James and Erin are here. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see two people – both of them! – come into the baggage claim area last night. I was nervous as I could be waiting for them there – I kept thinking there would be some other problem with the passport, visa, etc. But no problem!

Their flight got in on time at 10:20pm. We then took a cab from the airport back to their hotel, got them checked in, and then took a cab to the Rex Hotel’s rooftop bar so that James could get in touch with his inner Cronkite.

I got home sometime after 4:00am, and let’s just say that too much beer was consumed. It’s now 8:05am, and I’m up so that I can take a shower, go meet them for breakfast, and then head to my 10:30am ComLaw class. Not feeling so good right now – namely still drunk and also in dire need of sleep.

Oh well, one must do these things when you have to cram a 7-day trip into 5 days. I’ll try to update again soon, with photos, etc., but for now I’m just happy that they’re both here in Vietnam!

Okay, I saw The Dark Knight over the weekend and, contrary to the thousand gushing reviews I’ve read, I didn’t think it was that great. It wasn’t terrible, but I just didn’t think it deserved all of the hype it’s gotten – and I wonder how much of that hype is because of Heath Ledger’s death.

First, I thought it was way too long. I watched about 2/3rds of it, then turned it off and watched the last 1/3rd of it the next day. Not really the mark of an engaging movie. I think they tried to have too many storylines going on at one time, and it could have used some serious editing.

Second, I thought some of it was just stupid. The whole thing about the two boats with the detonators, etc. – I thought it was just gimmicky and unnecessary. Same for the whole “every cell phone in the city is now a sonar device.” And to me the action scenes just weren’t that impressive – nothing I felt I haven’t seen before in plenty of other movies. I keep reading that the bank heist at the beginning reminds people of the scene in Heat, and I really didn’t think it warranted the comparison.

Third – and I guess I’ll say finally because I don’t mean to completely bash it – I didn’t think the acting was all that great. I think Heath Ledger did a fine job, but I didn’t see a performance that I though was automatically worthy of an Oscar nomination. His performance was about what I expected – meaning that if you were going to play the Joker more straight without all of the camp from the TV series or the Jack Nicholson role, that’s about how you’d do it. And I can’t help but wonder how much acclaim he would have gotten for the role if he was still alive. We’ll never know. And, although I generally like Christian Bale, what was up with that voice? I literally laughed out loud a few times – the gravelly-voiced thing or whatever you want to call it was just too extreme.

Anyway, not terrible – but I honestly didn’t think it was as good as Batman Begins. I’d give it about a 6/10. I guess I am insane, because like I said – almost all of the reviews I’ve read have been falling over themselves to proclaim it the best superhero movie/comic adaptation ever, etc.

I actually saw a movie last night that I had never even heard of but that I enjoyed more than the Dark Knight. It is called Felon and stars Stephen Dorff and Val Kilmer. It’s a prison drama about a guy who kills a man while protecting his family and ends up doing hard time in a very intense prison environment. Not the greatest move I’ve ever seen by far, but pretty compelling and definitely kept my interest once it got going.

Alright, I’m going to get ready to head to the airport to give picking up James and Erin another shot. Hopefully tonight will go a little better! If I see Erin come out by herself again I am going to start crying.

I got an email from James this morning. They went to the U.S. embassy in Seoul this morning and were able to get his passport situation straightened out. He can pick up his new passport this afternoon. Then they will try to get on the next available flight from Seoul to Saigon. I looked online and there are a couple of flights this evening – one arriving at 10:20pm and one arriving at 11:40pm. Hopefully there will be space available on one or both of those flights, and we can get them into Vietnam tonight!

Our plans will change a little bit. We’ll just hang out in Saigon tomorrow – I have to teach my law class at 10:30am, so maybe they will come watch me teach – James mentioned before that he would be interested in seeing me teach my law class, and Erin is actually a teacher, so she can critique me. Then we’ll just go around and explore the city. etc.

