Thao and I planned an interesting new trip earlier today. I got an email from a budget airline over here, JetStar, advertising some very cheap rates within Vietnam. I have not been to Hanoi since I was first in Vietnam back in 2001, and I’ve been thinking about going, and round-trip tickets were only $60. (Usually around $200.) So October 5 through the 10th, Thao and I will be going to Hanoi and Halong Bay. Thao has never been to either place.

And here’s the really interesting part – we’re also taking Thao’s mom, who is about 62 or 63, I think, and Thao’s aunt, Co Ba, who is 68. Neither of them have ever been on a plane before, so that will be cool. And neither of them have ever been to north Vietnam. We’re going to spend a couple of nights in Hanoi, then a couple of nights at Halong Bay – one night out in the bay on a boat and one night on Cat Ba Island. Then one final night in Hanoi before flying back to Saigon.

Thao is very excited about the trip, and says her mom and aunt are very excited as well. So that’s something to look forward to!

Tomorrow is my last day of my swine flu break – going back to school Monday (unless they extend this thing further). This Saturday is my friend Anton’s wedding. I’m actually in the wedding – which is a first for me in Vietnam. I have to carry some sort of offering from Anton’s house to his fiance, Phi Dung’s house. I was hoping we’d all get to wear the traditional Vietnam garb, the ao dai, but only Anton gets to wear that. The rest of us will just be wearing suits and ties.

Tonight Thao and I went out for sushi and then went to the Master’s Cup Cafe where Thao practices her English. I have to say her English has gotten a ton better. She gets up early almost every morning and practices via YouTube. It’s amazing how many English lesson videos they have on there. Her speaking and writing have improved a lot – which is good for both of us!

I’ve gotten slack on my Vietnamese. My teacher has been extra busy lately with a group of advanced students visiting Vietnam from the U.S., and I’ve been busier (kind of) with the new job, so I’ve only been going once or twice a week. But after August 15th, those students are gone, so I hope to get it back up to at least three times a week. I can tell the difference since I haven’t been going very much lately. I’ve started to forget words, etc. Got to get crackin’.

Woo-hoo! Just ran 4 miles. The farthest I’ve run since I’ve allegedly been trying to get back into shape.

Better late than never, I guess, but I have never really gotten into much Neil Young before. This might sound stupid, but I think the reason is because of what Lynrd Skynrd says about him in Sweet Home Alabama – or specifically about his song, Southern Man. (I used to be a lot more conservative in my younger days, and actually cared about stuff like that.)

When I was in law school, I did buy one CD of his, Harvest Moon, which is pretty good, but I never really went back and listened to his whole catalog.

Anyway, I’ve been making up for lost time – most recently with the 8 CDs comprising his Archives, 1963-1972:

And I have to say, he’s a pretty compelling musician. I’m really enjoying listening to it. There’s some stuff I already know, some stuff I didn’t realize was Neil Young, and some stuff I’ve never remotely heard of. I guess I can find it in myself to forgive him for the whole Southern Man thing.

Cowgirl in the Sand: 

It’s Monday morning here – about 9:25am. Usually I would be teaching my first class of the week, but as I mentioned before the school was closed from Friday through today due to the swine flu. Well, we found out over the weekend that the closure has now been extended through next Sunday, August 2nd, as a few more people have been diagnosed with swine flu. So out of the blue, I’ve got a week off!

I just got back from my buddy Anton’s bachelor weekend in Nha Trang last night. I woke up at 4:45am on Friday morning and left about 5:45am for the airport. We flew to Da Lat – up in the mountains – then road bikes (the bicycling kind – not the motoribike kind) about 10km uphill (which was brutal – I’m not going to lie, I ended up walking my bike up some of the steeper hills and felt like I was going to throw up). Then, the fun part, we rode the bikes downhill for about 30km. No exaggeration, the longest downhill ride I’ve ever taken. It was awesome, if a little frightening. I basically went as fast as the bike would go – only braking on curves, and even then as little as possible. I was leaning over and crouched around my bike to reduce wind resistance, and we got up to some pretty insane speeds. We didn’t have a speedometer, but the guy from the bike rental company said they’d clocked someone doing 68mph before. However fast it was, it was fast enough.

