orangwutang

. . . will be in Vietnam as of this Saturday night around 10:20pm. That’s my friend and former coworker, James, and his wife, Erin (and me and what appears to be a merkin on my chin).

Thao and I will pick them up at Tan Son Nhat airport Saturday night, after which we will get them checked into their hotel. Then it’s on to the rooftop bar on the Rex Hotel (which is open all night) so James can, in his words, “get [his] Walter Cronkite on.” (Apparently, the rooftop bar on the Rex Hotel was where a lot of correspondents, including maybe Walter Cronkite, hung out - read: drank - during the conflict/war/”disagreement”.

It’s also the place we started Mary Ellen and Tony’s trip way back in November - and those of you who have been following this blog saw how that trip ended up:

Enough. You get the idea.)

Anyway, here’s James and Erin’s itinerary:

Sunday: Explore Saigon;
Monday - Tuesday: Mekong Delta tour;
Wednesday - Friday: Phu Quoc Island with Thao and me;
Saturday: Boat trip to Cu Chi tunnels; Saturday night flight back to the U.S.

So that’s a pretty short trip (not as short as Rudy and Hayley’s recent trip - 24 hours but still!). We decided not to try to cram in a trip to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, etc., since we only have about 7 days to work with. The Mekong Delta tour should be cool - a chance to see some rural Vietnam, floating markets, etc. (a lot of the tour is by boat). And chilling in Phu Quoc will be great (provided we have some decent weather). I haven’t been there yet, but it’s supposed to be very nice and chill. We’re just going to rent motorbikes and explore the island, maybe go on a hike, eat a lot of fresh seafood, and drink a lot of beer. Finally, the boat trip to Cu Chi makes for a nice, relaxing day. Maybe James and Erin will get to shoot an AK-47.

Anyway, I’m very excited about their trip over here. Neither of them have ever been to Asia before, and it’s always fun to see how people react to their first trip to Asia. I’m also excited about having next Wed., Thurs., and Fri. off of work! Woo-hoo!

Haven’t seen The Dark Knight yet but I am sure the DVD will be out soon. I bought Batman Begins the other day and watched it last night. Pretty good, but I thought some of it was kind of cheesy. For one, I didn’t think the Scarecrow villain was all that great. And the actor who played him - Cillian Murphy - creeps me out - I can’t stand to look at him in any film. I think he was scarier without the Scarecrow mask than he was with it. I don’t know what it is about that guy, but I have a very visceral negative reaction to him. Also, the scene where the Batmobile was jumping from roof to roof and the subsequent chase scene was kind of cheesy. Finally, Katie Holmes was pretty terrible - I don’t usually like continuity gaps like changing the actress from Katie Holmes to Maggie Gyllenhaal in the new movie, but in this case it might be a welcome change. All of that said, I think Christian Bale makes a pretty good Bruce Wayne, I liked Liam Neeson’s character, R’as Al Ghul, and the tone of the movie is a hell of a lot better than the earlier, campy Tim Burton-directed Batman movies, which I thought were kind of ridiculous. Anyway, the reviews for The Dark Knight are uniformly positive, so I am looking forward to that one.

I also watched Get Smart with Steve Carell, which I thought was pretty funny (even though Carell’s Maxwell Smart is basically the same character as Michael Scott from The Office). And I’ve got Hellboy II on tap. Bootleg DVD Fest 2008!

Anyway, I’ll have a new camera when James gets here - one that Thao and anyone in her extended family are prohibited from touching, much less using. So hopefully I’ll start posting - as my friend Mitch recently requested - “more pictures of random Vietnam shit.”

Oh, one last thing: My flight back to the U.S. next year is currently set for May 31, 2009. As much as I hate to admit it, my 20-year high school reunion will be in 2009. I’m trying to get the coordinators of it to have it sometime between June 1 and 14 if possible so I can go. If I can’t go, no biggie, but I would like to if possible. If I can go, I’m seriously thinking about renting that same powder blue tuxedo and hot pink bowtie and cummerbund that I wore to my senior prom in 1989, renting a stretch Hummer limo for the night, and generally doing it up in high style (for Thomaston, Georgia):

Beverly, you out there? Beverly?