Wednesday, we will go to Phu Quoc as planned, returning Friday, and Saturday we’ll still go up to Cu Chi by boat. So the only thing they’ll really miss out on is the trip to the Mekong Delta – which is a bummer but not the end of the world.

I’ll update again as I hear more, but as of right now, I am optimistic that they’ll make it here sometime tonight! What an ordeal.

I love this recent photo my mom took of O at the beach – you can see that one of his two front teeth is finally coming in! Won’t be snaggletoothed for long!

And below is a photo of my friends Katie and Travis’ son, Indio, who recently knocked his two front teeth out on the edge of Katie and Travis’ bed! They were going to get him some false teeth, because he’s way too young to have lost his teeth naturally, but Indio – or “Yodi Bear” as he is usually known – likes his look without the teeth and doesn’t want the false ones!

On a related note, Thao and I were looking at that photo of Owen the other day and Thao told me that when she was young she lost her two front teeth like that too. I asked her if she had any photos of her like that, and she said that she had had one black-and-white photo of her like that, but that they had lost it when her family moved one time. I then asked her if she had any photos of her as a child and she said that she did not – the earliest photo she has of her is when she was about 15. That made me so sad! I am always reminded of what different backgrounds – and different worlds, really – we come from. I’m going to make it a point to take a ton of photos of her from now on!

Ok, I’m officially addicted.

Wow. We hit a big snag at the airport last night – I’m still kind of in shock. Thao and I got to the airport a little before 10:00pm. James and Erin’s flight arrived about 10:20pm, and a few minutes later, we saw Erin come down the escalator into the baggage area. (We were having coffee in a vistors’ gallery that overlooks the baggage area.) I said “That looks like Erin, but she wouldn’t be by herself.” But after a while Erin looked up and saw us waving and waved back and I realized it really was her.

Thao and I thought maybe James had gone to the bathroom and Erin came on out to get their luggage, etc. Then, after we waited 15 or 20 minutes or so, we thought maybe James got lost in the airport. We really had no clue. Erin kept looking up at us and shrugging her shoulders and pointing back inside the airport, etc.

Finally, I motioned to Erin that I would try to meet her downstairs. I went down to her level and we were able to talk. She was still inside the part of the airport where people without tickets can’t get to (supposedly – more on that later) and hadn’t come through customs yet.

She said that there was a problem with James passport, that one of the pages was damaged and that they were telling him he couldn’t enter Vietnam and had to go back to Korea (where their flight to Vietnam had originated from). I was like “What!?!” I told Erin I was going to go get Thao and try to get Thao inside the airport to talk to the immigration people in Vietnamese.

Well, when Thao and I were walking back in – to the same area where I’d just been – one of the Vietnamese airport security guards came over and wouldn’t let Thao in. We explained the situation, but he said no way. That prohibition didn’t apply to me for some reason, so we got Thao situated outside and I went back in. This time, I walked through customs and went up to the immigration area on the second floor with Erin. (Try that in America – walking into an aiport and through customs without a ticket! Makes me feel really secure about Vietnamese airline security – but anyway.)

So Erin and I got up to the second level and there was James in the immigration area. He was on one side of a little fence with some Vietnamese dudes, and we were on the other side of the fence. He and a Vietnamese employee of Korean Airlines came over to us, and I tried to explain the situation to the Vietnamese guy in my limited Vietnamese (which proved to be completely unnecessary because his English was excellent – I just thought that maybe if I talked to him in Vietnamese and he knew I lived there and wasn’t just a tourist, etc., he might be more sympathetic to us – didn’t work).

He was very nice, but he said that the immigration manager had already reviewed the passport and made his decision and said that James would be refused entry into Vietnam. I couldn’t believe that there was nothing we could do, so I kept talking to him to see if there was anything at all we could do.

It turned out that the problem was that James and Erin’s dog, Cinnamon, had chewed up the cover of James’ passport. The identifying information was all intact – including the photo, signature, passport number, etc., but because the passport was damaged, Vietnam immigration would not let him in. James said that he never thought it would be a problem because he’d traveled internationally with that same passport after their dog had chewed it up – and they didn’t say anything at all about it that time.

