Last night I got my first
invitation for a late-night impromptu hotel/dorm party in many years, with my
new friend Duc from the hotel across the street with good wifi knocking insistently
on my door at 1 am to tell me that I am great, not just great, but really
really great, and even though he’s not making any money off of me, he still thinks
I’m great, and he wants to introduce me to his friends down in the so-called
lobby of my hotel (actually a parking space for the guests’ motorcycles plus a
reception desk), including the woman he says he loves but who is married to his
best friend (one of 10 or 12 best friends I’ve met in the past 48 hours), and to
show them that I am great, really really great. And I’m thinking he must be
drunk, but no, he’s hanging all over me and I can’t smell any alcohol, although
his breath could stop a Clydesdale in its tracks, and I just want to go back to
bed but I feel obligated to act like I’m great in front of his friends as well
as my hotel owner, who has dropped in on the tea party. It’s all great and I’m
great and Duc is the only one besides me who speaks any English at all, but
it’s pretty shaky and he just agrees with everything I say because I’m great. He
makes a lame joke about how his friends are married but they sleep in separate
rooms, and they don’t understand what he’s talking about, but I follow with the
equally lame observation that she has a wedding ring on her finger and he
doesn't, and that gets a much bigger laugh than it deserves, and then I point
to the hotel owner’s ring-less finger and I feel like Robin Williams doing a
HBO special bringing the house down. Then they start talking in Vietnamese, but
I don’t get any feeling that they’re talking about me, and when Duc notices
that I’m not part of the conversation he falls back into default mode, which is
telling me how great I am. It takes me 45 minutes to escape, another hour to
get back to sleep, neither of which is great, and the next morning when I
stumble into his hotel at 7 to use his wi-fi he’s crashed out on the hotel
lobby couch. Which is great for him but I’m moving on down the road to the next
cheap hotel on my 110cc-motorcycle-with-the-mystery-gearbox Vietnam tour, and
it looks like it’s going to be a misty rainy chilly day at 6,000 feet and
higher. Great.