After that, we got on rafts – which were really the smaller two-man inflatable kayak-style rafts – and floated the Cai River toward Nha Trang. It was a really nice trip, but the river was pretty calm and didn’t have many rapids, etc. The countryside was beautiful though – on both the bike ride and the rafting trip. I think living in Saigon I come to associate Vietnam as being a dirty, congested, urban place – and here it certainly is – but out in the countryside it’s a whole different story.

We then got in a van and rode the rest of the way to Nha Trang. I checked into the hotel, jumped in the pool for a while, then went to take a shower for our planned night out. I ended up taking a hot bath (the tub was huge and clean and I haven’t taken many, if any, baths in the two years I’ve been here – and I was sore from the bike ride and thought it might be relaxing). I got in the tub and promptly fell asleep – sitting up. Like couldn’t keep my eyes open even if I wanted to type sleep. So then I lay(?) down for a nap around 6:30pm, thinking I’d nap for about an hour or so then meet everyone for dinner and going out. Well, the next time I looked at the clock it was 1:53am. I had fallen asleep with the tv on so hadn’t heard the multiple calls to my cellphone and basically just slept through the night! Oh well, I just rolled over and went back to sleep.

(To be fair, I really wan’t feeling well. I don’t want to think that I’ve got the swine flu – and I’m scared to go to the doctor for fear that I do and will end up being quarantined in some public hospital here), but I definitely felt like I had a bad cold or some sort of flu or something all weekend. No energy, easily nauseated, etc.

Anyway, I woke up early – very early – Saturday morning, had breakfast, then waited for the rest of the guys to wake up from their considerably later night out. We met for lunch around noon and started drinking beer then, and lunch pretty much extended throughout most of the afternoon. Then we all went back to the hotel to take naps – my nap ended up being of normal length this time around – and met up for dinner. After that, we went to a bar, which ended up being more of a club (incredibly loud music, lasers, etc.) which is really not my scene at all, so I bugged out about 11:30pm and went back to the hotel. So yes, I definitely won the award for lamest friend/oldest man at the bachelor party, but oh well.

Sunday our flight back to Saigon wasn’t until 7:20pm, so we had all day to mess around in Nha Trang (which is a beautiful place, really. Completely touristy and developed, but the scenery there is just gorgeous.). After breakfast I went out and walked around for a while and found a good used bookstore that had some titles other than the same, standard backpacker titles you always see over and over again in Saigon. I bought Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, and some Robert Ludlum spy novel. I actually started and finished The Road yesterday – it was a very quick read and very well-written. I am a Cormac McCarthy fan anyway and I really liked it. A lot shorter and easier to read than most of his books, though. And not as much action as I thought it might have.

I’ve started reading Into the Wild. I saw the movie and, frankly, thought it was awful. I thought the actor that played the protagonist was sappy, melodramatic, and basically unlikeable – and I thought whole tone of the film (directed by Sean Penn) was pretty much the same way. I have read a couple of Krakauer books before and enjoyed them, so I thought I’d give the book a chance. So far, the book is much better than the movie – but I have to say that the Chris McCandless kid really does seem to be sappy, melodramatic, and basically unlikeable, so maybe the actor in the movie actually deserved an Oscar.

Anyway, we went out for a big lunch yesterday then just kind of cruised around town before heading to the airport. I got home about 9:30pm last night and didn’t do a whole lot before heading to bed.

So that’s it – it’s Monday morning of my 10-day-weekend. Thao’s at work. I’m sitting here drinking a cup of coffee. I have absolutely nothing to do until next Monday except grade the rest of the ComLaw midterms. I’ve graded about 70 out of 210, so about a third of the way through already. They are pretty awful and our students are going to have to step it up if they want to improve on last semester’s 38% failure rate.

That’s all I’ve got. Peace!

I just heard that they’ve officially closed school this Friday through Monday.  I was taking Friday off anyway to go to Da Lat and Nha Trang for my friend’s bachelor party – but at least now I don’t have to take a day of vacation.

This is clearly the work of Al Qaeda.

Anyway, if I start to feel sick, I’m going straight to the doctor to see if I can get quarantined too!  Ha!

Look how happy this little guy is for someone to be playing with him with his ball:

I saved this one for last because this was my “favorite” child at the orphanage:

We were in a room with a bunch of the more severely disabled children in beds and I heard one child crying really loudly. I looked over and it was the girl above, lying in her bed and just screaming crying. I went over to her and started rubbing her arms and back and hugging on her, and she immediately stopped crying.

