Like Sands Through the Hourglass, so are the Days of My Life (cue high-pitched flute-like music)

6:00 a.m. Wake up from sunlight that is screaming into the room…curse myself for not remembering to close the drapes the night before. Head immediately to do e-mail, as the later it gets in the day, the slower the internet is, if that is possible. What’s that you say? We pay a sizable monthly fee for “broadband”? Why yes, yes, we do. Never mind, I actually like having to click everything twice to get it loaded onto the page, which then takes twice the normal time in the States.

6:10 a.m. Restart the computer and log in as a different user each time to try to connect to the internet. Often spend the next 30-40 minutes doing this and wondering what’s more sad—the fact that it takes this long or the fact that I allow myself to do this for such a ridiculous amount of time? Hear roosters crowing. Remember that when I was in the Peace Corps, I did not set my alarm clock on the first morning, assuming that the roosters would wake me up at sunrise, like in the Kellogg’s cornflakes commercials. Start laughing, then stop when I remember that these roosters may have the chicken flu and perhaps that’s why they are crowing so damn insistently. Remember friend’s host family’s creepy one-legged rooster in Uzbekistan and hope that they don’t have those here.

8:45 a.m. Greet our cook, Apple, who comes three times a week. We spend a few minutes in a hilarious mix of Vietnamese and English trying to communicate about food. Apple has been bringing various local fruit for us to try. I have yet to like the more complicated fruits, like durians, rambutan or lychee, and my reactions range from mild dislike to offensive disgust, such as when I tried durian, a fruit so pungent that it has been banned from passenger planes. Apple shakes her head, thinking not only is this a stupid American who speaks like a slow child, but this is a stupid, wasteful, ungrateful American who speaks like a slow child.

9:00 a.m. Run down to Tae Bo and observe our little U.N. of a class, while pretending to exercise. There is a variation of Japanese, Australian, French, American, South African and Vietnamese women who participate. I must say we're damn good. Think to myself what a funny-looking group we'd make for a Billy Blanks video, though.

10:00 a.m. Run back up the apartment, change into poolside attire, argue with Apple over why I think it is okay for me to eat M&Ms and cookies for lunch, so she need only make dinner. After all, M&Ms and cookies would be just plain silly for dinner, I tell her. She shakes her head and says that it’s a good thing I exercise a lot. Threaten to fire her.

10:15-12:30 p.m. Lounge around pool area, swimming laps, reading and practicing my bad Vietnamese with some of the pool staff. Given that our language training in the States focused on either very simplistic or complicated exchanges and nothing in the intermediate range, I usually talk about the weather, the devaluation of the Dollar to the Euro, subsidies for farmers or American Idol.

1:00 p.m. Eat M&Ms, cookies, Lay’s chips, peanut butter sandwich, and/or Ramen noodles. Contemplate making brownies, but then laugh as I realize that would require getting out a recipe and actually baking them. Become sad when I realize I’m watching Oprah, since BBC and CNN have a nasty habit of repeating the same stories. What's an unemployed girl to do, though?

1:30 p.m. Wander around town, shopping or doing errands. Think about running around in a Batwoman costume, since I already attract so much attention. Wave with a backwards Miss America wave, which is the signal for no here, to the fifty motorbike and cyclo drivers all waiting in a row who say “You go mo to?” and put their hands in handlebar vroom-vroom positions in case I don’t understand (this is an everyday ritual, by the way). Try to avoid the motorbikes that careen onto the sidewalk because driving in the street is too safe.

3:00 p.m. Return home, sweating like a priest at a, well, I won’t use that metaphor, okay, am sweating like crazy. Hop online just in time for the amazing enormous thunder, rain and lightning that are the rainy season to start. Image of my dad pops up on my right shoulder, telling me that I will be electrocuted if I continue to operate an electrical object, particularly the computer. Image of the Nike swoosh pops up on my left shoulder, telling me to just do it. Shake my head and open a second bottle of wine, but continue to type. Sometimes hear birds thump against the window and fall to their death.

