It's currently 3:30pm and Jack and I just got back to the hotel after our first day up and about for realsies.  

I've spent the last 24hrs thinking hard about culture and honestly up until this trip I didn't really understand how my culture fundamentally differed from others around the world.

I mean, I've traveled all around North America and seen how other people live. But obviously N-America is a white power, colonial type of society and cultural norms don't really differ much state to state / province to province. Not in any hugely noticeable way at any rate.  

It wasn't until experiencing Vietnam that I really began to understand just how different my expectations and way of life are to the people here.  The difference isn't bad, far from it, but it's a difference I've just never needed to examine before.  

Yes, I think it's more a culmination of small differences.  Mainly though, how everyone here seems to just show universal contempt towards standardized driving practises. It's kind of like that old arcade game Frogger where your mission was to safely navigate a frog from one side of the street to the other while trying not to get run over by sixteen wheelers.  (If you don't know what I mean it's just a quick Google search away.)  Anyway yeah motorcyclists here seem to have borrowed a theme from the Cuban Missile Crisis, that being Mutually Assured Distruction because they give all of zero fucks. Basically as long as you don't hit them, they won't hit you. Whenever you want to cross a street you simply just walk across in a slow, straight line.  No stopping, no turning back.  Because, as Jack likes to remind me. 

You Stop

You Die

G-