“Doin’ Time in ‘89!”

“Mighty Fine in ‘89!”

“Right On Time in ‘89!”

I’m sure there were more of these, but I can’t remember. And in any event, the above should be more than enough to give you a taste of the creative juices flowing through the R.E. Lee Institute Class of 1989.

Here are a couple of lesser known sayings of our class that year:

“Old No. 7″

“My foot!”

“That damn tam.”

“Everybody’s talkin’ ’bout . . .”

“It’s so easy . . .”

“Buc is on restriction.”

“Jennifer [last name omitted] got caught . . . in Barnesville.”

“Varmint-Cong”

“L.P.G.N.!”

“Students Against Couch”

“We didn’t know about the kids, ma’am.”

“Why don’t you tell us about what happened at the Sci-Trek Museum on Friday?”

“Frank Bunn!”

“Frank Gibson!”

“Scrack!”

“Dr. Ice and L.L. Cool Ray a/k/a 2 F.U.N.”

“Know the lake.”

“Sri Chinmoy’s Boys”

“Stan Bumgardner”

The Billboard Hot 100 (1989)

► Tags: entertainement music charts

► A list by Leto

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• 1. Look Away - Chicago
• 2. My Prerogative - Bobby Brown
• 3. Every Rose Has Its Thorn - Poison
• 4. Straight Up - Paula Abdul
• 5. Miss You Much - Janet Jackson
• 6. Cold Hearted - Paula Abdul
• 7. Wind Beneath My Wings - Bette Midler
• 8. Girl You Know Its True - Milli Vanilli

• 9. Baby, I Love Your Way-Freebird - Will Te=o Power
• 10. Giving You The Best That I Got - Anita Baker
• 11. Right Here Waiting - Richard Marx
• 12. Waiting For A Star To Fall - Boy Meets Girl
• 13. Lost In Your Eyes - Debbie Gibson
• 14. Don’t Wanna Lose You - Gloria Estefan
• 15. Heavan - Warrant
• 16. Girl I’m Gonna Miss You - Milli Vanilli
• 17. The Look - Roxette
• 18. She Drives Me Crazy - Fine Young Cannibals
• 19. On Our Own - Bobby Brown
• 20. Two Hearts - Phil Collins
• 21. Blame It On The Rain - Milli Vanilli
• 22. Listen To Your Heart - Roxette
• 23. I’ll Be There For You - Bon Jovi
• 24. If You Don’t Know Be By Now - Simply Red
• 25. Like A Prayer - Madonna
• 26. I’ll Be Loving You (Forever) - New Kids On The Block
• 27. How Can I Fall? - Breathe
• 28. Baby Don’t Forget My Number - Milli Vanilli
• 29. Toy Solider - Martika
• 30. Forever Your Girl. - Paula Abdul
• 31. The Living Years - Mike & The Mechanics
• 32. Eternal Flame - The Bangles
• 33. Wild Thing - Tone Loc
• 34. When I See You Smile - Bad English
• 35. If I Could Turn Back Time - Cher

• 36. Buffalo Stance - Neneh Cherry

• 37. When I’m With You - Sheriff
• 38. Don’t Rush Me - Taylor Dayne
• 39. Born To Be My Baby - Bon Jovi
• 40. Good Thing - Fine Young Cannibals
• 41. The Lover In Me - Sheena Easton
• 42. Bust A Move - Young M.C.

