Friday, July 31, 2009

Vietnam Day 24 (7/1/09)

My stomach was still off, but I decided to try easing myself back into a normal diet by eating solid but bland foods. It was nice to have real food again, but it devastated me not to use hot sauce. We’ll be visiting the central region during the next four days and since Kendra’s and Khang’s birthdays occur during that span of time, we decided to celebrate early and throw them a surprise party. Van Anh and Hanh are experts at planning a party – they got lots of decorations and even cut out party hats and used colored paper to make cute faces on them. They got balloons, which would normally seem like a natural addition to a birthday party except that they accidentally got water balloons. People were turning purple trying to blow them all up, but they managed and soon the walls were covered with little squash-shaped balloons.

Alex, Van, and I went to Ben Thanh Market to buy a present for Kendra (earrings of course). We got there just five minutes before closing, but we’re expert shoppers and found some nice ones and haggled down the price (though we probably still got ripped off) all before the stalls shut down. It was raining and we needed to get back in time for the party so we grabbed the first cab we could, even though we knew we were taking a risk since we didn’t know the cab company. I thought we might get ripped off but this was ridiculous. The driver claimed the meter was going up so high because traffic slowed us down, but I’ve taken cabs to and from Ben Thanh often enough to know he was taking us a roundabout way. I’m convinced there’s a button on the steering wheel that lets the driver change the meter at will. By the time we made the decision to bail out and walk the rest of the way, we were nearly at the guesthouse, but it was the principle of the thing – I wasn’t going to pay that driver a cent more. We crossed the crazy street to the guest house feeling used.

The surprise party went wonderfully despite a few close calls and planning snafus (the party wasn’t actually ready three different times they called us over, so I had to keep distracting Kendra for nearly an hour). The major epiphany of the night was that birthday cake is the ideal chopstick food. It’s easily cut into perfect bite-sized pieces by pinching it with the chopsticks. I think I’m going to start a new tradition when I get back to the U.S. – everyone who wants to eat my birthday cake has to use chopsticks (which means I’ll have to teach Mom pretty soon after I get back). After the party, we packed our things and tried to get whatever sleep we could, a more difficult task in my case since there were two extra people sleeping in the beds we’d pushed together (Hanh because her room reeked of birthday cake and dried squid from the party and Hieu just because he loves us), but I had to try because we were leaving for the airport at the inhumane hour of 4:30 a.m.

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