Mmm, morning

My shiny green bike ride in to work this morning was ridiculously gorgeous and somehow very poignant. It had the kind of lighting that I think would be appropriate for a "last beautiful morning on Earth" kind of scene. Really yellow sunlight, streaking white clouds, deep blue sky (does it always look like this at 8am?). All along the roads, people were gathered, hunched over their midget plastic tables eating the best looking beef noodle soup you could ever hope to see, dressed in office finery and nylon pyjamas, whichever. As I biked along, people stepped out to cross the flow of traffic as we do here, slowly and steadily, watching the traffic swirl around 'em and part and come back together, like motorbike water ballet. One old woman wearing extremely wide-leg pyjamas that were fluttering in the breeze stepped off the curb, bowl of breakfast in one hand and chopsticks in the other, and just opened her arms Jesus-on-the-cross style and walked out with closed eyes. Gorgeous. Let's see what else... kids on their way to school, little navy blue and white ducklings bobbing along. The four guys who hang out on my street and offer rides to people on their motorbikes, waving and smiling at me (it's nice to be known). The market looked especially good this morning, too. Before 10am is definitely the time to go.

Tomorrow I'm taking the hydrofoil down to Vung Tau beach and leaving Kenny here (he's teaching this weekend, but I am not. Ha ha.) and I plan on regaining my nice American tan and hopefully having a much easier time with beach hair now that said hair is hacked off.

In other news, I realised that even though it's a solid idea to buy a Vespa here and import it back to the States where it'll be worth at least twice what I paid for it and I can be the coolest teacher in the world, tooling around on my little vintage Italian putter... I just don't have enough money to buy one in the first place. Dang. Dang dang!

I can still drool over them, though. That ain't expensive. Look at these guys and imagine what they look like 40 years older (and wiser).