100 days

Today marks the completion of the first 100 days of my adventure. In some cases, my learning curve has been steep, and then there are the occasions where the old dog, new tricks saying comes to mind. I still procrastinate - I still haven't unpacked since moving into my permanent apartment three weeks ago. I generally don't like schedules or time limits, and therefore, do not wear a watch.

Although most of my travel nowadays require going through immigration, I still try to push the time when I arrive at the airport. Prior to 9/11, I got away with a lot. This included a flight to Las Vegas where the gate and airplane door had been closed, but the agents had both re-open just for me to make the flight. A friend used to get very stressed traveling with me, even though he was on a different flight at a later time than my flight. He would stress that I would miss my flight and would generally grab my bag and start speedwalking towards my gate while I continued at my normal New York pace, which is faster than a stroll. Being 6'3", his legs took him further than mine. Of course, he would give me dirty looks when I arrived at the gate, and as I continuously pointed out to him, in 'plenty of time' to make the flight.

The company driver took me to the airport today so I was forced to be early. All this does though is make me putz around. In this case, the 'putzing' was catching up on blogging. My flight was at 4:30pm with boarding time at 4pm. My last blog post was right at 4pm. As I was shutting down my computer, I heard my name over the airport intercom announcing final boarding call for the flight to Kuala Lumpur. In my defense, the flight was fairly empty so all the organized people (everyone but me apparently) were already boarded and ready at 4pm.

Then there are things that do change. I don't know if my Vietnamese has improved. At times, like when in Bangkok, my immediate response is in Vietnamese rather than English. I still don't pronounce words correctly and speak like an 8-year-old. The additional challenge is that the language has changed from French-inspired to Chinese-inspired. My vocabulary is frozen in time to circa 1975. I noticed that my parents struggled a bit with the language as well when they came to visit. For example, bank is now 'ngân hàng' rather than 'nhà băng'. On our way to Siem Reap, my friend told the taxi driver something that sounded like 'son bay'. I somewhat dismissed his attempt at Vietnamese and told the driver 'phi trường'. However, when my Vietkieu friend said something similar on our way to Hanoi, I followed up with her. It turns out that my Siem Reap friend was correct and that the new word for airport is 'sân bay'. How embarrassing that a Canadian white guy is teaching me Vietnamese. Sigh!