• 43. Once Bitten, Twice Shy - Great White
• 44. Batdance - Prince
• 45. Rock On - Michael Damian
• 46. Real Love - Jody Watley
• 47. Love Shack - B-52’s
• 48. Every Little Step - Bobby Brown
• 49. Hangin’ Tough - New Kids On The Block
• 50. My Heart Can’t Tell You No - Rod Stewart
• 51. So Alive - Love & Rockets
• 52. You Got It (The Right Stuff) - New Kids On The Block
• 53. Armageddon It - Def Leppard

• 54. Satisfied - Richard Marx
• 55. Express Yourself - Madonna
• 56. I Like It - Dino
• 57. Soldier Of Love - Donny Osmond
• 58. Sowing The Seeds Of Love - Tears For Fears
• 59. Cherish - Madonna
• 60. When The Children Cry - White Lion
• 61. 18 And Life - Skid Row
• 62. I Don’t Want Your Love - Duran Duran
• 63. Second Chances - .38 Special
• 64. The Way You Love Me - Karyn White
• 65. Funky Cold Medina - Tone Loc

• 66. In Your Room - Bangles
• 67. Miss You Like Crazy - Natalie Cole
• 68. Love Song - Cure
• 69. Secret Rendesvous - Karyn White
• 70. Angel Eyes - Jeff Healey Band
• 71. Patience - Guns N’ Roses
• 72. Walk On Water - Eddie Money
• 73. Cover Girl - New Kids On The Block
• 74. Welcom To The Jungle - Guns N’ Roses
• 75. Shower Me With Your Love - Surface
• 76. Stand - R.E.M.
• 77. Close My Eyes Forever - Lita Ford
• 78. All This Time - Tiffany
• 79. After All - Cher & Peter Cetera
• 80. Roni - Bobby Brown

• 81. Love In An Elevator - Aerosmith
• 82. Lay Your Hands On Me - Bon Jovi
• 83. This Promise - When In Rome
• 84. What I Am - Edie Brickell & The New Bohemians
• 85. I Remember Holding You - Boys Club
• 86. Paradise City - Guns N’ Roses
• 87. Iwanna Have Some Fun - Samantha Fox
• 88. She Wants To Dance With Me - Rick Astley
• 89. Dreamin’ - Vanessa Williams
• 90. It’s No Crime - Babyface
• 91. Poison - Alice Cooper
• 92. This Time I Know It’s For Real - Donna Summer
• 93. Smooth Criminal - Michael Jackson
• 94. Heavan Help Me - Deon Estus
• 95. Rock Wit’cha - Bobby Brown
• 96. Thinking Of You - Sa-fire
• 97. What You Don’t Know - Expose
• 98. Surrender To Me - Ann Wilson & Robin Zander
• 99. The End Of The Innocence - Don Henley
• 100. Keep On Movin’ - Soul II Soul

I was going to buy that Dell laptop recently for $974 - but Dell couldn’t ship it to my friend James before he comes over here in a couple of weeks. Then I was going to buy an even more souped-up HP laptop for $1,160 - but once again they couldn’t get it to James before he left the U.S.

So today I went and bought a gigabyte of RAM for my old Compaq laptop for $68 and it is running a lot better. So that’s sweet! I also bought a copy of “Windows XP Black” - which is some black market version of Windows XP that comes with some extra programs built in, etc. For 20,000 dong - or $1.25.

So I’ve reverted from Linus back to Windows XP. Linux was okay - but didn’t really run much faster on my weak system than Windows XP does. Also, there were several programs that I couldn’t get for Linux - one is a program I use to help me learn Vietnamese, and another was iTunes, which I need to move music on and off of my iPhone.

Anyway, hopefully this new RAM will let me use this old laptop for at least another year - and hopefully more.

My buddy Aaron just sent me some more great photos from his and Mirjam’s trip. He just got these from the guy on his dive boat at Sail Rock in Thailand: Link to Photos

Here are some samples - I can’t imagine how cool it must have been to be that close to a whale shark!

Incredible!

I got the following email from my friend - I may have called him “Meatlord” on this blog before, but today I will call him the “Carpet-headed Hibernian” - telling me about a dream he had last night:

Hank, what’s up,
fella? Check out this dream I had last night. I was working in the
office and suddenly Jerry Garcia was in my door - or at least someone who looked
a lot like Jerry Garcia. I said “Jerry”? And he said, “No, it’s
Hank”. Anyway, I didn’t believe him/you, but he insisted that he was
you. I was making fun of you for not aging all that well. I said
something like “Damn, Hank, looks like Vietnam has been rough on you.”
That’s all I remember. Rock on.