Anyway, we explored a lot of different options with the KAL employee, but he was convinced that there would be no way to change the immigration manager’s mind. We then called the U.S. consulate’s emergency number, and spoke with a consulate official. She said she’d talk to the KAL employee and/or the immigration manager for us and, if necessary, she’d go to the consulate (she was on her mobile) and process some type of confirmation for James, etc. The KAL employee was skeptical that the immigration manager would even talk to her, but we prevailed upon him to get the immigration manager to come out of his office.

He came out, and he was actually a very nice guy, but he wouldn’t talk to the consulate official and said that the problem was that Vietnamese law was very clear that they simply could not accept a damaged passport. He said there was nothing he or anyone else at the airport at that time could do – regardless of what the U.S. consulate said. We even offered to pay him or the KAL employee $1,000 USD as a “fine” or “penalty” if there was anything they could do – but they said they couldn’t help us. They were both very sorry about the situation – realizing that James and Erin had just gotten off of a 25-hour flight and were now about to have to get on another 5.5-hour flight back to Korea.

When they finally convinced us that there really was nothing they could do, we started discussing how to handle it going forward. They were going to make James and Erin get on a flight back to Seoul that was leaving soon, so we didn’t have a lot of time. The real problem was that they might not accept James’ passport in Korea either – in which case they would put them on the next flight back to the U.S.

But assuming James could get into Korea on his passport, the next step would be to try to get the U.S. embassy there to give him a new passport or some type of temporary certification that would be good enough to get him in to Vietnam – at which point they would fly back. I asked them if they could extend their trip for a couple of days to make up for the lost time, but they said they couldn’t because Erin had to start back to work teaching the day after they were scheduled to get back.

We also discussed Erin staying in Vietnam and James going back to Korea by himself to work out the situation. The problem was that we didn’t know if James would even be able to get into Korea with his passport, and if not he’d be on his way back to the U.S. and Erin would be in Vietnam. (Which wouldn’t have been a problem, but then she would have had to travel back to the U.S. by herself as well.) So she decided to go with him back to Korea.

I felt very bad for them. I’ve made that flight or similar flights many times, and I know how tired you are when you finally arrive. And how the last thing on earth you want to do is to get back onto a plane. Erin said a few times “I really don’t think I can get back on a plane right now.” But in the end, that’s what they decided to do.

So I told them how sorry I was, hugged them goodbye, and they were escorted to their flight back to Korea. (For which they also had to pay $1,000 USD.)

Thao and I felt terrible. We couldn’t believe it and we felt kind of sick for them. But there was nothing we could do other than head home.

We woke up several times during the night and I told Thao “James and Erin are still on their flight.” We just felt awful about it.

This morning, I received an email from james that, after a lot of arguing, Korean immigration finally allowed him to enter Korea. So they are in Seoul now. He was going to try to get in touch with the U.S. embassy today to get the passport situation resolved. I looked online and it said the embassy is not open on Sunday, but there is an emergency number you can call and I emailed that number to James. (Not sure whether they will consider a stranded tourist an emergency but it’s worth a shot.) If he can’t get them to do anything today, they open at 9:00am tomorrow (Monday) morning, so he will try then.

My hope is that they will be able to get back to Vietnam no later than Monday night. We will have to cancel the Mekong Delta trip, but they will still be able to check out Saigon, go to the beach at Phu Quoc Island, and take the boat trip to Cu Chi. But it will turn an already short trip to Vietnam even shorter, so that sucks.

I guess the bottom line is before you come here – or anywhere – make sure your passport is in 100% good condition. I can’t imagine how angry I’d be if I flew all the way over here and then was told I couldn’t enter the country and had to get back on a plane. I’m going to check my passport throroughly every time I travel from now on. It actually has some staple holes in the back cover from where I’ve stapled in my customs declarations to keep from losing them. I wonder if that’s enough “damage” to keep me from entering a country? Maybe I’ll just go get a new passport so that it won’t even be a remote possibility.

