Getting Ready to Go

So, on July 21, I'll be in Hanoi, Vietnam, in theory ready to start the amazing experience that's waiting for me but most likely exhausted and jet lagged and useless. I've got a month before I go.

I started this blog because I want to be able to record everything I experience there, in a way where I can share it easily with my friends and family and anyone interested in keeping tabs on me. Right now I'll probably post sporadically to blabber about all the preparation - shopping, getting shots, doing research, reading reading reading - but hopefully once I'm there I'll post every day, record everything, forget nothing. Take loads and loads of pictures. In the end, this is probably more for me than for anyone else reading this, so I'll never forget. I've been out of the country before - I've been lucky enough to go to places like England, Ireland and Italy - but as amazing as those places were to experience, they still fall within the realm of the familiar. I'm thrilled to be going to a place so completely different from what I've known all my life, with lifestyles and thoughts and food so foreign.

Meanwhile, I'll be experiencing a country and a people with a history painfully and inextricably intertwined with that of the US, a history that neither country can forget or ignore. My mother was a hippie in college, and she threw herself into protesting the war, as passionate about the atrocities of her generation as I am about the atrocities of mine. Now, she thinks that my going to the country she fought so hard for is bringing something full circle. Discussing possible locations for me to go, she heard old familiar names - Saigon, Mekong Delta, Hanoi - in a whole new context, the images of war and horror removed and replaced with hope and opportunity. Nice an poetic, a new generation healing the wounds of the old.

Don't get me wrong - I'm not pretending that me crossing the Pacific and teaching some children how to say "How are you" will heal the wounds of the Vietnam War. It's also pretty naive to assume that I and the people I encounter will come away with a new outlook on our lives and our places in the world. But hey, there's nothing wrong with hoping. In any case, I'll go somewhere completely new, completely foreign, and hopefully find a way to make it feel like home.