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July 3rd

I tried hard as possible to make Hanoi fun, but I just couldn't manage it. The rip offs and greasy encounters were just too much to handle so I completely lost my sense of humor and learned how to be rude, at least rude enough to make people understand I wanted to be left alone and was not someone to mess with, dammit. Counting the days until I leave here. I had one interesting day where I saw a number of sights, including the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, (though not the actual body of Uncle Ho himself which is interred there), the Temple of Literature which was beautiful, and some relics of the American War, even the "carcass" of a B52 crashed into a lake right in the midst of the city. But my motorbike driver turned from goofy and pleasant to dark and disgusting. He started to ask completely inappropriate questions about who I was sleeping with, and did I have "all the fun" with many men and did we want to get a room for two hours so we could try to make a Vietnamese baby for me to take home, and then he'd shake my hand and tickle my palm with his dirty long nailed middle finger, and it just made me throw up a little in my mouth and I wanted to curl up and die. Then he tried to scam me with a huge overcharge. I ditched him, paid him what I thought was fair while speaking sternly about what was not nice, not appropriate to speak to me about, and called it a morning. In the afternoon I went to see the Water Puppets which everyone raves about, but that I found a little boring. All I could think about was that I would have enjoyed it much more if I had had the Malnourished kids with me...... Back to the Tamarind Cafe for more good food and ambient jazz, and then back to the hotel to repack my bags for travel to Danang in the very early morning.

July 4th

A day or so ago, I received an email from a woman who said she had adopted her son last year through the Holt Adoption Agency and that at the time he had been living at Malnourished Center, where I have been a volunteer for the last two months. She wrote that she had been reading my blog and that she too had fallen in love with Giang while waiting for her son to be released to fly home with her. She wanted me to know that she had been contributing money towards her care since then, and was concerned about the fact that it sounded as though I hadn't been made aware of their support when I inquired about Giang's status. She wanted to ask Holt about Giang's situation in more detail and I believe she had an idea that there was something dishonest going on. Unfortunately, the whole situation has blown up in everyone's faces and drawn the attentions of Holt, Malnourished and GVN in negative ways. I reacted very strongly online in the holt forum since I was very upset that I had to spend my last day in Danang cleaning up messes I hadn't made, and apologizing for accusations I hadn't made and the whole situation has become unnecessarily ugly and a little sad. I am just sick with sorrow at the whole thing and hope that I can clear it all up in the next few days, after all my travel, when I have more wits about me. I fear I've hurt some feelings and I'm suffering a little sorrow myself, and it's just a lot of energy I wish I hadn't had to spend. I trust with some accountability and time to heal I can clear it all up and get back to the work of getting things in good order for Giang.

Off to Saigon tonight for a day and a half before I fly home. Not sure if I'll just pass time in the hotel room or have one last attempt at adventure, but we'll see how tired I am when I get there.

July 5th
Saigon for the Day

I was pretty exhausted so stayed in bed for a long, very long morning..... Then I decided to try again, and have some fun on my last full day in Vietnam. Dammit, I was going to win this Karmic tug of war. I decided to try to do either or both the Reunification Palace and the "War Remnants Museum", which was called the Museum of Chinese and American War Crimes up until a few years ago. The new name might be a good cover, but the minute you walk in the door, there is no mistaking what the Vietnamese feel about what both the Chinese, French and Americans have done to them in the last hundred or so years. Wandering these halls was a brutal visual and esthetic experience and I wasn't the only person wandering with a hand covering their mouth in horror and shame. There were relics of tanks, airplanes, bombs other artillery and copters in front of the museum, and smaller items from history inside... dresses of children burnt to death during invasions, pictures and fetuses of deformed babies, victims of Agent Orange through direct exposure and birth defect, photographs of mangled soldiers, citizens, people who were murdered along the way. It just blows you away. There was a replication of the Tiger Cages, separate outdoor rooms for particularly difficult or important prisoners, where brutal interrogations and torture took place. There were artist's renditions of some of the tortures that took place. I was especially hurt by the descriptions of tortures saved specifically for female prisoners. The part I enjoyed the most was a separate wing documenting the work of those war and news photographers that died during their coverage assignments, and many of their images on display are those that are ingrained in our collective memories. Some artifacts included a camera with a bullet hole right through it, and a series from Robert Capa's last roll of film, including the last shots taken just before he stepped on the land mine that killed him. This museum moved me deeply, and while it wasn't exactly the "fun" I was hoping to have on my last day, it was well worth seeing and made my day.

I left there when they closed at 5pm and walked around for hours, past the Reunification Palace and park, past the Ho Chi Minh Museum and cool gingerbread French Colonial building of the Hotel de Ville, which is the home for the People's Committee now. The Reunification Palace is where the first communist tanks charged through the wrought iron gates on April 30, 1975, and a soldier ran up the stairs to unfurl the Viet Cong flag from the fourth floor balcony, as the Republic of Vietnam ceased to exist.

