October 12, 1999
It's time to meet the natives. But not before burning a hole into my host's bedsheets with my cigarette. I'm not really awake - and not really asleep. I exist and I walk and talk like a human.
Steve and his wife and I get breakfast at a small place near their house. I can't face soup with beef in it first thing in the morning and it does my stomach in just to watch other people eat it at this time of the morning.
But there is coffee and this is good. In a shot glass, it's as close as you can legally get to a speedball.
It seems that there are money troubles and my laptop has not yet been purchased. Nor will my ticket be reimbursed for a bit. Nor will I get the money back I spent on their books. I'm trying to be cool about this. I'm trying to put myself in their shoes. But what the hell am I doing in their shoes? I have my own!
Why am I suprised that life is about to get farsical? And it does... in spades... I turn up at the office and get plonked down in from of the computer that is supposed to do me until my laptop arrives. It's an old PC9500 mac. Not so bad... I think to myself. Until I try to install Dreamweaver and I find out that it only has 32 Meg of RAM.
The only consolation in all this is that the Vietnamese I am going to be working with are all really nice - really down-to-earth - really sweet.
Back in my room at Steve's, I'm trying to figure out how to deal with the hole in the sheet. Steve's Vietnamese wife is formidable and, although very few people in life scare me, she does. She scares me to death.
sleep