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THE SLOW TRAIN TO NHA TRANG

or, THE DIFFERENCE $7 MAKES AROUND HERE

I went to Nha Trang this past week, a lovely seaside town with something quite Mediterranean about it. I took the train, which I was looking forward to despite my fussy Vietnamese friend complaining about the toilet situation -- a hole in the floor that you can only use when the train's in motion, that convinced her not to go to the bathroom for the 8 hours the journey takes.

The only seat I could choose was a $6 "hard seat." I chose it. The train itself was an old colonial filled with unevenly painted park benches, set in facing pairs. My seat was occupied by an old woman, whom I considered for a moment before asking to move. I sat down and shared a laugh with my seatmates, then noticed a finger pointing in my direction.

As the first leg of the trip got on, people started to get comfortable. The girl next to me leaned against my shoulder, close as it was, offsetting the duffle she'd left on the other side of the seat. The man across disembarked at a close stop, and the woman he was sitting next to lay down across both seats, her legs against the window wall. A man in the seat behind her got up and squeezed his floormat into the pyramid formed by the back-facing seats, squeezing himself in after it. The people rolling food and drink carts slightly adjusted their paths to avoid his two peeking feet.

I was doing that thing where I pretend a bunch of people aren't too close to me -- feigning absorption in my poorly photocopied bootleg novel -- even though me and the girl beside were jockeying for better shoulder positioning, and a toddler was making runs at me across the aisle, stamping her feet on my toe-tight FiveFingers shoe.

And I occasionally smiled, but it's a tentative smile aimed at the children of strangers. But soon someone caught my eye and handed me the cut-off bottom third of a water bottle filled with tea, and the train opened to me, twenty cars of people looking at the green mountains passing and the only white person on the train.

Mothers picked their children up onto seats before my waiting lens, other young ones yelled "hello!" over armrests. And I yelled back. We were all in this together, just trying to get through an 8-hour train ride with our bums intact.

So here are some pictures.

Don't get so excited; this is tobacco, people.

On the way back, Josefine and I took the soft-seat, AC option ($13). It wasn't nearly as colorful and generous, probably because the seats were comfortable enough to sit in all the way through, without having to resort to antics. There were also a lot more Westerners with us, and just my visible identity didn't earn me smiles. I got only one picture on it, but it was a good one.