My daughter Lena and I share a fondness for hot coffee with milk.  This morning we met at a local cafe in our Da Nang neighborhood to have a cup before she, her sisters, and two nieces took off for a five day holiday in Thailand.  None of them have been to Thailand, only Lena and Ha have been out of Vietnam.  I wasn’t invited.  Girls only vacation I was told.  Oh well, I’ve been anyway, but that was 45 years ago and a whole other story…  After the girls’ departure, I spent a couple hours working.  Then it started to rain, so I decided to take a walk across town to Dông Tiên bakery where  I was certain I would find fresh sliced bread for my new toaster.  Da Nang is a wonderful walking city, especially in a light rain.  The rain drops are fat and warm, like being wrapped in a blanket on a windy day.  The sidewalks are beautifully crafted out of stone, but mostly unusable since there’s so much stuff in the way.  Sandwich, noodle, and mango smoothie carts, motorbikes, and just stuff.  I spend a lot of time walking in the street, particularly since the trees are manicured for a five foot tall population.  I’m six feet and keep hitting my head.  Easier going in the street.

My favorite time to walk is just after lunch when the city is taking a nap. It’s a weird kind of quiet for an urban area.  High energy from the early morning until 1:00 and then everything just stops.

Dropped in at a cafe for a sugary lemon drink and to use the men’s room.  My Vietnamese is steadily improving, one word at a time, but I’m still pretty much limited to getting my self fed, finding a bathroom, and getting sketchy directions that may or may not be accurate. The sign in the men’s room fascinated me, reminding me that even though Da Nang has all the trappings of a vibrant modern city, it still has one foot in the rice paddies.  Clear directions though.  I think I got everything right.

When I returned to my apartment, the manager, a lovely Vietnamese woman named Trinh knocked on my door.  Trinh doesn’t speak English, so our conversations are usually carried on in pantomime, like this morning when I acted out someone replacing a light bulb.  Happy to report that my charade worked, the light is working fine as of now.  Anyway, Trinh had two ripe bananas on an ornate china plate that she offered me when I answered the door.  I accepted the plate with enthusiasm and said my thank you’s in both english and vietnamese.  That wasn’t enough, however.  She was pointing at the bananas and trying to explain something about them well beyond my vietnamese language capability.  She kept talking and pointing and I kept smiling, trying to get some sort of clue about what she was saying.  I continued to nod and smile until I realized that she wanted her plate back.  She got the plate, I got the bananas, and I think we’re both reasonably happy with the outcome.  One word at a time.