My Vietnam

Just checked up on my old company email to find a link from Philip, who I had the pleasure to work with for almost a year, when he was working for our company here in Vietnam. Philip is one of my link pushers to new exciting web sites, I don’t know if this is just another Picasa Web, but I had to create an account and try it out of course, you could too at http://www.facebook.com!

This is what I noticed first, I have a friend…

And so it just came to me naturally…

You just call out my name,
And you know where ever I am
Ill come running, oh yeah baby
To see you again.
Winter, spring, summer, or fall,
All you have to do is call
And I’ll be there, yeah, yeah, yeah.
You’ve got a friend.

Philip and I used to play a game on Messenger in the good old days when it was still working. One of us would start out with the the first half of a sentence from the lyric of a song and then the other would have to finish of the sentence. But not just that, you had to remember to start with a note and end with a note like this:

Challenger: (8)Winter, spring, summer, or fall,…
Challenged: All you have to do is call(8)

To those unfamiliar with Messenger, (8) will show a note emoticon. Not remembering the note meant you lost, didn’t matter if the lyric was correct , so if you read my blog and you are lucky to catch me online on Messenger when it’s actually working, you can try to challenge me! However for those who desperately needs to sing the whole song right now, here is some help for you: You’ve Got A Friend.

Anyway Facebook looks pretty nice, when you hold your mouse over persons on the images the their name will appear, guess Philip used a lot of time drawing boxes around heads, but what if, just imagine what if the software itself would start to recognize faces of your friends when you uploaded new images, uuuhhh now that would be cool!

I follow Philip’s blog regularly, he is currently working in USA for an American company a big dream of his I think, and I enjoyed very much reading about his problems with power outages, something I thought only happened regularly here in Vietnam

This has just been one of the most terrible weeks in a very very long time and it all started with a little bit of throwing up last Friday, sigh! My wife is feeling a little better, but still in pain though. This is my hell week with very little sleep, a lot of angriness and lots of self-blame.

I found out who kicked my wife! Ain’t gonna write it here we can call him Mr. K. Because Mr. K is a foreigner I found it better to be in contact with a lawyer to find out what I should do about all this. I briefed him on the situation and promised to return to him Monday with some more papers.

OK, I drank too much, but I spend a lot of time thinking about it and finally reached the conclusion that there could have been many scenarios where I still drank too much and my wife wasn’t kicked, what a man would kick a woman like that?!

Monday came faster than anticipated, nothing new there, this happens every weekend, wonder why it is that weekends always go by so extremely fast; come to think of it my weeks do so as well so perhaps not weird weird, but just a little strange.

I got to work and had a pretty lousy Monday, not quite able to put Friday night’s events behind me. So in the afternoon something happened. My colleague who was at the party got a phone call from… Mr. K who wanted to apologize for Friday’s incident, because of the things he called my colleagues wife. Mr. K also told my friend that he was ready to meet up with us to talk it through. I was a little shaken after this and I wondered why he had called.

I decided to call the lawyer because maybe he had something to do with this, and I was right. He had made a call to Mr. K in order to tell him that I wasn’t completely satisfied with what had happened Friday at the party. I think that was the reason he decided to call my colleague. My lawyer also told me that Mr. K was ready to offer his apologize to my wife and me, so I asked my lawyer to arrange a meeting, I think my lawyer didn’t quite get me on that one.

I decided that maybe my lawyer wasn’t that much of a help, calling Mr. K even before he had received all my papers, perhaps they even knew each other, come to think of it my lawyer kind of indicated that to my wife on the phone, hmmm… So I decided to write an email to the Danish embassy because I didn’t really know who I should turn to for help, found the Danish ambassador’s email address on the Internet.

Monday was also me and my wife’s 3 years anniversary, my intention was to invite my wife out for dinner, but she was really not ready to get out of bed yet, so instead we had a quiet evening at home, no date for me, guess you can say I got what I deserved, my wife didn’t though.

Tuesday weren’t much better, slept awfully bad and wasn’t really ready to get to work when my alarm woke me up. In the end I pulled myself up to it. Most of the day went by extremely fast and in the afternoon I received an email from the Danish embassy, with sweaty hands I double clicked on it to find out what they had written to me. The mail was not from the ambassador but one of his colleagues, I had seen her name before, she asked for my phone number.

