On Mosquitos
There are not mosquito nets at our guest home in Ben Tre. Upon questioning why this was the case, the following conversation pursued:
Em: There are A/C units in the rooms.
Me: So?
Em: Mosquitoes don't like living stinging you under these conditions.
Sounded logical to me. However, I think that the
excessive, nightly feastings upon my limbs prove otherwise. Regardless of the fact that the native may have been incorrect, I can't proclaim that he was untruthful (does your dog bite? No. He bit me! This is not my dog.) and he never gets bitten, but any mechanisms of defense are utterly useless in the Mekong Region against expat blood, especially of type B+. I have given up on repellents as they only seem to antagonize these audacious little buggers; they will land on body parts you are visually guarding against and if you go for the SWAT, they casually depart your epidermis only to return momentarily. They play by a different set of rules, it's not a one bite and done type of deal, these are communist, so they eat accordingly. There is no such thing as getting one bite, you get a cluster of bites but you aren't aware of this until you start moving about and realize a section of your body has been assaulted by an pro-itchiness campaign. Like many problems here, this is best solved by using thy mind and trying to simply forget what has occurred, or if you are like me, you douse said area of your body with tiger balm.
On the Subject of Medicine
I ditched my malaria pills a while back and will only take them if I want a particularly vivid dream - but I never do.
I have learned that lime followed by 5 minutes and iodine is the best way to counter an allergic reaction to concrete. I am certain that had a mild reaction of this type overtaken my legs in America, I would have spent half my day dealing with the matter and anywhere between $50-$200.
On the Matter of Pain
It is all relative; but, it is easier to dissociate from feelings of pain when you know a homeopathic and surefire cure lies within reach - rather than a trip to the doctor's office and a bottle of drugs that are not suitable for the 'syndrome' you have just contracted.
On Vietnamese Toughness
It is good that the Vietnamese people are tough, because the kids are violent little creatures. It is common occurrence for our elementary school students to suddenly start waling on one another. It is rarely more than 1 vs. 1, except when they or our Vietnamese teaching counterparts decide to incite games in which the students are encouraged attack the teacher. It's all in good fun, and it never draws blood, but that doesn't mean they don't bruise each other or are hesitant to sock or be socked in the face (and yes this includes inter-gender duels). They eat knuckle sandwiches willingly and I am convinced that this is where the expression originated.
On the Lunchlady
She don't take no s#@* from nobody and she would never fathom serving us knuckle sandwich, but that doesn't mean she wouldn't cook one. The lunchlady is the ultimate purveyor of Vietnamese everything, particularly that which I have already mentioned. Her food is too good to be served anywhere but in her kitchen and while she's not at all reluctant to share her secrets, she works so swiftly that I cannot tell if she has added a pinch of salt and a tablespoon of MSG to the batter or vice versa (what will surely equate to a big difference when I feebly attempt to recreate her dishes). What I do know is that her food is very sweet and that this results from cooking everything in a combination of fat oil and coconut milk and using ample sugar. While the lunchlady's meals are a tremendous temporary cure-all, their conclusion's often immediately induce the following states: drowsiness, a food-like coma, of pain reentering the body, TMJ (Temporomandibular Joint Disorder), hydration and or dehydration, relaxation, and anxiety to name a few. The reason for the latter is simple, you never quite know what the lunchlady is liable to do once you have satisfied her appetite by dutifully eating all of the food anywhere near your table (or feeding leftover scraps to the dogs if she is not looking and you happen to have come across a particularly fatty piece of meat). Things I have seen the lunchlady do: throw a coconut at her dog's head for trying to eat scraps of food from the trashcan, kick her chicken because it was trying to drink water from the dishwashing basin, feed her python a chicken followed up by a large rat (it ate both), chide me for the manner in which I eat certain foods, get angry with our Vietnamese girl counterparts for letting us men get anywhere near doing house chores, hold cooking seminars for an American man and an Argentinian man so that they may woo a better wife in a nearer day, laugh incessantly at my lack of photographic inhibition and then at the pictures it produces, give me a tour of her property (which runs back 400m) and pull down a kilogram of limes from her tree as a kind of sacrificial offering to my leg (concrete burn), chop the tops off and then force us to drink multiple coconuts laughing all-the-while because she knows we are already full.
On the Subject of Vietnamese Women Who Treat Me Like They Would Their Son
The Mama of Anh Hong (our hotel), Mah as we call her, never misses a chance to tell a story about me and parlay it into how I remind her of her son who, as chance would have it, works here; he, obviously, is a righteously cool, overly nice and very handsome dude who has an
impeccable fashion sense to boot. It was just yesterday that I was in the market shopping at Mah's clockware and jewelry store when her son pulled up on a motorbike. It was at the moment when Mah was jamming a bangle bracelet on Logan's wrist - while a Vietnamese women was telling Logan she was not in pain at the very same time that Logan was yelping and exclaiming how she was in pain - that her son told me he liked one of the four pendants I had picked out (same one I would have chosen). When I told Mah I would take it, she snatched it from me and said something along the lines of "This is one of the ugliest pieces of garbage I have, these are supposed to be jade and it's not, I'll take you to buy a fashionably acceptable one" I know this because Bao was translating.
Other quirky petty grievances we have: she swipes my laundry whenever I so much as walk anywhere near the washing basin with dirty clothes in my hand. I don't know how this one came about because she never let me get so far as pouring water onto my clothes before she decided I was no good at cleaning them. She thinks she is doing our room a service by tidying it; my roommate and I agree that this makes is harder to find things. If an accessory food (such as the morning bread loaves) run out, she makes one of the hostesses run out and fetch one from the market; I would rather eat my find then and there without the bells and whistles than wait 15 minutes for a proper meal. That is Mah, that's just the way she is, did I mention what else?
The Ranging Services of Anh Hong Hotel
It runs the gamut from a brothel to a wedding hall. It also comes with Mah, your personal, complimentary, market shopping assistant who decides the price of the item you are being sold, not the shop owner. Whatever food you want to eat and tofu cooking lessons.
More to come, got to go, no time to edit.