I walked to the fruit markets and bought my last bunch of lychees. The skies opened up once again, so I grabbed a cab and went back to the room to repack and bid Vietnam adieu. For now.....

3:30 am July 6th
Airport in Saigon

I've been trying to play around with my sleep times the last three nights, moving them forward by staying up late and sleeping closer to when they sleep in the US so I can get back to the right zone quickly when I get home. It is hell. In my older age these days, I just don't do well if I haven't gotten any sleep or less than enough sleep. It actually makes me nauseous and weak and cranky. But I would really like to feel well as quickly as possible when I get home, and not slip into a depression between my body's confusion and pain from dragging too much baggage around the world and the fact that I miss the kids so much already. I've just checked into United Airlines to start the journey home. In one way I'm very ready to go home. In the last week or two so many things happened to me that were negative that I am finally missing the straight forward pricing and normal every day negotiations that are inherent in the way we live in the US. I'm so tired of being ripped off. In the States we're still ripped off, overcharged, but we tend to know about it right up front. By the end, even the people you thought were trustworthy seemed not to be. Every transaction included some grift, right down to check out and the sudden tax on the room that for some reason wasn't included in the quoted rate, or the false charges to my mini bar or the time honored "I don't have correct change" scenario where they have to end up keeping some money back because there isn't quite enough change to give me.... every single transaction had some BS padding, or "problem" resulting in another way to part the money from my wallet. I'd lost my sense of humor about it and other assorted Vietnamese rip off issues. I was under the very bad impression that I

had bought at least some karmic immunity when I bought nothing short of 500 beach bracelets and 700 discs of tiger balm, pineapple I wasn't hungry for or postcards for the "street children" who were more likely working for their parents.....I'm carrying SO much tiger balm that i will probably have to pay an import tax on the stuff at customs. So somehow, I thought I had showed the gods that I was trying to share the love or something. But Hanoi's robbery really beat me down spiritually and from there on I realized I had lost my patience for being looked at solely as a wallet with legs.

So I arrived at the airport and for some unknown reason burst into tears from the minute I get out and drag my weighted suitcases out of the broken, burping taxi. I have no conscious reason per se for crying so hard, but I just can't stop. Big tears down roll my face and launch off my puffy cheeks. The poor attendant checking me in asks nervously if I'm okay and can he help me, and I thank him for his concern and tell him that early as it is, I'm already having a bad day. He takes pity on me and covertly helps me rearrange my suitcase contents so I can skirt the charges on overweight baggage. He can't alter the charges incurred when I had to change flights after my wallet was stolen, but he does squeak me a ticket for an upgrade to first class in the final leg from California to Boston. Random acts of kindness on my behalf always make me sob, so while he was expecting to make me feel better, I left the counter thanking him profusely but crying harder than when it all started.

Hong Kong was a quick stop after going through all the security all over again. I wanted to find a cafe to sit and have a something resembling breakfast during the two hour layover since I had been in comas through the flight meals, or even just a hot coffee and an email check with the free WiFi. When I checked the menu and saw that the scrambled egg "special" was $68 and that the fruit juice smoothie I would lust for was only $28, I kept on walking around the shops instead to waste time before I could get back on a plane and go back to sleep. I later found out that the prices were in Hong Kong dollars, which is about $1USD to 7$HKD, so that made me feel a tiny bit better. Still skipped breakfast. Considered whether anyone at home would appreciate a gift of instant shark fin soup with abalone, which was on special at the gist shop, but just couldn't fit one more thing in my bag...

San Francisco was confusing since I was still sleeping when I walked off the plane. Complete zombie mode. My compromised state made it harder to figure out where to meet my sister, Tracy, who had come to the airport to have lunch and let me brag some stories and show photo slideshows from my macbook. She arrived pulling a huge Dora The Explorer helium balloon and shot photos of my victorious return holding the silly balloon next to me as though she had been my traveling companion the whole way. We had a terrific lunch, with lots of cheese, which I have soooo missed in Vietnam. But it went too fast. Time for the final leg. Seat 1A. As excited as I was to have the privilege of flying the last long leg of my trip up front in the roomie section with the fancy folks, I fell asleep before they could offer me any more than a Diet Coke before we had even taxied to the runway. I went back into coma mode and woke only when the flight attendant checked to see if I was still breathing since everyone else had disembarked at Logan Airport. "You weren't even boozin'!" said she, just before she considered flashing a mirror under my nose to see if I was breathing. I thanked her for her concern, and left to walk the tunnel off the plane bumping off the walls and laughing like a mental patient, not sure where I was going. For the first time in two months, my cell phone started ringing and phone calls and voicemails of congratulations helped pass the time waiting for my luggage. I had made it almost all the way. Started crying one more time the minute I was safe in my hotel room, for the last night before I make the final flight to Nantucket Saturday morning.

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