days under the sun

As the title of this entry implies, I have been spent the previous few days in Mui Ne--swimming, lounging, reading, walking, eating, and sleeping. The waters were especially nice; they were at their clearest when the tide was in before noon. I have finally finished reading Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; I probably should have bought that one book in Japan, but oh well.

To describe the city, I would say that the sun was blazing hot, the waters were wonderfully cool, and the peoples usually kind. On the first day there as I was walking down the beach, and a group of local children, done with school for the summer, stopped me to ask if we could play and if they could 'have' my swimming goggles. In a sense, the introduction of my foreign goggles brought a degree of unnecessary conflict among the children as they fought over who would be the first and next to use them. At one point in an unrelated matter, two of the children began fighting over something with one brutally pinching the other in unspecified areas. Not wanting to cause any commotion since I was an outsider here, I told them to stop fighting and let their oldest be the mediators. The struggle ended peacefully, if one could call it that, with one of the older boys consoling the one whom had been attacked.

Last night after my return to Sai Gon, I went to eat dinner with Phuong, Trinh, Son, and Khanh at a place called Son La near here. The food was decent, the decor jungle-like, and the staff all dressed alike. After that, we went to a place down Tran Hung Dao which served hot vit lon. I have the fried one, which didn't particularly taste like it had been fried. Thereafter, we hit up Lam's Bar on Bui Vien where we ordered a crazy cocktail served in a large flower vase while seated on the rooftop in the warm Sai Gon night air. The night concluded back at Chris's where we watched a bit of Training Day, talked to some IT friends of Ben visiting from Ha Noi, and a game of scrabble.