An exercise in frustration

I’m actually writing this off-line, and will see if I can hop on a little later, because the little internet gnomes have been conspiring to have me break things out of frustration tonight. Just ask my friend Michelle, with whom I’ve been trying to have a conversation tonight. I have been bounced off the internet not one, not two, but five times, for no apparent reason. Let’s think for a second just how incredibly irritating this is. Let’s also understand that this falls into the category of “Things That Bother Me More Than They Should”. (It’s actually quite a large category.) So it’s best that my nephews aren’t around, because I have a feeling that David would have had many opportunities to say “Aunt Mandy, you said a bad word!”. Although, I don’t know if he would have known all the words I was using – I kind of hope he wouldn’t have. In fact, I’m a little disappointed that I know them.

We went out to a restaurant this evening called Lal Quila, which was lovely – kind of a cross between an Indian buffet and Medieval Times. It’s this huge castle-like building, quite pretty with a moat, servers and greeters in “authentic” dress, all that good stuff. Although, I have to admit that I don’t know to what it was that they were being authentic. But it was quite fun, actually. And the food was also quite tasty. Unlike the Chinese restaurant that we tried for lunch. Our chief technical advisor is in town for a couple weeks and thought we should try something for “fun” at lunch. I think he and I have differing ideas of fun. Once again, it appears that my choice of lunch was not the best idea I’ve ever had. Being vegetarian, vegetable dishes are really the only thing I can go for. But there are some parts of the world where the safest things to eat are things that have been cooked within an inch of their life. Well, with veggies, it’s not that it’s harder to accomplish that, it’s just that it doesn’t often happen, unless you like ratatouille. So it’s a good thing that I spent my babyhood here – can you imagine how much worse it could be? My mother told me that when we got back from here, my pediatrician said that I was likely to have a lifelong immunity to most gastrointestinal disorders found here, thanks to doing things like drinking water from the garden hose. (I still don’t know how that didn’t kill me.) New York street food, here I come!!!

Maybe not.

Work is interesting – I’m still caught up in trying to address things with some projects back home that JUST WON’T DIE. Let me tell you how much I don’t like checking work e-mail at 10 pm and having five new messages, when I just checked a few hours ago. I know it’s because of the time difference, but still, it remains one more thing to worry about. There are a few things I’m trying to iron out which essentially involve people doing things that don’t make sense. It’s awesome. Especially when they get indignant when I ask for an explanation. At this point, I don’t care if someone thinks I’m an idiot, I just want them to give me a straight answer to a straight question.

Maybe I should pretend to have a lousy internet connection in Vietnam? No, no – I wouldn’t feel right about that. Although, for all I know, I might have a lousy internet connection in Vietnam, I don’t quite know what to expect. I read a really interesting article from Sojourners about Vietnam and how they’re expressing their capitalist tendencies more in recent years, and how it’s resulted in an outbreak of “keeping up with the Joneses”, particularly in urban areas. I believe they called it the “I want my iPod and I want it now” syndrome. It’s still a very poor country, but because of how their economic situation is changing, there is more affluence to be seen in cities, primarily. And it’s resulting in some of the uglier expressions of human nature. The article, though, profiled a woman who was educated through government assistance programs and came back to Vietnam to work in poor communities. Very interesting – I can’t wait to go.

I think, however, that it’s going to be a busy week getting ready to go. There are a lot of things I’d like to get set up before I go, so we’ll see how that “to do” list goes. Depending on many, many things, I may also take a side trip to Bangladesh to look at a program that CARE International is doing that’s quite similar to some of the work we’re hoping to do here. I don’t know that it will happen because someone still has to pay for my time and travel, but the very nice project manager from CARE said they’d be happy to host a trip for someone from our team. I can’t say Bangladesh has been at the top of my “must see” list, but I certainly wouldn’t turn down the opportunity – I think it would be fascinating. But we’re coming up on monsoon season, aren’t we? Hmm…and I thought that eating out in Karachi was tempting fate.