Unpacking my trip through the objects I bought.
My mother sent me off on my first international trip with my friends with one instruction (that I consciously remembered), “If you shop, get back small items, don’t buy anything too big- in size or in the amount of money you spend.”
I went around some cities in northern and central Vietnam, picking up objects that the designer in me was salivating over. While the shopping took off quite later in the trip, it went on right until the small duty-free shops near my airport gate. With time and some Vietnamese dongs to get rid of, these shops are the perfect bait for last minute gifts. In the true Indian spirit of getting back gifts for the entire neighbourhood, I encountered two couples buying chocolates, the classic ‘I have returned from another country’ gift.
After quite the turbulent flight , I came home overwhelmed and happy. Two solid days of rest later, it is safe to say that my trip to Vietnam was worth every penny (my parents) spent. I landed, came from Bombay to Pune, and reached home by 2.30am, a time when my parents are closer to waking up than they are to their sleep time. To top this off, I had an itchy throat and a sore neck, tired from bouncing up and down during car rides from the past week. Before someone recommends neck pillows, I have tried them, and they are always too big to work for me.
All these first world problems considered, upon my arrival I opened my bag and hurriedly showed them everything I had picked up. Evidently so, I was proud of my bag of tiny things collected from Vietnam. And through that little bag and my collaged descriptions, I brought home Vietnam.
Let me describe the pieces of the collage for you.
1. Postcards
While the use of postcards as postcards might have reduced (only a speculation), I can confirm based on my creative circles that their value as ‘wall accessories’ has certainly gone up. Be it Pinterest mood boards at play, me having visited Blossom’s (a bookstore in Bangalore that sells postcards) too many times or simply my increased exposure to artists, I find myself thinking ‘hey, this could very well turn into a postcard’ at anything 2d, A5-ish in size and ‘stickable’. An easy ‘pick me up’ item becomes easier to pick up when you love letters, writing, and/or writing love letters.
2. Toys
Over my multiple visits to neighbourhood flea markets, bazaars and exhibitions, I have built a bunch of bells. As someone who needs constant reminders to blink while working on my laptop, a distracting sound is quite helpful. The small new wind chime, from the pottery village in Hoi An, will now hang around in my collection. The lovely detail seeming like a dragonfly is going in circles whenever the wind plays with it instantly caught my eye.
Like the wind chime, so many toys were pleasant disturbances to the ‘sightseeing.’ One that my friends and I thought to be a showpiece ended up being a whistle. Another, I thought to be a mere ‘cool’ kite, ended up having an attachment that made a flute like sound upon flying, how delightful a pass time! At the bustling street markets in multiple cities, I saw bird shaped toys using potential energy in elastic rubber bands to fly. I took my own sweet time on the streets of Hà Nội to learn how to play with these. Thanks to it being the weekend, the road along the Hoàn Kiem lake was shut for vehicles. Turns out, every weekend it turns into a vibrant space to spend time and promenade through (on skates too, if you’re adventurous enough).
3. A bright green halter neck top
Like every other person whose itinerary was influenced to some degree by Instagram, I ended up getting a blouse stitched in Hội An. It costed me a little more than what it would have in India, but I decided to give it a go for its added emotional, narrative value. “Yes thanks, I got it stitched when I went to Vietnam with my school friends! Yes, you must go to Hội An, the streets lit up with too many lanterns to count and-” I did not mind spending a few bucks extra for all the conversations I would get to have over it for the years to come.
4. A paper Lantern
While I missed my chance to grab the traditional lantern because I kept thinking it was priced more than its price in my head, I did get a little paper lantern back home. Very simply built out of marble paper, with minimal folds and 4 staple pins giving it structure, I brought it home as a reminder for the wish I made while letting one go in the Thu Bồn River.
It is so heart curling to think of how so many places in the world have their own wish making rituals, the little act a passerby does not mind performing, for it holds the chance to make dreams come true.
5. Dragonfly trinket
About 5 years ago, when I was being mentored to go to design school, this story, the one I am about to describe, was one of my favorites. Supposedly also a classic metaphor used to explain the concept of death (something even adults find hard to swallow) to kids. It talks about how beyond the underwater world where dragonfly eggs come to life, lies the atmosphere, a world where the eggs emerge as dragonflies and never return. However, it is only the dragonflies hovering above the lake that know what a different world lies beyond the surface of water. And while they have the entire world to explore, the one thing they cannot do is go back under to tell the little ones this secret.
I always get so carried away by this story I hold close to me. So, when I saw a tiny trinket with a similar painting, I picked it up. While I didn’t have a certified use for it by the time I reached home, my grandma very easily allotted it the task of holding salt whenever guests are over.
