A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

October 2002 November 2002 December 2002 January 2003 February 2003 March 2003 April 2003 May 2003 June 2003 July 2003 August 2003 September 2003 October 2003 November 2003 February 2006 March 2006 May 2006

 
I was going to make an entry here last night, but the power went out all over my part of Ho Chi Minh City. So a bunch of us sat there at the internet place in our swiveling desk chairs in the dark as the clerk dripped wax on the top of every other CPU so the candles would remain erect and give us some feeble light while we waited. The sight of ten people in a room full of computers with candles burning on top is surreal, let me tell you.

I only waited as long as it took him to finish the candle-lighting process -- by that time it was clear that this wasn't one of those 2 minute outages. So I decided to go get some dinner at a sidewalk noodle soup place a few blocks away. You'd think, wouldn't you, that things would be pretty quiet during a blackout, since nobody could play music or anything, but it was actually quite the opposite. For one thing, everyone was on the street. It's just not fun to sit in your pitch black house for an hour in 85 degree heat with no fan while waiting for the power to return. But the real noise came from from the generators. Standard operating procedure for most of the restaurants and hotels catering to foreigners is to wheel a generator out onto the sidewalk to get business going as soon as possible. So the streets were alive with people wandering around chatting and eating, motorbikes as usual, and small generators apparently competing to be the loudest. Not serene, but no looting, so I guess it's not all bad.

© 2003 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 8:18 PM