She couldn’t speak – and I am not sure how much she could understand, but I just kept speaking to her in a sweet voice and touching her. She had very little control over her arms, legs, or head, couldn’t sit up, etc. She basically can just lie there and wiggle around. But I thought she was motioning that she wanted something. So at first I kind of helped her sit up where she was propped against the edge of the bed.

But she kept motioning as if she wanted something else, so finally I picked her up and put her down on the floor. That seemed to be what she wanted. She laid (lay? lied?) down on the floor and tried to move around as best as she could. She couldn’t make it very far – only under the nearest bed and even then only by grabbing onto the leg of the bed and pulling herself under it.

After a while I helped her back out from under the bed and was going to put her back in her bed when I decided I’d just hold her in my lap for a while. When I did, she immediately calmed down and stopped moving around at all – she just sat there in my lap and even put her head down and just chilled out as you see in the photo. I held her like that for a few minutes before I put her back in her bed.

She was so sweet, and so pathetic. It breaks my heart even as I sit here typing this to think that right now she is probably just lying there in that same bed all by herself. It is hard to guess how old she is because of her condition – but I bet she is between 10 and 15 years old. I should have asked how old she was and what her name was.

I know it would take someone with a heart of gold to adopt a child like that – to voluntarily take on that type of responsibility. But I can see how someone would want to do so. Such a helpless creature – and someone adopting her would improve the quality of her life so much. And then, all around her, literally hundreds of other children in similar conditions. Just awful.

Okay, enough depressing stuff for now. Sorry.

Here’s a little tip for all of you out there:

Anyway, there are serious concerns at our school that there could be a real breakout of this stuff and they could theoretically have to shut the school down.  They've already suspended all non-necessary international travel.  We'll see - I still haven't seen anything convincing me that this swine flu is a bigger deal than the regular strains of flu that go around each year - but then again what the hell do I know?  Don't forget you're currently reading the words of wisdom of a 38-year-old man who doesn't even know better than to eat a large pizza and then try to go for a run.]

It rained all day long here today – well, starting about noon at least.  Which was just in time from preventing me from sneaking out of work early and going to my Vietnamese class.  I ended up being at work until 5 – at which point it was still raining but I braved it.

Peace, earthlings.

This past Sunday our volunteer group, the RMIT Community Action Network, had our first volunteer activity since we opened up membership to all students and staff.  We took about 25 of our members to the Phu My Orphanage in Binh Thanh District.  The orphanage has about 300 children living there, most of whom have mental or physical disabilities – ranging from mild to extremely severe.  Some of the more severely disabled children could not sit up, talk, eat, control their limbs or hands, etc.  It was very, very sad and very difficult to be there. 

At first, we were all kind of shocked and didn’t really know what to do – but after a few minutes, we just dove in and started interacting with the children.  Some of them could play and we played with them, read to them, drew with them, etc.  Some couldn’t do anything more than let you hug them or rub their back as they lay in their crib, etc.  We also helped feed a lot of them who couldn’t feed themselves.

I can’t really express how overwhelmingly sad it was to be there.  I was depressed the rest of the day on Sunday and still feel depressed every time I think about it.  But the facility was actually a very nice, clean facility and I think the children are being provided for as best as they can be under the circumstances.  But it was just heartbreaking to see.

I took my camera with me, but was so overwhelmed I never even took it out of my pocket.  Fortunately some of our other CAN members did take some photos.  I haven’t seen them all yet, but here are a few:

One thing I learned from that trip is that we have a really great group of caring students – and we were only able to take about 25 of the 80 or so who have signed up for CAN so far. They were great with the children at the orphanage and really very inspiring. I am more excited about our group now than ever before, as I see that we are going to be able to do a lot of good in the community.

I went to lunch with some of the students after we left the orphanage. One thing I told them was that as sad a place as that orphanage was, and as sad as it made us feel to see those children in that condition, it was really only a couple of hours of our lives and it was all those children will ever know. Their whole lives are really going to be like that – they can’t just leave and get away from it like we can. So the fact that we were able to go and spend time with them – to play with them or even just show them some affection – was worth more to those kids than whatever sadness we felt.

I think that we will try to make a regular monthly visit to an orphanage like that. Either to Phu My Orphanage or some other orphanage around Ho Chi Minh City. As tough as it was, it was really a great experience overall and I’m so glad we went.