If I were to look at where I began the year 2015 and where I was when it ended I would posture that it was one of the best years of my life. But I guess I know the whole story and between those two apexes are some deep valleys of frustration and unemployment.

I woke up in Taipei in my house or maybe my ex-girlfriend’s house. I don’t remember. We had watched an orchestra at the National Theater and Concert Hall for New Year’s. It was very anti-climactic but a nice time spent with a person I truly cared about and was glad to share some of my life with. We had broken up a few days ago but I wasn’t going to be in Taiwan much longer and we still wanted to hang out. Also we were taking a trip to Vietnam in February before I flew back to the States.

Near the beginning of February Pipi and I flew to Ho Chi Minh City and hung out for a few days and met up with a friend we met on Couchsurfing. After that we took a bus to Cat Tien National Park to look for dragonflies and enjoy the solitude (from people) of the jungle. We didn’t get a whole lot in the way of dragonflies which was kind of a hard but unspoken disappointment for me since that was one of my main reasons for wanting to go–but it was dry season and we were winging it. However, we did pick up some new friends and see a lot of other plants and bugs. There’s no airport in the national park so we took a bus back to the city to wander around a bit more and then go home to Taiwan.

The bus trip back was somewhat stressful as the driver tried to jack up the price by 1000% claiming we misunderstood. I told him no respectfully but he insisted we pay the exaggerated amount so I told him to stop the bus. He didn’t stop the bus so we texted one of our Vietnamese friends who then called us and spoke to him. After hanging up the guy tried to change the price again and at this point I stopped being nice.

[–We had already been taken advantage of in Ho Chi Minh City once by the coconut vendor on the street because we were too polite to tell him to stop pestering us and leave us alone because we didn’t want a coconut, even when offered as “a gift”. I was skeptical and ignored him at first but after he approached Pipi I just wanted the guy to stop harassing us before my intercultural-BS/patience threshold was depleted.

Thinking about this more I realize I don’t know if it is as much being taken advantage of as local people (possibly culturally-unknowingly) capitalizing on a loophole where certain foreigners who are naturally friendly and curious about the culture but unsure of the consequences of telling someone they aren’t going to pay (or…”no [sic] pay” but gladly “tip”, as the vendor put it) for something they were given out of goodwill. This type of “cultural misunderstanding” is not one I really wanted to write about (for many reasons) but it definitely made an impact on all subsequent interactions with people.

Any way you look at this it ultimately is not good for their non-local tourism industry. It is not sustainable long-term but I think this requires more social, intellectual, and wider temporal thinking than is likely present in a low-wage vendor-class population (not blaming them). I have witnessed similar scenarios in many other Asian countries where Westerners (like myself in this situation) do not want to provoke further confrontation/misunderstanding and leave feeling distrustful and reluctant to engage…making the distance between us seem even wider.–

–I’ll try not to write about that ever again….]

By this point I was extremely irritated. I got up and walked to the front and told the guy again he needed to accept the initial price he gave us or stop the bus. It’s hard to say how much we actually understood each other because I know about three words in Vietnamese and I have no idea how much English he knew or pretended not to know, but I know I looked angry and probably a little crazy. Pipi called our friend again and gave the phone to the dude and eventually paid the correct amount (from our point of view) and moved past it to take pictures out the window of the different ways people drive safely in Vietnam.

After Vietnam I tried to mentally reconcile leaving Taiwan and Asia and going home to look for work. I didn’t want to go back to the US but I wanted to be somewhere more diverse/less mono-cultural than Taiwan. I didn’t have the resources to go somewhere else and figure it out so I started redoing my resume and bought a ticket back to DFW.

This is way too long and I’m only to February…

I will finish it later, if ever. As I mentioned, it looked a lot like a valley and ended on a peak much too high to maintain.