If you smile you (often) will get a smile back

Where ever you are you will have to learn how to smile.
Perhaps because of the weather, or because that women here are used to smile. Men more seldom smile to strangers like me.
Carsten Jensen, a Danish writer and journalist, wrote in a book after a long stay in Vietnam, that men here seemed to be less curious and more comparing than women.
As if they would adore you for your money, but they can also be mocking you as a foreigner from the west that only can say a few worlds in Vietnamese.
Western foreigners that has caused so much suffering here in the past.

I think Jensen generalized some. Most people here seem to be quite indifferent to you. In most stores women don't smile to you but both men and women smile back if you smile to them, at least most of them.
So, as in mindfulness, it's about interaction.
Im many ways I feel at home here:
In the shops, they let banknotes lay higgledy-piggledy in a drawer.
Usually we don't do that in Sweden, but my family did it and I still do it...
Another thing is the what we think of religion. Both Vietnam and Sweden are among the less religios countrys in the world.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/11530382/Mapped-These-are-the-worlds-most-religious-countries.html
But it may be difficult to say that you are religous in Vietnam. The party doesn't want their ideology to be threatened.

Vietnam has something though, that we haven't; seahorses - these lovely creatures. I hope I will see some when I will go snorkeling.





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