Making Friends With A Vietnamese Local (Without Speaking The Same Language)

Life can throw some curveballs at you sometimes. If you’re open to what life has to throw at ya, you can end up having some really fun, unexpected experiences.

I was walking home yesterday, when I saw a Vietnamese guy fishing in the lake.

I don’t really know what compelled me to stop and try to talk to him, but I did it.

The fun thing about not being able to speak the local language is you get the chance to play a never-ending game of charades.

If you understand each other, you win.

If you don’t, then you lose.

Like, when I tried to order mangos with chili on it, but got a mango smoothie instead.

I failed that game, but it wasn’t TOO hard of a loss, because the mango smoothie was pretty good :).

Honestly, there's just something so beautiful about being able to have a connection with someone without even speaking the same language.

It just started with me wanting to take a picture... and the random boy was nice enough to say yes.

Then we started “talking” sort of, if you can call it that. He did tell me his name is "Dang" which I understood at least.

We somehow ended hanging out and fishing together for about an hour. I tried to speak in Vietnamese, and he tried to speak in English.

We tried to talk some through google translate, which is always hilarious… because sometimes it says the wrong thing.

He typed to me: You have no social skills.

I’m still trying to decide if that’s what he meant to say or not. It’s a toss up, haha.

He said he isn't from Hanoi, but from a province somewhere else:

Here’s the video of us hanging out.

If anyone has any good video editing advice, please let me know!

It took me about 3 hours just to figure out how to convert this thing and upload it from a .mov file so I could get it on dlive... I'm assuming there's a better way.

But I'm really proud anyway...

... because I wanted to use Dlive instead of youtube. So I put in the mother of all efforts and got this thing converted!!!

It's not the most professional movie, because I'm still developing my skills, but at least you can still see Dang’s awesome personality in the video, and I guess that's the main thing anyway.

Also, I let Dang try to film some of it..and I'm thinking maybe he's never tried to film with a camera before haha. I know for sure he has a basic phone, so maybe doesn't know how to use a smart phone really.

I'm so glad I randomly decided to stop and watch him fish, 'cause I had a blast.

I think he had fun, too, because he saw me again today and invited me for "water" (tea).

Just this once...pretend you liked it, 'cause I stayed up until 2 am for this shiz haha.

My video is at DLive