Two days in, and I’ve already managed to freak out, have a cry, and get diarrhoea. Not a bad haul - I thought it would take a least a week to rack up those three travel classics.
As for the freak out, here’s some good advice: If you already have a pretty well entrenched fear of flying, don’t take it upon yourself to watch every single episode of Air Crash Investigation (excellent show though it may be) in the build up to the longest flight of your life. What it will leave you with is a pretty vivid idea of what could go wrong on each stage of the flight. While most people are tuning into some classical music and closing their eyes for a relaxed snooze shortly before take off, you’ll be sitting there thinking about how the plane’s tyres haven’t been pumped properly due to criminal negligence on behalf of a depressed engineer, the inevitable upshot being a puncture during take-off which fires rubber shrapnel into the engines, causing a rather impressive explosion 1,000ft in the air.
While others are tucking into the surprisingly edible mid-flight chicken schezwan, you’ll be agonising over the idea of essential mechanical parts of the plane failing to thaw after being subjected to minus 50C temperatures, leading to the hydraulics failing and the engines unable to receive fuel.
As you come into land, instead of looking forward to sandy beaches and exotic cocktails, you’ll be bracing yourself for a fatal brake failure, which will see the plane careen into a hanger, killing everybody on board, along with a good deal of ground crew.
I say I had a freakout - it mainly consisted of staring at the flight clock for nine hours straight, counting the minutes as they passed. Entire weeks have passed more quickly.
However, I managed to get my shit together for long enough to sit through Her, a truly excellent film, I thought.
As for the cry, well that’s rather more embarrassing. But as I started to try and switch off for a night’s sleep, the enormity of the life decision I’d made really swept over me. I was seeing a highlight reel of all the friends and family I’d spent time with over the last year, all their smiles and the wonderful conversations we’d had. And I was missing hugs like this:
Cliched as it sounds, it's only when you're away from the people your friends and family sometimes that you realise how precious they are to you. I've been so singularly minded in getting this whole trip together, that I've had to stamp out any anxieties about loneliness, or being away from those special, un-recreatable bonds. Fortunately, having Jen here to comfort me was a great help, and then sticking on a podcast with Louis Theroux unleashed plenty of Britishness to comfortably cajole me into a peaceful slumber. (Need to thank James Dyer for the tip on listening to podcasts - an amazing way to hear life stories of people you'd otherwise have no real exposure to).
It's good to cry sometimes. Odysseus - one of the bravest and most impressive of the fictional Greeks - cried about 600 times on his travels:
"Odysseus wept when he heard the poet sing of his great deeds abroad because, once sung, they were no longer his alone"
"Demodacus started to sing about troy again, and Odysseus wept some more"
“Yet Odysseus felt a longing for his wife and wept, sitting on a rock"
So you know, as far as the Greeks are concerned, my crying was very noble indeed. Still, so was being aggressively intimate with 6-year-old boys, so maybe it's a dangerous school of thought for me to start following...
In regards to Da Nang, it's a perfect combination of bustling chaos, with a few western comforts thrown in.The locals are lovely and curious, and that curiosity is no doubt further piqued by Jen's red hair and my 2 meter stature.
We've eaten some delicious food, including one of the most succulent steak baguettes I've ever had - the crunchy bread which melts in your mouth a legacy of the French occupation here. And it cost 60p (although I later saw one advertised for the equivalent of about 20p) We also drank a couple of delicious smoothies, although I fear they might have been the route cause of the loss of integrity in my bowel movements. You can sort of see that I've realised it even as I'm drinking it:
There are some awesome sights in the city, including some extremely ostentatious bridges, one of which has a multicoloured dragon running along it, you can see a terrible picture of the tail here (I'll get better at taking pictures as time goes on, I promise):
It's been a hectic but exhilarating start to the adventure, and following some initial sadness I'm starting to feel the excitement settle in. We've found the flat we want to stay in. Lovely modern furnishings and just a stone's throw to the beach. Tomorrow, we'll be going to observe lessons, while next week we'll start teaching ourselves. For now, we're dead happy.
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