I told Thao that James might kill Cinnamon when he gets back home. Not really. (By the way, the photo above for those of you who don’t know is of a dog that won the world’s ugliest dog contest a few years ago. At that time, I saw it online and I sent out an email to my family and friends saying that I’d gotten a new dog (this was a few years after my old dog died) and that the attached photo was of my new dog. In that email, I said that her name was Cinnamon – so James and Erin’s dog, Cinnamon, made me think about “my” Cinnamon.)

I’ll update the blog as I hear from James and Erin.

Okay, for anyone who wants to get a feel for the high degree of maturity, profound wit, incredible sophistication, and exploration of existential issues that permeate my masterpiece, “Divergent Perspectives,” but who doesn’t really like to hear someone say “bangin’,” feel free to watch the shorter, edited version below. If I may say so myself, I think I’ve done a remarkable job capturing the major themes running throughout the work:

Okay, below is a film I did for my friend Brighton’s film festival back in the summer of 2005. Notice: “summer of 2005.” Three long years ago – three years during which I have grown and matured in so many ways that I can’t even begin to itemize them. Plus, it’s just a joke! It’s a joke! Hah!

I’ve been thinking about posting it for a while, but haven’t done so because there is about three seconds of me looking at porn on my computer and I didn’t want to put porn on my blog. (The setup is the girl I’m purportedly dating – played by my friend Jennifer, who used to live in my condo building in Atlanta – is telling her friend how mature I am, etc., and how I’m super active and have so many different interests – and then it cuts to a shot of me looking at porn on my computer. Like I’m a real renaissance man. ) Anyway, I’ve blurred and pixelated the porn as much as I can figure out how to do – you can still kind of tell what it is, but if anyone looks at this for its salacious value, they have a problem. There’s real porn out there on the internet people – you don’t need to look at this.

So if anyone is offended by the blurred-out three seconds of porn, I apologize in advance. Don’t watch it! Or close your eyes or something.

There’s also some harsh language – including the use of the term “bangin’” and the f-bomb. So, if you’re the easily-offended type, again, please dont watch this! There’s a lot of good, wholesome material here on Orangwutang – go look at some of it.

Anyway, if you see this disappear from my blog in a couple of days, that is a pretty good indication that someone – or some people – most likely my mother – sent me an email and told me I shouldn’t have this on my blog. And by that point I had sobered up enough to think they were probably right.

Okay, now after all of that buildup, here is my very mediocre film about the different ways (divergent perspectives – get it?) a man and a woman view their budding relationship.

All of my female friends, it has been great knowing you and I wish you all the best.

Sincerely,

Captain Sensitivity

WARNING: NOT SAFE FOR WORK! (Maybe – if you work somewhere that watching three seconds of blurred-out, colorized semi-porn in a parody is “unsafe.”)

Here are a couple of photos from the party for Thao’s niece, Bao Ngan’s one-month birthday party a few weeks ago (iPhone only b/c my Canon “disappeared” at that same party):

(I think I posted this first one directly from my iPhone earlier – sorry for the repeat):

It’s just not an infant’s birthday party until someone breaks out the Johnnie Walker Red Label.

And below are some iPhone shots of the wedding party we went to the very next day (this time in Hoc Song, not Long An).

Here’s the table of loud drunk men you see at every party in Vietnam – I’m almost convinced it’s the same guys – they just circulate from party to party getting drunk and being loud:

The aftermath:

Holy shit! Noodles in Vietnam!

It’s Friday night here and I am bored. I should be at the gym, but in addition to being bored, I am also lazy. And fat. I went out to dinner the past two nights, and I know I’m going to have a big week with James and Erin here, so I’m just taking it easy tonight. Thao is at her English class until 9:30pm. I am screwing around on the internet.

