes of the USA, with napalm attacks and the use of herbicides, bacteria and fungicides to cause a widespread famine by destroying the cultivated fields, was such a perfidious tactic, which to this day leads to Vietnam due to the residual toxic substances remaining in the soil has a much higher rate of miscarriages and miscarriages compared to other countries. How can people who have no knowledge or contact with the other ethnic group have so much power that they divide an entire country into north and south and then massacre hundreds of thousands of people because they pursue a different ideology? Even if people wage war for supposedly religious, territorial or ideological reasons, the real reason is always to secure or expand their own power. The Americans and the Russians and the Chinese shouldn't give a damn what state and economic system another country is run under. I know that of course it's not the case for economic reasons, but can't you just accept the autonomy of a state and let the people there live like that? You wouldn't want anything different for your home country. This utopian idea, which is written here so vaguely, unstructured and far too undifferentiated, is actually the result of 6 hours of exposure to heat at 37°C and the pacifist ideas that boil up due to the memory and lack of understanding of what happened during the war.

Great, now I'm angry and feel the need to continue to trumpet my opinion in a transparent and undifferentiated way...

I hate Nazis