It's taken me six months here to find a decent gym (just as I'm getting ready to leave, go me). Whilst your average Hanoian keeps fit by doing chin-ups on rusty bars next to a lake at 5am, the upmarket expat gyms are lush but maintain their exclusivity by charging an insane amount to join (like, your first month there you'd be $1000 poorer). I've been to another gym a bit, but their treadmills are designed for 40kg Vietnamese girls, not "real women" (ha), and also I crashed my bike coming out of the carpark and now I'm scared to go back.
Someone recommended me Olympia gym on Trang Hung Dao. Unsurprisingly considering it costs 40,000 VND ($2) a go, it's grotty as hell, but luckily it's also gloomy enough that you can't really see the pubes or the sweat stains down the walls. It's got a swimming pool and a big room with weight machines and only four treadmills, one of which tried to kill me by incrementally increasing the speed without me noticing. There are lots of Vietnamese men in hot pants doing Vietnamese things such as walking sideways on a treadmill whilst beating their chests. Such calisthenic wisdom is yet to reach the West, but they must be doing something right as they're all well skinny. Upstairs from the gym, women go to do aerobics, but I was intimidated by the frantic pumping house music and didn't go up there. The gym also has a really fit assissant man working there who kept "demonstrating the equipment for me" (i.e. showing me his muscles). He was very attentive. I like this gym.
The reason I wanted to write about this was due to the conversation that followed my first trip to the swimming pool there. After a long cold winter containing few swimming opportunities, I excitedly told Dung about the pool. He said he really likes swimming, he wants to go there, etc. He said he hasn't been swimming for a long time, since he left his village... WHERE HE LEARNT TO SWIM WHILST FARMING BUFFALO. What the fuck?! Whilst I was having swimming lessons at the Taro, he was in a fucking rice paddy in rural Vietnam, herding water buffalo and eating cats. He knows that he can hold his breath for two minutes, because when he's riding on a buffalo's back and it goes underwater, he has to go underwater too. Many of the friends he grew up with are still farmers like this. I hope I don't need to say that none of this is meant in a conscending way, like "Ho ho, you mean there isn't a multi-million pound leisure centre where you come from?!" But it happens very frequently that I can't even wrap my head around HOW different our backgrounds are. I think he's fascinating.
We are going on holiday to Nha Trang, beachy town in central Vietnam, at the beginning of next month. I wanted to fly there to save time, but flying is too expensive, and furthermore it makes baby polar bears cry. So we're going to get the 24-hour train down there. Dung was like "That's ok, I really want to go on a train. I've never been on one before." WHAT! I know I'm lucky enough to have been on more flights than a lot of people, but train journeys have been a staple of my whole life - gigs in Portsmouth, going to the orthodontist in Guilford, day trips in London, that time Nolly and I went to meet a man in Eastleigh... I have never really considered this a privilege, it's just normal. How can you have never ever been on a train? And then I was like, "I can't believe you've never been on a train!" and he thought I was saying, "I don't believe you've never been on a train!" and accusing him of lying.
Most bizarre relationship EVER (also the best).