5:00 p.m. Head off to Vietnamese class and meet Duke there. Today, Teacher decides to talk about “The Minority Peoples of Viet Nam”. Spend the next hour and a half listening to her talk about how stupid, lazy and fat they all are. Hear about how they cannot read or write, and all they want to do is lay around, do smack, ride motorbikes, then get into accidents because they don’t know how to drive when they are high. Also hear about how scared they are of telephones, and how THEY DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO SAY “ALLO” when answering said telephone which they don't possess. Silly people, I am supposed to think. By the end of class, find myself wondering if they grow their own smack or import it. Wonder what climate smack grows best in. Wonder how it got the name smack. Worry that if there is a channel in the U.S. devoted to golf, 24 hours a day/7 days a week, then what is to stop someone from creating the billiards channel. Also wonder how Teacher knows this stuff, since the people about whom she is speaking live in the highlands, pretty far from Saigon. Think about giving her a copy of Rudyard Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden." Decide against, since she might think that I, too, am of this 19th-century mindset.

7:30 p.m. Ravenously eat Apple's carefully prepared dinner with Duke and watch the rejected shows from the U.S. like Miss Match with Alicia Silverstone. Pray that Alien 3 will not be shown yet again. Become even more disappointed when I realize Jeepers Creepers is that evening's movie. Become really depressed when I remember that Duke and I already watched it a few evenings prior.

10:30 p.m. Head to bed and forget to close the drapes so that the sun doesn’t wake me up at 6:00 a.m.

Michael, You're Never Far from Our Hearts

Our Memorial Day weekend started out just like any other. On Friday, I waited around for our Household Effects, or HHE, in the alphabet soup jargon of the Foreign Service world. The moving team consisted of six Vietnamese men, compared to the three we had in Washington, DC. I’ve decided that many jobs here that would normally take one person or even a machine to do require at least three. For example, the toll booths on the highways have four people—one person to collect the money, another to issue the ticket, yet another to watch the other two, and a fourth to tell jokes and spit watermelon seeds at motorists. In our case, the moving team had three men to transport the boxes, while three others stood around and shouted. They seemed much more in shape than the ones we had in Washington, where the head of the team was Porky, or Puh-Key, as he pronounced it, a large, 64 year-old man who had been with the same company for 42 years. Graciously, the two younger men let him move all of the heavier items, while I watched in horror as he maneuvered our way-too-large couch out of the way-too-small doorway of the apartment. Unlike the move from Washington, however, the men here unloaded the truck during a torrential downpour. While I was lucky enough to wait inside during all of this, it was a bit distressing watching our boxes being unloaded. After all, how sturdy can cardboard be during a monsoon? In the end, all of our boxes arrived safely and, while, funny enough, the contents smelled like they had, well, been on a ship for three months, luckily the movers in Washington managed to pack the most important items, including potatoes, onions and garlic cloves that apparently had been lying around in our pantry, as well as scrap paper and a bag of trash from the kitchen.

Duke and I sorted through some of the boxes—those three-month old potatoes and garlic cloves really hit the spot—then gave up and prepared for our trip the following day. We decided to go to Mui Ne, a small beach about four hours away on the southern coast famous for its high sand dunes. We took a tour bus, where we had the misfortune of sitting in the front seat, so we could see exactly how close our driver came to hitting vehicles and pedestrians in the other lane head-on, as he passed even more impossibly-slow trucks and tractors. I tried to ignore the signs every kilometer or so warning about wearing helmets and keeping one’s speed down in order to reduce the alarming number of highway deaths. It was comforting to see that the drivers, and bus drivers in particular, had cultivated a complicated series of signals for speedtraps. Sometimes it was a simple honk and a flash of headlights, other times it was headlight flashes and a horizontal arm rapidly moving up and down, still others executed a Macarena-esque arm move followed by some head jerks. What was amusing, though, is that usually the passengers would do it, too, perhaps in case our driver did not see these obvious gestures. It turns out our driver had perfected the art of slowing down just before the radar gun and speeding up right after we were out of range, just in time to pass a large truck and careen over a blind hill. After four hours of this, we arrived to our hotel, only to discover that the place had given our room away. This was both amusing and annoying, as it was the off-season, and there were all of 10 people staying in Mui Ne Beach, so we found it difficult to understand that there were no more rooms at our hotel. In any case, we walked a few meters up and settled on a place with the unfortunate name of Indochina Dreams.

