About Me!

I'm a sophomore at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana studying Middle/Secondary Education and Math. Semester at Sea is my opportunity to not only study abroad, but also live the dream of Suite Life on Deck. (Just kidding). I'll be taking classes on a cruise ship with about 600 other students and sharing my experiences here!

Friday, February 12, 2016

Driving in Vietnam

So this next entry is one that I submitted as a blog post for my Intercultural Communications class. After every port, we write about something that made us stop and think. It's a way of incorporating what we do in port with what we learn in our classes. 

Never will I ever operate a motor vehicle in Vietnam. Although I'm relatively confident with my driving through the suburbs of Indianapolis, I can only imagine the anxiety of weaving around all the motorcycles and the possibility of getting run over by tour buses with their very aggressive honks and intimidating size. Nobody stays in one lane. In fact, driving in two lanes at once seems like the cool thing to do. Bonus points if you weave back and forth between the two on the wrong side of the road. 
Obviously, driving here is very different from what I'm used to in the US. I'm afraid of what I'm going to see in the countries later on my voyage. Can you say culture shock? On a more serious note, I noticed that they have a lot of the same issues that we have, including drunk driving. However, there are some differences as well. Many more people ride on scooters or motorcycles. I've lost count of how many families of four I've seen loaded on one cycle. I even saw a family of five, and felt pretty proud of that accomplishment. On the flip side, almost everyone has a helmet, which is not the case in the US. 
There's also a lot of honking. Not in the aggressive pissed off at dumb people driving (or not driving) honking in the states. This honking is more consistent. It's a reminder that your vehicle is behind another, slower vehicle. And that they should probably get out of the way. Cue the image of my anxiety attack while driving a motorcycle. It reminds me of learning to drive on the highway. But worse. I'd probably just stop and let them drive around me. 
In my Intercultural Communications class, we look for critical incidents where something we notice makes us stop and think. Here, that's the honking for me. It's just so hard not to notice it and for me, it's almost omnipresent. Over the four days spent in Vietnam, I was on multiple buses, taking many taxi rides, and even just walking around the city. After observing it, I've noticed that it's a necessary part of daily life. The two taps on the horn of a bus coming up behind you is like a polite excuse me as you walk by someone in the grocery store. 
This is sort of a cultural difference that is highlighted in Martin and Nakayama's Intercultural Communications text, where they introduce the notion of high-context communication. That is, "a style of communication in which much of the information is contained in the contexts and nonverbal cues rather than expressed explicitly in words" (p. 233). I believe the honking is a form of nonverbal communication, and without the context of the culture, it can mean different things to different people. The only time I use my horn in the US is generally if I get cut off on the highway. But here, I think I would have to get used to using it much more. 

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