Look! A Shiny Object!

(First of all - Happy birthday, Pete!)

I’m a little distracted today, and my cold is definitely progressing, which is both good and bad, I suppose. Good in that the faster it starts, the faster it will be gone, but bad in that…well, it kind of sucks having a cold. So that’s not likely to be helping my concentration, either! Ah well.

I stayed up later and did some work last night, so I’m glad I got some of that out of the way. I’m having a hard time getting started on my trip report from the last field trips, but I think once I really get going on it, it won’t be too bad. It’s just a matter of getting going, as it is with so many things! It was a good trip, but there’s so much to talk about, I’m not sure where to start.

I get the feeling that TW and IB, but mostly TW, feel like I need to be scheduled more. TW came into the office on Friday and announced that the driver would be arriving shortly to take me to lunch. I was a little surprised and said “oh, we’re going out to lunch?” and she said “no, just you.” I told her that I appreciated the offer, but I didn’t feel like going out to lunch by myself and would just grab something downstairs. Ten minutes later she came back and announced that IB would go with me. This was not my point. We went to lunch and it was nice and lovely and all of that, but it felt very strange – I hadn’t indicated that I wanted to go anywhere, but she just decided that I would be going out that day, and then when I declined, roped IB into keeping me company – poor girl. I don’t particularly like being fussed over most of the time, and it feels strange to think that they see me as needing to be babysat – I can’t imagine what I would have done to give that impression. Of course, the communication difficulties don’t really help the situation at all, either. Plus, I don’t want to be rude, and I think that my desire to just be left on my own sometimes might be perceived that way, so I try to suppress it.

We went out to a really fun Vietnamese place for lunch today, one of those little hole-in-the-wall places that I see lining the streets, where you sit on little plastic stools at little plastic tables. The food was delicious (a soup with chunks of freshly roasted pork, to which you add noodles and veggies as you like), but the stool would have been a more appropriate size for my nephew John. John is three. The table, however, was a proportional size to the stool, so it was an interesting experience, and I think it resembled how my parents must have felt at parent-teacher nights when I was in kindergarten, and they had to sit in the little chairs.

I told them I needed to get to an ATM, and they said they’d have the driver take me to one on the way home – very nice of them. Then IB came in and announced that I wouldn’t be able to withdraw any cash, so what did I want to do? I was a little puzzled, and she said that Vietcom Bank will only let their own customers use their ATMs or something like that. I said that my bank let me use any ATM, and that I was sure I could find a Citibank or HSBC branch around here. She looked unsure, but I said I’d find something, and it took me approximately 2 minutes to find the location of one on the internet. It was kind of like when PM told me in the airport that I needed to make sure that I didn’t leave anything valuable in the outside pockets of my suitcase, which weren’t locked. Well, *duh*. I have actually done this before, after all. Nonetheless, I said thanks and I hadn't left anything valuable there - although I may have also said something to the effect of "this isn't exactly the first time I've traveled..." People have been telling me that I look younger than I am quite a lot lately (I’ve never given it much thought – once I got past the age where people kept assuming I was older because of my height, I have tended to just think I look the way I look) – maybe by “young”, they mean “dumb”, I don’t know. I appreciate that they’re all trying to be helpful and considerate, but it goes back to the “I don’t like being babied” thing. I suppose it’s better than completely being chucked in the deep end, but I have gotten better at swimming.

Or maybe I just need to be less of a cranky bee-yotch. I think that's probably part of it, too...