A room with a view

It’s hard to know where to begin, so, at the risk of neglecting a countrywide perspective, I’ll start at home. I’ve moved twice in less than two weeks, which is what happens when you go to a foreign country without making living arrangements. The thought scared me, of course, but enough people had assured me it’d be easier to rent a place once I reached Saigon that I believed it. I spent the first few days at a small hotel (khach san) while my cousin searched for a room. For just 200,000 dong a night (the exchange rate is 16,600 dong per dollar), I could have certainly made the hotel my home for the summer, but the idea has always seemed odd to me. If I want to see Vietnam as it is, why let a hotel obstruct my view? A cheaper room also had the masochistic appeal of testing my capacity for discomfort.

The hotel could not have had more than a dozen rooms, and mine came with a TV, air conditioner, mini-bar, and queen-sized bed. I had been warned not to be surprised if, as in many East Asian countries, the bathroom had no separate shower, just a nozzle that splashes the entire bathroom when turned on. But I had only one complaint about the room, something that at first I couldn’t put my finger on. It was an unsettling feeling that I gave no thought to, that I subconsciously attributed to exhaustion or something like it. Not until the second day did I realize the room lacked a window.

How silly to lose sleep over a window. But after my pathetic excuse for an internal clock had already been scrambled by the 16-hour flight, a window seemed to be the only reminder of which way was up. The combination of jet lag and an unstructured schedule had me sleeping haphazardly, always between sprints and marathons, never knowing day from night. If nothing else, I told my cousin, please find a room with a window.

Technically, she did. The room had two windows, in fact, plus the glass on the door and the large, vent-like openings near the ceiling. But it may as well have had no windows because they admitted no natural light, instead opening out onto a hallway in the building. When I walked through the hallway during the day I would glance wistfully at our neighbor’s room, which faced the street and overflowed with sunlight.

Then again, that room was also closer to the railroad running next to our building. Just 20 feet away from the train, I always heard its terrifyingly loud and irritatingly frequent whistle, so I imagine it could only have been worse for our neighbor. I can’t explain why I dreaded the oncoming train so much because it couldn’t have been the noise alone – it never disturbed me in my sleep, and I always hoped it was thunder, which inexplicably would have been more bearable. I started reading Atlas Shrugged the night we moved in.

Some other things to look for when renting a room in Vietnam: curfews, furnishings, toilets (as opposed to a hole in the ground), sinks (as opposed to a spout), air conditioning, and permission to cook.

What we didn’t think to ask our landlord was whether we could have company over, and when he refused, my cousin decided he was too difficult to live with. Our smaller, yet costlier room sits among a chain of other rooms behind the shops on the main street, rather than inside a building. In other words, we have a window. It’s hardly large enough for an average sized person to crawl through, but still, all I wanted was to see the sky. There was only one drawback I hadn’t planned for. Like our old room, this has openings near the ceiling which admit insects along with the sunlight. Now that there are newspapers covering those holes, I’m getting bitten less often, but if you’ll excuse me, I have some gnats to kill.