March 8th, 2010

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Tuesday Feb 9. Another sunrise in Paradise

Monday, March 8th, 2010

It’s not 7 a.m. yet. Just hang up some laundry on the balcony and then had to close the doors and windows and turned on the a.c. as the sun is already baking the east side. I’ll have breakfast and then gather at the “Beverly Hills” coffee shop with the “regulars”, next I’ll have coffee with Chien and Chau of the Falcon Shipping Agency. Yesterday afternoon I rode out to the south side of town, across the Anh Binh bridge. In 2006 I took some photos of the fish drying along the river bank. There were none at Tet and there are none yet. T.J. has the best Cha Gio spring rolls and that’s what I had for dinner. The “El Coyote” was alive, with a dozen young Swedes and a similar group of Australians. I wanted to get a picture of Andre Rochette. We met in 2006 when he was building floats in the Boa Dai summer residence bay, where I was anchored. Andre’s life is a colorful as he and his paintings look.  He was born in Vietnam in 1958. His father, a Cheyenne Indian from North Dakota served in the U.S. Special Forces, he went missing in action in Laos in 1962. His mother is half French half Laotian. He grew up in France and took his grandfather’s last name, Rochette. In his father’s footsteps, he joined the French Foreign Legion and made several jumps as a paratrooper over West Africa. He is a talented painter, the walls of his Tex-Mex restaurant are full of his paintings of American Indian scenes. According to Andre the below photo of him and a Cheyenne Indian comes very close to a photograph he has of his dad and there is undoubtedly a resemblance. So, if you happen to be in Nhatrang this is the only place you’ll get a good Margarita and  a good story in Vietnam. 

Monday March 8

Monday, March 8th, 2010

It is International Women’s Day. And it does not go by unnoticed in Vietnam. Last night it was celebrated even more than today. Boys and men were buying their sweethearts and wives a red rose, wrapped in cellophane. The flower vendors were wall to wall on the beach. The restaurants and bars were packed. But the young who could not afford a restaurant formed parties on the beach. The below picture is of a group of twenty year old students at the Tourism college, just down the block from the hotel.

I am fading fast and will probably do the rest tomorrow morning. I should have never mentioned anything about my tooth ache/abscess, in yesterday’s blog. I woke up in the middle of the night with a worse ache than before. It took a while for the Codeine to kick in. I plan to have it checked in Saigon. I am now planning to take the Wednesday night train. I posted the package with my Basket Boat manuscript and pictures on a CD and the letter to the minister of Culture, Sport and Tourism.

Beach party for International Women's Day