THE PEOPLE I MEET
Hue, Vietnam

It sounds like the title of a Dr. Seuss book, but today it's just the title of my blog post. It's the people I've met.

This woman sat next to me at the French Cafe in Kunming. Her dirty blond hair was in tangles and she wore capri pants. The way she cradled her coffee, she looked like she'd been on a 24 hour sleeper bus without food or water. Then I saw her in Hanoi with the same outfit on. Yesterday I saw her at the travel agent's stand when I was buying a bus ticket. The girl at the ticket booth told me I could get a commission if I convinced the woman to buy, so I spoke to her and told her what I just told you now. She said she was from Holland. She said she flew. Who knew?

Then there was the Bulgarian family I saw at the Water Puppet Theater in Hanoi and again in the Mandarin Cafe in Hue, with mom's curls bleach white, dad's waves a graying scarlet, and all three lanky sons sharing the same gangly limbs and bobbing locks of gold.

There was the gaggle of Europeans who'd ridden their bikes along the silk road from Germany to southern China. I saw them at the border of China and Vietnam. Then I saw them in the post office ripping into a box--their twice-monthly shipment of fresh paperbacks from their friends back home!

The Czech couple told me where to find cheap net access. They laughed as we seperated from our group for lunch on the Cat Ba Island tour because our guest house had a different meal plan for the three of us. They once worked in England, but they'd been on the road a year. They knew the trip would soon end and they felt lucky to have experienced what they did. They knew how to find the good deals on things like pastries and gummy candy. They would probably go back to England. They went on walks together and gave me a postcard of their birthplace, a frigid place even colder than my Michigan mitten.

And the elderly couple in the guesthouse with the cat, the motorbike drivers with their constant calls, the children selling peanuts and fake money, the german playing an unplugged electric guitar and giving me advice about my diarhea, the woman in the market who helped me buy an overpriced hat and was disappointed I wouldn't buy her silk shirts and wore the most exquisite white heels that were covered in the mud of the vegetable stalls where she found me wide eyed and slightly feverish.

And all of you readers too. Well, some of us may not have met, but when we're scattered around the globe, sometimes the net is the only place we can meet.

And Hue, the rains and this stomach bug have kept me from exploring your secrets by bicycle.

until the next post,
~josh(away)