Back in Saigon after a four day beach retreat and a five hour bus ride through rush hour Saigon traffic. I have a few hours to kill before I have to be at the train station for my 18 hour trip north. I spent up an hour or two eating a mediocre vegetarian dinner but a really cute 12-year old girl selling gum got the better of me and I bought her dinner.
After about 15 minutes of convincing me that I should give her the equivalent money instead of dinner, I finally convinced her to order something. She chose pizza and a yogurt drink. She covered the pizza bite by bite in hot chili sause, ate about as slowly as my 11-year old niece and was about the size of my 7-year old pipsqueak nephew. I guess it was missing those kids in the states that won me over to buy her a Cornetto ice cream cone after she devoured the pizza. I got a short Vietnamese lesson out of the deal. She was sweet and we made fun of the tourists in the restaurant together -- the guy with dreadlocks and a flannel shirt, the guy sitting next to us wearing the serious deep in thought expression of the world traveler.
The rest of the time I have to kill, I plan to spend fighting with the slowest Internet connection in the world.
I would have said more about the beach, how each day eased into the next; how I drank banana lassies and watched the dusk settle over the beach, turning the sky to a steel gray and the sea to a darker gray, the high tide leaving only a small strip of wet amber sand; and how dark the street was on the walk home from dinner, a pitch black road enclosed by the silhouettes of palm tree fronds and when empty of motorbikes, only the beat of your flip flops on pavement and the rustle of palm trees in the breeze.