I love it!

Thao and I have decided that she’s not going to make the trip home with me in October. It is proving to be too much of a pain to get the visa for her to enter the U.S. - and if she’s rejected this time, it makes getting it in the future a lot more difficult.

Also, I think the idea of my taking Thao to the U.S. with me kind of made our relationship seem a lot more serious than it really needed to be at this point. Although it’s not a big deal to me to take her with me, and I think both of us would have enjoyed it, it’s a very big deal to a single Vietnamese woman, and to her family and friends, for her to travel around the world with a man. I think it was putting some extra pressure on our relationship, and unnecessarily so.

Finally, to be completely honest and although I didn’t mention this part to Thao, it was going to be hella expensive to take her back with me. I actually already have a flight back to the U.S. - it’s the return leg of my flight from Atlanta to Vietnam back in January. I fly into Atlanta on the morning of Sunday, October 5th. If Thao came, I wasn’t going to be able to use that ticket and was going to have to buy two brand new round-trip ticket’s at a cost of over $3,000. And that’s not counting the $330 visa application fee and the extra money we’d spend in the U.S. I’m just going to buy a one-way ticket back from the U.S. to Vietnam (for October 18th - I start classes back up on October 20th). That will only cost me about $950 or so. So a lot cheaper. I don’t make a lot of money now. so saving a few thousand bucks on a two-week trip is a good thing.

So, anyway, I’ll be home from October 5 - 18. I am not going to be able to drive around like I did last time - I put 2,500 miles on my Jeep and basically wore myself out. So for some of you friends in far-flung areas of the Southeast and beyond, maybe next time!

Thao is going to go to Phu Quoc Island (off the southern coast of Vietnam) with my friends James and Erin and me in a couple of weeks. We fly down on Wednesday (Thao’s second flight ever) and come back Friday. I haven’t been to Phu Quoc Island yet, but it’s supposed to be really nice - not as developed as other parts of Vietnam and pretty laid back. We’re staying at a resort called Mango Bay, which I have heard is nice, and which looks nice on the internet: Mango Bay So that should be a nice trip.

Here are some more pictures my homey Aaron sent me.

You know the routine for these first few: Act like you’re going to take a serious, nice, posed photo, then make some jackass face at the last minute. Then your girlfriend looks at the photo on the digital camera and sees the face you made and demands to take the photo again - “And this time do it right!”

Personally, I’m just amazed by how many chins I have developed here in Vietnam.

Finally, a legit one. Now I just look drunk.

I really have nothing to say about these next two except “Damn, I am good looking!”:

My buddy Aaron posted his and Mirjam’s pics from their trip to Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand online at this link: Mexi-Cam

Here are a couple of nice ones:

Mirjam, Aaron, Thao, and some very drunk-looking American:

Mexi-Nug & Mirjam stylin’ and profilin’:

I moved to Vietnam one year ago today! Woo-hoo!

It’s a cool - if kind of weird - feeling to think that I’ve now lived in Vietnam for a whole year. I had always wanted to do something like this - to go live somewhere for a year or two instead of just passing through as a tourist, and it’s been a great experience so far.

Not that there haven’t been frustrations, etc. I remember after I first moved here - wondering if I’d done the right thing by coming here, getting incredibly frustrated and asking myself “How long do I need to live here before moving back to the U.S. so that I will at least have given it a legitimate shot?” I remember being happy about making it to my first month, then three months, then going home after five months, which was great.

I was worried about that trip home. I thought that I might find myself very homesick for the U.S. and not want to return to Vietnam. But the exact opposite happened. As much as I enjoyed being home and seeing my family and friends, by the end of that trip I couldn’t wait to get back. And now I’ve been here almost another seven months - with three more months before I go home again in October. As I’ve mentioned before, sometimes I get homesick - but it usually lasts a few days and then goes away. Over the last few months, it’s really started to feel more like my life is here vs. it being just some temporary thing, some break from my “real life” back in the U.S.

