I arrived on Ho Chi Minh City on May 20th. As promised, Khue from the Heifer Viet Nam office met me at the airport and took me to our hotel - the Freedom Hotel - in the city. We didn't arrive until midnight which meant I couldn't locate an internet cafe to send an email to my dad. I tried to place an international call from my room, but was told by the night desk attendant, "No call. No call." This posed a problem as I knew that my dad was a complete stress case back at home. Anyone who is familiar with my dad will understand. He is what you would call overprotective. This past October I went to Nashville and forgot to phone home when I arrived. When he finally did get a hold of me a couple of hours later, he was only barely able spit out that he had already contacted at least 3 different police stations in Arkansas and Tennessee (5-27-07 update: my dad has informed via email that he actually spoke to 8 different police stations...i'm not kidding), called my “trucker” Uncle Craig so that he could send out an alert to all JB Hunt truckers and, as I later discovered, he had also managed to track down my roommate in Little Rock to ask her if she randomly had the phone numbers for any of my former sorority sisters (none of whom I was actually going to see in Nashville, by the way). He also informed that I had nearly been solely responsible for his early death.The point is, I knew I had to find someway to get in touch with my dad so that he didn't think I'd been kidnapped by Vietnamese communists and/or bitten by one of those poisonous Vietnamese snakes that he has been warning me about for the past 3 months. I pulled my laptop out and tried to get a wireless connection. I had trouble connecting to all of the available networks. Sometimes it would connect and then after a couple of minutes, the server could not be found. I was running around my rather toasty hotel room trying to find a good spot where the signal would hold. Unfortunately, I had been using my computer throughout my travels, so my computer died after about 15 minutes of me holding my computer up to different points of the ceiling.
The day before I had made a trip to Wal-mart to buy an international adapter. It was technically only configured for the UK, Europe and Australia, but I bought it on the off chance that it would work anyway. After digging it out of the bottom of my massive suitcase, I then used my tiny fingernail scissors to hack through that industrial strength plastic that manufacturers love to use. Amazingly, my cheap adapter worked, and my computer was back in action. I was eventually able to get a signal long enough to send an email home and breathed a sigh of relief. I figured that if I could get a wireless signal in our little hotel in the middle of the night, Vietnam had to be a little more developed than I thought. The trash can in my hotel bathroom read "Happiness to Everybody" and I thought to myself that, with this fairly promising start, perhaps I could find some summer happiness in Vietnam myself. After traveling for more than 24 hours, I finally curled up in my Vietnamese bed and fell asleep.
The day before I had made a trip to Wal-mart to buy an international adapter. It was technically only configured for the UK, Europe and Australia, but I bought it on the off chance that it would work anyway. After digging it out of the bottom of my massive suitcase, I then used my tiny fingernail scissors to hack through that industrial strength plastic that manufacturers love to use. Amazingly, my cheap adapter worked, and my computer was back in action. I was eventually able to get a signal long enough to send an email home and breathed a sigh of relief. I figured that if I could get a wireless signal in our little hotel in the middle of the night, Vietnam had to be a little more developed than I thought. The trash can in my hotel bathroom read "Happiness to Everybody" and I thought to myself that, with this fairly promising start, perhaps I could find some summer happiness in Vietnam myself. After traveling for more than 24 hours, I finally curled up in my Vietnamese bed and fell asleep.
3 comments:
Oh my gosh, I just laughed outloud for like 3 minutes in the internet cafe, that picture is priceless. My favorite thing here is a store named super glue. what????? Also everyone shouts english profanity.
My mom totally cried when I called her. My plane was delayed 9 hours and I had to spend the night in Bahrain and couldn't call her from the plane. I think she thought I was dead. Then of course I started to cry, probably b/c I had been awake for 36 hours and made my mom cry and was in "crazy town" but we made it.
Oh, Christin, I copied the excerpt about your dad and his worrying and e mailed to my parents. Since Declan aka Andrew, was away I planned a Memorial Day getaway to Nashville with my friend Diane. Her parents and my parents were calling us every day. And to think both of us have traveled solo across the country for business, but you would have thought we were Thelma and Louise. Well,now that I think of it, we sometimes are! Glad to read your posts and learn about your experiences. You may have a career in writing humor columns.
Declan's Friend from St. Louis
Dea:)
Post a Comment