Getting Started

I began this blog when I lived in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. I ugently needed to connect wtih the rest of the world and while I'll never regret my decision to go there and teach school, living in Southeast Asia severely tested me. I didn't have Facebook because it was banned and I didn't have television. But I did have a speedy internet connection. Fortunately, the school I worked for had a first-class IT department, hence the reliable WiFi. When I first arrived in District 11 and realized how far off the beaten track I was, my computer filled hours of downtime. And because the immediate vicinity offered little else in the way of entertainment, I created a blog.

There wasn't any computer guru around and asking a question was futile without knowing Vietnamese, so I was on my own. I found blogging exasperating and the few pages I posted were the result of an infernal struggle, immersed in tropical heat and ineptitude. I decided it would be really cool to imbed short slideshows made from pictures I had taken around Saigon, a bad idea in hindsight. But the diversion of downloading software and creating slideshows, with music even, made me forget all about my sweaty misery.

Venturing out of my apartment in District 11 was unnerving to say the least. One day I gathered courage to go look around and picked a business with a red awning as a reference point. "Here's where I'll start and to get back, I'll just look for that red awning," I thought. In one block I found two more red awnings, then three in a neighborhood of sidewalk goings on. Finally, after circling around and around, I found the original reference point and headed back to the safety of four walls. I decided to figure out a better guidance system. When I eventually bought a map of Saigon, District 11 was so far out that it was cut off. I had an even better sense of the size of the city when I took a bus downtown and it arrived a half hour later. Getting lost in Ho Chi Minh City was the last thing I needed.

So there I was, typing away in the security of my teacher's dorm cubicle with a rattling AC. Welcome to Southeast Asia!