Anyway, I could ramble on all day but I’ll stop here. The bottom line is it’s been an incredible year and, on balance, probably the best decision I ever made. I don’t know how you really quantify happiness, but overall I feel so much happier now than I did a year ago.

Before I came here, several people asked me whether I thought I was just “running away,” and whether I thought making a move like this could really make me happy, or if I would just end up being equally unhappy somewhere else. And at that time I really wasn’t sure. But for whatever reason, it’s worked out okay. I’m sure it’s a combination of having a much easier, less-stressful job, living in an very interesting environment, challenging my brain by learning a new and very difficult language, and generally just not taking things so seriously - but the bottom line is I really do feel a lot happier. So maybe I was just running away or whatever, but if that’s what it was, it worked!

People have been asking me how much longer I think I’ll stay here, etc., and the answer is that as of right now, I just don’t know. If I had to say, I would say that I am probably more likely to be over here for a few years than I am to move back to the U.S. permanently. One thing that I’d like to do is work over here for 9 months of each year, then return to the U.S. for 3 months of each year. My school will let us do that - unpaid of course - so that may be something I will do at some point. Maybe I could get a job in the U.S. for those three months, or maybe I could just save up enough money during the other 9 months to live on during the three months I’m home. Also, I’ve always wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Coast Trail, so maybe at some point I’ll take a semester or two off to do that. Who knows?

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, my motto back in the states when I was still practicing law, etc., was “These people need to get off of my [freaking] back.” My motto here is “Who knows?” Here, even when you think you know what’s going on, you never really do 100%. And isn’t life really out of our control for the most part anyway? So who knows?

I celebrated my one-year anniversary by going out to dinner with Thao and my friend (and boss) Anton and a Vietnamese woman, Hien, that we introduced Anton to. We had a nice dinner and a few beers and it was a nice evening. I think Anton and Hien hit it off pretty well. I noticed that they exchanged business cards, so we’ll see how that goes. Then today I went and got a haircut. I had needed one for a while but had been holding off. It was time. It’s gotten really warm over here and I already feel about 10 degrees cooler with the new buzz.

Oh, and I went to the gym and hit it hard yesterday. I did an hour on the elliptical machine - 600+ calories - then an hour on the recumbent bike - 400+ calories. Then I sat in the sauna for a while. I was beat after that - just not in good shape right now. I slept great last night though!

I’m off to prepare for class. I hope everyone is doing well!

[The above is the cover of the Loverboy album that had the song "Working for the Weekend" on it. Not some testament to my love for hairy-armed men in tight red leather pants.]

It’s about 3:00pm Saturday afternoon here and I’m getting ready to leave work. I don’t normally work on Saturdays - I’m covering for another teacher who’s out of town today, and he is going to cover for me in a couple of weeks when I go to Phu Quoc Island with my friends James and Erin who are coming from Atlanta. I can’t wait.

Tonight I am going to have dinner with a friend-of-a-friend of mine from Atlanta, who is a doctor with the CDC and is here in Saigon on some project or other.

And tomorrow night Thao and I are going out to dinner with one of my friends here and one of Thao’s friends. Kind of a set-up for the two of them, I guess, as my friend is recently single and looking and Thao’s friend is cute and nice.

I finally got my Xbox Live working over my internet connection, and actually played a couple of games of Call of Duty 2. (I can only play games for which I have the actual, original discs I brought with me from the U.S., because apparently Microsoft can detect bootlegs and will ban you from Xbox Live.) The only problem is the internet is so slow here that I have quite a bit of lag - I hit fire on my weapon and it takes a second or so to actually fire, by which point I might have already been killed by the other guy. Hopefully that will not always be the case.

There may be a problem with my laptop order. I got an email from Dell saying that the laptops would ship on July 29th, which is three days after James gets to Vietnam (and presumably would be bringing me my laptop). I’ve emailed Dell customer service. If they can’t expedite the shipping of the laptops, or at least one of them, I will have to cancel the order.

I hope everyone has a great weekend! I’m out of here.