Do you want to see how bored I am? I created my second creature using Spore Creature Creator. My goal was to make a creature that looked like my old basset hound, Hannah. See? That’s bored – sitting around on a Friday night trying to create an animated computer character that looks like your dog that died six years ago! Actually more pathetic than bored, but here you go:

It looks a little bit like Hannah – if Hannah had been an alien platypus. But you get the idea.

So tomorrow I have to teach – covering for another law teacher who’s out of town – and he’s covering for me while I’m in Phu Quoc with James, Erin, and Thao next week. One class at 10:30am, another at 12:00pm tomorrow. After that: to the gym! (Maybe.) Then Thao and I will go out to dinner and then go to the airport to welcome our weary travelers to the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam. I’m getting very fired up about them coming!

I haven’t been to the gym as much as I hoped/planned, but I have been doing this pushups program with my friend Bart: One Hundred Pushups Program. The idea is you can get up to doing 100 pushups in six weeks. Let me rephrase that: Within six weeks you will be able to do 100 straight pushups – not 100 pushups over the course of six weeks, which is slightly less impressive (but probably more realistic for Bart and me!).

The first week has proven to be a little harder than either of us expected. Day 1 we did sets of 10, 10, 8, 6, and 9. Day 2: 12, 12, 10, 10, 8 (so you can see we’re already falling off the program as we’re supposed to max out that last set and do at least 15). Day 3 (today – you skip one day between each pushup day): 15, 13, 10, 10, 10 (last set supposed to be 15 – couldn’t do it).

I’m using those Perfect Pushup things that I got back in the U.S. last December. They really isolate your muscles – by the time I hit that last set, my muscles are failing completely. I literally can’t physically push myself back up. I sit there straining and flailing for a while (a very short while, I assure you – I’m not really big on either straining or flailing), and then I collapse to the floor in a sweating heap of middle agedness.

So we had so much trouble this week that Bart and I collectively decided to repeat the first week’s program next week to see if we can at least build our strength up to that of average 80-year-old women.

Also tonight I am downloading the software to crack my iPhone so that I can download applications from Apple’s new App Store. There are some pretty cool applications out there and I can’t wait to try some of them. Of course what will probably happen is I will completely fry my iPhone, but we’ll see.

I’m trying to think if I have any other news. I don’t think so. My law students have their first midterm next Saturday. I keep telling them that I’m going to Phu Quoc on Wednesday and won’t be back before their test on Saturday, so if they have any questions they better ask me before Tuesday. I get some sick satisfaction out of saying to them: “So next Saturday, I will be drinking beer on Phu Quoc Island while you guys are taking your first midterm.” I think they might be plotting to kill me.

We finished our review of negligence today. It’s hard for them, but I think I’m doing a better job than I did last semester, and I also think I have some sharper kids (on average – no offense to any of the brainiacs in my class last semester). I’m going to do an experiment by not being involved in the grading of the first midterm. Two of the other law teachers will grade it and then I and the fourth teacher will grade the second midterm. I want to see if my kids do better this semester than they did last semester – without me being tempted to score my kids higher, etc. So we’ll see.

I’m getting very excited about my trip home in October. This is the longest – by far – that I’ve ever been out of the country. About 9 months and some change. I’m not really homesick – and not really missing anything specific – like a certain food or whatever – but it will just be nice to be home and to see my family and friends. It will also be nice to have some cool weather! The last couple of weeks here it’s gotten hot as hell and we’re in the midst of full-blown rainy season. (I haven’t mentioned that to this point because I didn’t want James and Erin to realize that they’re coming right as rainy season is fully upon us – but as of right now they’re at the airport waiting on their flight out of Atlanta, so I think it’s safe to mention!) It’s really not bad – just rains for a couple of hours every day.

Okay, that’s enough rambling. I’m still waiting on my iPhone software to download. Maybe I will go create another Spore creature. I wonder if I can come up with anything more depressing than my dead dog. I’ll give it some thought.

Hope everyone on that end is doing well!