"A funny thing happened in asia the other day..." Vol. 1 Ed. 3

This edition was sent in a mass e-mail on 1 Nov. 2008

Dear friends and family,
I hope you all have been well. Some of you may have heard on the news that Vietnam is experiencing record-breaking rains. It's true. Two days ago I never expected to find myself riding on the back of a motorbike going the wrong way down a street with water washing up to my ankles, but that is exactly where I found myself Friday evening at 5:05pm.

At 4:50pm, when I looked out my office window and saw that water had washed over the sidewalk and was lapping the edges of our building, I turned to my coworkers Thuan and Long and asked point-blank "what am I supposed to do?" Miss Thuan kindly offered to take me home, and we promptly donned our ponchos and shed our socks and shoes. As we passed waterlogged motorbikes and taxis abandoned in the street I was simultaneously scared I might not make it home and disappointed that I hadn't brought my camera along for the ride.


For lack of a camera, I resort to two pictures downloaded from the internet.

Here is a link where you can see more like them.

Up top is a picture of me in full rain attire (note the shoes in a plastic bag).

But before you are shocked and horrified at the terrible hardships I am suffering, consider this: rain, to Vietnamese, is like snow to Michiganders. Any tropical-born foreigner who experiences a Michigan blizzard for the first time is shocked and horrified at the sheer amount of it, and no less so by the behavior of Michigan natives as they go on with their lives, apparently oblivious to the peril to life and limb all around them. The foreigner might even write letters home about it (complete with photos downloded from the internet and pictures of themselves in full snow attire). These Americans! he/she exclaims in disbelief, How can they put up with this? The answer, of course, is that they (and their parents before them) have been putting up with it before they even knew what "it" was. And there are so many other things that keep them there: family, friends, the leaves in fall, etc. The same is true for Vietnam. The city of Hanoi alone is nearly 1,000 years old. A little rain--even a lot--is not going to make it wash away overnight.