Despite what Lonely Planet said about it being “dreamy,” with “well-appointed” rooms, we couldn’t get out of there fast enough, although we did have to stay the first night there. Our bungalow, while quaintly situated right on the beach, was a sweatbox, as the power kept going off so that neither the fan nor the air conditioner—for which we paid extra—was able to work. While our bed only had a few dead mosquitoes, ants and spiders on it, the room was missing a certain je ne sais quoi. What sealed the deal, though, was our young waiter/cleaner/beach attendant. He really wanted to practice his English, to the point where after serving our lunch, he actually sat down with us and talked at length, in barely understandable English, I might add, about karaoke and Michael Jackson, breaking only to run and get some very sadly drawn sketches he had made of the sand dunes. I didn’t have the heart to tell the poor kid about the Michael Jackson trial and the state of the Neverland Ranch. Later, when he came to sit with us on the beach, again uninvited, I bit my tongue as he showed off his Michael Jackson moves, complete with head snaps and arm waves. You see, it was too sandy and uneven to do the moonwalk. The next morning, our new friend seemed upset when he saw that we were leaving, as he was sitting in the beach chair directly outside of our room, waiting, I’m sure, to debate which album was better, Farewell My Summer Love or Thriller. Perhaps it was better that the Michael Jackson for him was the pre-1985 Michael, before he had his third nose pinching, his hair caught on fire during a Pepsi commercial, he dangled his precious Blanket over the balcony, and he climbed trees with Martin Bashir. Oh, Michael, how far you’ve come since The Wiz and Ben the Mouse. No, for the waiter/cleaner/beach attendant, he will always be the hoo-hoo-ing, jamon-ing, chika-chik-ow-ing, crotch-grabbing Michael.

We spent a second way less eventful night in a much better hotel, where the staff outnumbered the guests three to one, we had a large pool, a spot on the beach with raked sand and some unfortunately dressed and very sunburned Russian female guests to keep us company. Getting to the second hotel was interesting, as we took our first motorbike taxis, which are called xe om, or hugging vehicles. They are all over Saigon, but I’ve been a huge wimp about even attempting to get on one, which is good because apparently there is such a thing as xe om etiquette. Had I used one in Saigon, I would have hopped on and put my arms right around the driver’s waist, thinking that, well, it’s a hugging vehicle, so one must hold on that way. Normal passengers, of course, do not do that. For skittish westerners like me, you hold on to the metal bar in the back. If you’re more confident in your balance, you can rest your hands on your thighs. If you’re an expert, you can do a handstand and practice juggling tricks while riding on the bike. Although we only went about two kilometers in the xe oms, it was just long enough to be intoxicating for Duke and ridiculously terrifying for me. The xe om drivers in Mui Ne, after all, have much more of a free reign than their counterparts in Saigon, who are slowed down by cars, buses, cyclos and occasionally intersections.

After a short three-day, two night holiday, we unwillingly headed back to the city. We were smart enough not to sit in the front seat on the way back, which gave us more time to concentrate on the rain that was seeping in through the less insulated parts of the bus. Despite the fact that it is officially rainy season in southern Viet Nam, Mui Ne Beach does not receive much rainfall due to the sand dunes, which help create a microclimate. Not too far out from Mui Ne, however, we were reminded of what was waiting for us back in Saigon, as the Dutch man across from us was frantically trying to stop up the cracks in his window. I found some irony in the fact that a man from a country that should be under water was unable to stop the roof and windows near him from leaking. Stay dry, everyone.