6. The complete ‘Vietnamese Coffee’ kit
Of late, maybe because of my 4 years long stay in Bangalore, I have gotten used to small strong servings of coffee. Larger portions often end up with me not enjoying the drink. Safe to say, that I inhaled glasses full of Vietnamese coffee, giving me another chance to rebuild my relationship with it while the sparks still flew. Consequently, I picked up different kinds of coffee, condensed milk and coconut cream (fully aware that my dear country manufactures them too), all in my preparation for the perfect coffee to cure my lag, more of an emotional than a temporal one. Collectively trying to get the ‘recipe’ right gave me and my friends some extra good times too; as always, endless stories around coffee!
7. Bamboo and Mother of pearl goodies
Whatever little opportunity I have had to be in touch with bamboo as a medium has only left me in awe. On our way to Ha Long Bay, we spent some time at an exhibit about how pearls are harvested. When I came across products being made from bamboo with mother of pearl embedded in it, I simply couldn’t comprehend how they were made. It gave my brain something to fidget over. It was after a while that I had been exposed to a craft so new that I couldn’t decode it in my brain, and I decided to get that feeling home.
8. Chopsticks
The thing about gifting that I find confusing, is do I get a gift that is likeable or or do I get a gift that shares with the person, the essence of my experience. With the understanding that there are too many days when one is ‘supposed’ to get and give gifts, I am still trying to structure my personal policy on gifting. Meanwhile, an object that yells ‘I went to Vietnam and almost figured out how to eat with chopsticks’ was a message I thought I wanted to share with those close to me.
As an amateur, I imagined chopsticks to have become a ‘regular’ in south east Asian countries as a tool to make sure people ‘focus’ on their food during meal time. Upon further research, I found that the regular use of chopsticks to eat has not only agricultural reasons, but philosophical, functional and ‘food-saving’ reasons too! So many stories in each of these objects, if only one dwells!
9. Ramen and Spices and Yoghurt and Seeds
While I am not usually up for instant noodles, I brought some back as a warm up exercise to prepare my parents for their hypothetical Vietnam trip. For someone who still needs to develop their tastebuds to enjoy Vietnamese food in all its glory, the instant vegetable Phở was quite the relief. I jazzed it up with some sauteed mushrooms, spinach and springs onions, and it was a lovely meal.
While in Vietnam, I tried Cao Lau and Phở both, and the mint, lettuce, thick noodles and croutons made the Cao Lau the clear winner for me. Either way, some Hội An chilli (a kind of hot sauce with chilli and garlic) and flavored yoghurts always came to my rescue as a vegetarian in a place where seafood is the much obvious and go-to choice.
As a descendant of vegetarians who are stern believers of dry fruits, it was customary that I returned with sunflower seeds. While I hoped that getting home superfoods will put me higher up on the superchild ladder, I ended up getting seeds that needed further peeling, watermelon ones tougher to crack than sunflower.
10. The pot I ‘threw‘
Over my sightseeing experiences as a cyclist in Jodhpur, Amsterdam, Goa, Shimla and now Hội An, I can confirm that being at par with those on the streets of a place is the one way to get closer to an ‘authentic’ experience, something a lot of us actively seek while travelling. Our cycle took us to a pottery village, a village where we saw people grow herbs and leafy vegetables extensively, a duck farm, and endless rice fields. At the Thanh Ha pottery village, I grabbed my chance to revise my rusty, half-baked technique of making a bowl on a potter’s wheel. Everyone who has had their chance of sitting on a pottery wheel knows what I mean when I say it is difficult to get distracted from what is happening on the spinning plate. The clay grounded me so easily after I was on my toes for the week, absorbing in the experiences Vietnam had to offer.
Upon my return, I realized that the air fryer baked pot (what a genius trick to save time, I must say) was baked just enough to be safely transported home, not enough to pot plants like I had imagined. The clay is now a little something from Vietnam for my plants that have soil too airy or loose.
11. A bookmark
As a writer/documenter, most of my bookmarks go in my diaries. The bookmark with a delicately laser cut Temple of literature silhouette (I still long to see) acts as a pause sign, as a promise of my return to the land of the ascending Dragon.
To sum the ‘rest’ of the trip up, I could not climb Mua Caves all the way up because my body over-heated like an abused laptop, I couldn’t watch the water puppet show because we reached 5 minutes late, and we couldn’t check out the beach at Hoi An because all our energy went in shutting our alarms off, exhausted from the packed week.
All these now add to my list of reasons to visit Vietnam again. Ms. Sue, our hotel receptionist at Hội An told us how she lost her prime years to travel to the pandemic. She reminded us, ‘you live, first’, and I intend on doing nothing but listening, and listening well!
Vee Documents 
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