It is a Saturday and I’m sitting on the balcony and the light is going. We got Finn out of the play centre with a bribe. We bought a Thomas the Tank Engine toy after his last one slipped overboard on the ferry from Ranong to Ko Phayam (Thailand). His face froze. He knew that it wasn’t lets-go-get-it-gone, but forever-gone. I panicked and promised I’d get him a new one, but I don’t think he knew what that meant. Still, I remembered his bereft little face and my promise. That was two months ago and today I finally replaced it.

We walked until we saw the first of many places serving Phở. The word ‘restaurant’ seems too formal. These places are family run, with kids sleeping or playing at the back surrounded by toys and some kind of bed arrangement and the sense that receiving and cooking for people is just a part of their home life. There are few items on the menu, usually some kind of broth/noodle combination like our favourite–Bún bò Huế, or Phở or noodle dishes with clams, shrimp, pork, and a bowlful of fresh herbs, chillies and lime. There is pickled garlic in a jar on the table, fish sauce and clear bottles of other things we haven’t yet tested. You add these in pinches and half-spoons and tentative drizzles. It’s the kind of food that builds. Comforting, once you’ve hit your own sweet-spot of condiments and extras.

It rained as it has almost every day since we got to Vietnam, but each time it is short lived and a relief because it cuts through the humidity. We waited for it to stop and walked the rest of the way home, dropping into the coffee shop next to our apartment where Finn runs straight behind the counter, holds out his hand and giggles knowingly as female staff members produce lollypops out of nowhere. He is as comfortable crossing these boundaries as if it were his living room, which (since we’re technically homeless), I suppose it is. I always bristle a little bit, worried that he will get told off or I will get told off or people will think I’m a bad mother because of the total absence of discipline. But then I look at everyone’s faces. The girls are laughing and ruffling his hair, Finn is smiling, and I’m the only one biting my nails. It’s a kind of unlearning–facing a new culture, and I come up against my Englishness in these moments. The tension of wanting to apologise for everything, to rehearse old social patterns, and having to manually override them by relaxing my own shoulders, forcing a deep breath and finally smiling along with everyone else.

Saigon has been interesting and the first couple of days I wavered somewhere between excitement and terror. But these things can’t sustain themselves, so I’m sinking into it and walking alongside the sea of motorbikes absentmindedly as they curve around me like I’m a cow or a goat. Everyone goes around each other here, people use their instincts more and they talk with their horns. In England, beeping your horn is an emergency, the equivalent of shouting. In Vietnam, it’s more of a casual conversation and so your alarm system adjusts too and the noise shrinks to background chatter.

I’ve started a daily writing habit as well, just to help me feel more like a functional human being. When I write, other things seem to fall into place or the opposite, move. So I badgered myself into doing at least twenty minutes. It’s not much, just something to root me while I get my bearings–stream of consciousness mainly. Today I’m doing it on our balcony. Our apartment is on a busy road, not a main road, actually it’s quite narrow, but there are shops and music and swarms of motorbikes talking to each other as they criss-cross. I once read (in a book called The Poetics of Space I think), that the sound of the traffic at night is a bit like the sound of the sea, the whir and swell of cars like the crashing of waves. I used to try and think of this when I lived on Brixton highstreet, my bedroom window facing the main road. The waves, sweeping up the occasional ambulance, sent me to sleep. If you’re not a city person, it could be maddening and nightmarish, an assault on the senses. Sometimes though, it’s a kind of stubbornness or lack of imagination.

Saigon. The heat, getting wet and drying off again, plunging your flip-flopped feet into murky puddles, crossing the road in sections, voices speaking in a language you don’t understand, and the constant movement–these particular city-waves rising and crashing is something you get used to, I’m told. Grotesque or beautiful depending on how many drinks you’ve had or how long you’ve been here. It’s not a neat place nor clean if you want a neat, clean life. But it is Asia: overwhelming, hot, exciting, demanding that you bend around it. it feels like if you could just release for a second whatever it is that is hunching your shoulders, then it’s kind of awesome, isn’t it?