Day 9 - These Two Are Not Gay

We have this Chinese friend named Bunbury. Bunbury some how got it into his head that Ken and Dave are gay. Ken and Dave knew each other since college so they spend a lot of time together in China and they have their own interesting, read odd, terms and language. Actually since they were pretty much the only people who knew each other beforehand at CIEE orientation there were jokes about them their as well. Besides this someone recently told Bunbury that they had seen Ken at a gay bar. Leaving aside the question of what this person was doing there to see Ken at a gay bar, Changzhou has almost no bars and it would be really surprising if one was a gay bar. The final straw may have been that Bunbury got a gift from Ken, Dave, and me that made a surreptitious joke about his ass, which he apparently didn't get until recently. The problem with China is that these sort of rumors have a life of their own. It probably hurts that Ken and Dave haven't shown up around campus with a series of Chinese girlfriends, as some English teaches do. This rumor though is persistent enough that other random Chinese people around school have heard it, they love to gossip about us. Bunbury apparently describes himself as a more traditional Chinese person and doesn't like gay people so it will be interesting to see how he reacts to all this. Dave was tempted to hang up porn around his room, but couldn't decide if it should be straight porn to set him right, or gay porn to egg him on. I said Dave should give him a big hug the next time they meet, but that doesn't really mean anything in China.

Teddy was actually on a train back from Nanjing as we arrived at the station to go to Shanghai so we passed him on the platform. Once in Shanghai we got a bus to the airport. The bus was really easy to fund since we had just taken it about 30 hours ago, but if we didn't know exactly where to look we never would have found it. The sign for the buses was just a jumble of number not really explaining where each bus went. There are a lot of things like that in China, guides that are good if you know what you're doing, but indecipherable to an outsider. When we got to the airport we weren't sure exactly which airline we were flying with so we had to look for a flight leaving at about when we knew we were leaving. We found it eventually but still had to wait a while before we could get our tickets since we were their too early. As we sat there a little kid who had taken an interest in Dave kept walking over picking up Dave's water bottle and throwing it across the floor. His parents would soon follow retrieving the water bottle and apologizing to Dave. Then about 15 minutes later he'd do it again. One time he walked over picked up the bottle looked Dave square in the face as if to say, "you know what's coming," then launched the bottle again.

The flight eventually left on time and since it's not a US airline they served an OK on board meal. It was already past midnight when we arrived in Ho Chi Minh City. We had these visa letter things, but we still had to wait to get the actual visas put into our passports. I had to get a new passport when I went to Australia, and the new one is almost full since every visa takes up a full page and can't be easily removed. Some of the tourists started to get pretty annoyed with the fairly disorganized Vietnamese visa station. I just don't get annoyed at most things like that anymore, in Asia things just work weirdly. We finally got our visas and got through customs. Outside there were a ton of people offering taxis, but there was no clear place to go to get a metered cab. Most airports try to discourage this type of behavior, but not in Vietnam apparently. We finally agreed on a cab, paying between two and four times more than we should have to get into the city. The hotel, which I had found online, was worried about the time we were arriving. Unlike in the US, where most people have credit cards, in Asia people can't really put money down ahead of time for a hotel. This means that if you're coming late at night this worries the hotel, since they have no assurance you'll actually show up and no way to recoup the cost if you don't.

I had received a number of worried e-mails from them. They said they would be reassured if we took there way overpriced cab service, which I turned down several times, so it was anyone's guess if we'd actually have a room. When we got their it was all dark in the lobby, which we could mostly see through the glass exterior wall. We knocked on the door and someone who was asleep on the couch got up to let us in and give us our room. He took our passports, which seems to be standard practice in Vietnam, in China they always just copy down your information, and showed us to our room. Our room was small but it was in a good location and very clean.

P.S.
I've included a link to Amy's blog, she's the new teacher from Canada. Also I've been having some technical difficulties lately so if things aren't working just hang on.