What a Day!

My day started out waiting 30 minutes for my breakfast at my hotel – a tiny toasted cheese sandwich. So I was late for work and then realized that I had forgotten to bring with me the documents I had been working on over the weekend. Still, things picked up for a while and I was actually getting quite a bit done.

I had an afternoon meeting with my new boss. I hadn’t seen him in a week as his son has been critically ill with a staph infection and they had to fly to Bangkok. Unfortunately, he told me that there is a possibility that he and his family might have to leave Vietnam if the infection came from living here. That definitely complicates things for me as I took the job because I thought he and I would make a good team, and I really don’t think his supervisors and I would do the same. Life is complicated, but I will just have to wait and see.

So with lots of thoughts bumping around in my head, I left the office before 6pm with every intention to go back to my hotel and then go for a run around the lake. I found a taxi and very quickly got stuck in the worst traffic jam in my life. It turns out that with so much traffic heading out of the center of the city during rush hour, many streets become de-facto one-way streets. There was no way a car was going to be able to drive in the opposite direction. It was so crazy that I was even worried about getting out of the car and walking because there are no sidewalks (no one walks here) and you have walk in the road dodging mopeds. The taxi driver did a U-turn and then drove in circles around the city for 30 minutes trying to find a way through. When the meter reached 55,000 dong (about $3.30), my usual taxi ride home, I told him to pull over and got out. I had absolutely no idea where I was, but I started to walk in the opposite direction of traffic. After half an hour of walking, I finally got to a street that was more open and where I caught a taxi and finally got back to my comfortable quiet hotel room.

I ordered pizza and flipped on the TV – an interesting polygamy show on Oprah. Of course the pizza place misunderstood my horrible Vietnamese pronunciation and delivered my pizza to a different hotel. It’s been an hour and it’s now 8pm, but I still have hope that I will eat at some point tonight.