I tried to send her and email; gah same old problem with no Internet when you need it the most! So I decided to call her instead. Mildly agitated I tried my best to explain my situation to her and she listened very patiently to my story. I don’t really know what I had expected her to say, but in the end I can see that she couldn’t really have said anything else than she did.

She told me that she and the ambassador had talked about it the day before on the embassy and at first they thought it was the crayfish party in Hà Nội I was talking about, apparently this yearly event is spread out across Asia if not the whole world and seems to something held by the consulate. In the end I didn’t really get anything from the Danish embassy other than I should accept the apology because a trial would be pretty difficult under the given circumstances and the fact that we weren’t as sober as so. I felt a little better though being in touch with the Danish embassy, and I promised to be in touch.

I think it was only a couple of hours later that my other colleague contacted me on Skype and told me that a guy let’s call him Mr. L called to check up on the situation. Mr. L knew that all three of us were working together because we talked with him at the party, maybe he was involved in arranging the party what do I know. Anyway he seemed keen to get this whole story put on ice before it escalated any further.

It felt very weird that a lot of things were happening around me but no one really wanted to talk with me directly, this is of course speculation from my part, but it would have been very easy to get my phone number, and it seemed pretty obvious that Mr. K and Mr. L had similar interests. When I came home from work I decided to call my lawyer who had promised to call me back Tuesday, which he didn’t. When I called him up he honestly sounded lightly irritated and asked me what I wanted more, I thought that was pretty weird, and decided to get my papers back and drop this lawyer! Can anyone recommend a good lawyer here in Vietnam then write a comment

So Tuesday evening and night I spend preparing a letter for Mr. K letting him know what I felt about the way he treated my wife. In the meat time I had been told by my colleague that someone had called his wife some pretty bad things, but again that was only words and can hardly justify kicking another man’s wife can it?

Tuesday became Wednesday before I went to bed at 2:30 am, but my letter was ready and I was determined to get it send the next day, only problem was that I only had one place to send it, namely to the man who had been in contact with my colleague Mr. L. I knew from my lawyer that Mr. K and Mr. L had some kind of connection with each other because when I called my lawyer on Tuesday he asked me if someone had called my boss.

In the lunch break Wednesday I send the letter to the only email contact I had, and asked Mr. L to pass on my letter to Mr. K. My hope was that they were related in some way as they both knew about the incident. And then I waited checking my email almost constantly the rest of the day, but no reply.

On Wednesday I also got my idea to controlling my intake of alcohol a little bit, so that I wouldn’t be throwing up in more consuls’ houses, this should be a one-time experience only. The idea is pretty simple and it partly came from not knowing what to do with old business cards which are no longer usable because they have the wrong address on them or the wrong title. I will give you the recipe in another post.

Thursday, still no email reply, by now I lost my patience and decided to look at little harder, Google is fantastic! I found Mr. K’s email address, and I send him the letter late Thursday more than a little excited about what I could expect. Would he reply, and if he did what would he write back to me? Oh Friday come fast!

Friday came and so did the reply from Mr. K, I opened on purpose his email as the last one, and started reading. It was an explanation of how he saw things happened on the previous Friday, how his wife had been called something not so nice, how it had somehow been my wife’s fault, and how the vomiting didn’t really have anything to do with anything. He admitted that he had not been drunk, but very angry. His anger was turned at my wife and so he kicked her. I was so amazed to read this.

But as I read on in the email I felt that he might be sorry for what had happened, and he ended his letter with apologizing to my wife and me. I sat for a very long time, and I read the email over and over again. I didn’t feel more happy, fact is he kicked my wife and he even admits it, maybe he didn’t exactly use the word kick, and maybe he chose his sentences carefully. All he wished now was to put it behind him, I bet he would like that!

Anyway I saw this was coming to an end, and what could I possibly do more which would bring along anything good, so I decided to write back to Mr. K and accept his apology. Come to think of it now; I should have asked him give the shoe back which my wife lost when running away from there, but I really don’t feel like talking anymore with him at all ever.

Hope this post closes this dark chapter in my blog, I didn’t expect this was the way my blog should begin, I didn’t even introduce myself first, oh well that will have to wait! Now I will enjoy the rest of this weekend, I have started to pack up some of my stuff, we are moving to a new house very soon, with at small garden!!

I am looking very much forward to that, perhaps I will even do some garden posts on what NOT to do. My mum will come in handy, she loves working in her garden, she have to give me some help!