Something about Apocalypse now getting sucked into the jungle…

Two weeks ago today proved to be a very chaotic week so I needed a full week (last week) to nurse my body and mind back into shape.  I got the “Vietnamese Flu.” Not really sure how to describe it, but it was a combination of sweats and chills and devastating achiness. The lowdown: Sunday night, just finished 22 hours of work, Libby and I were feeling pretty popular (mostly Libby) since we had multiple invitations to do things. It was our co-worker’s birthday so we opted for that… It was very fun and very Vietnamese. We went to a very stereotypical Vietnamese restaurant with 50 cent beers half indoor/half outdoor with tons of small dishes. Everyone is mot/hai/bah, yo’ing (cheersing) and since we had such a huge table there are like one of two staff devoted to not letting your glass fall below half empty and ensuring your beer is always ice-cold (bad pun, I actually enjoy drinking beer the Vietnamese way, with Ice/Da).  Anyways, long story short I was extremely hung over Monday morning when the flu-aches started coming on… only I didn’t know I was getting the flu and just attributed it to some combination of working on my feet for a whole weekend and being hungover. So I told Libby we had to get massages…anyways it was really strange and I honestly couldn’t tell whether it felt good or not getting my flu-achiness massaged, it was really weird. Libby had bought our AO show tickets the week before, so we had to go to that. The AO show was very good, it’s directed by some former Cirque Du Soleil producer or something and you could see the similarities. I’d expect Cirque Du Soleil to be more jaw-dropping and the choreography to be more perfectly executed, but the AO show was still professionally done. They utilized traditional bamboo woven fishing baskets and bamboo poles for their stunts but my favorite part was probably the accompanying “orchestra,” which really was only 5 guys who were playing traditional Vietnamese instruments… Hearing traditional Vietnamese music is hard to find, let alone talented traditional Vietnamese music.  Anyways, we finished our “spectacular” day of spa, cocktails, AO Show with dinner at our favorite Italian restaurant. At which point my aches were so bad and my appetite so gone that I just sat there like the hunchback of Notre Dame staring blankly at food that I knew to be delicious… It turned out to be just an OK day honestly.

The worst part about it was for the next three days I had 8-4 professional development workshops. Not paid of course. The only reason I said yes was because they had asked me like 6 weeks earlier and also guilt tripped me like no other. “Only two other teachers get to go, you get lunch free, you get a certificate.” I was sick for the first part of Tuesday but after like 8 missed calls from my boss I went to the afternoon session on Tuesday. The workshop was useful, but I mean… The lunches were bad; they even managed to have shrimp on the last day. The certificate won’t be here for another 6 months, at which time I don’t plan on even being there so, I guess I don’t get my “Oxford Teaching Academy” certificate. At the end of my 8-4 on Thursday I had to teach my worst class. Some other teacher gave it up so it was up to me to finish it out to the end. Some of them were real S***heads. The worst was this half-American girl… She was the worst… like all the bad words in the world embodied here… and she was like 13 years old. Her English was great, so she could be a sassy *****, obviously her dad didn’t love her enough to teach her himself because he totally could have/should have, given he is AMERICAN.  My favorite line of hers through the 4-5 weeks I had to teach her was something she told the Vietnamese teacher when she told her to stop talking one week: “I really like to talk and nobody can stop be.”

After that those lovely three hours, it was practically Friday, which meant dance practice… Getting pretty dance’ed out, ready to just get it over with…and then of course it was the beloved weekend, except this time I had a boat anchor of a cold (carry-over from the flu) to carry along. By the time last Monday rolled around I was ready to crawl into a fetal position and sleep a couple of days away, which I did. Trying to think of memorable things we did last week, and they were mostly few and far between. Went back to the Jazz club again, never disappoints. The keyboardist was spectacular, they were playing blues covers and he was playing one hand on the grand piano and one hand on the electric piano sitting on the top of the grand, and of course the owner is amazing, he comes out like 45 minutes into the set and blows away the first Saxophonist who is no slouch. The friend we had brought along said it was like Ron Burgandy coming out. The best part is when he busts out the traditional Vietnamese instruments and plays what he calls Jazz Fusion music.  That weekend I was talking to one of my coworkers about how great that place was and he was calling it tacky and over the top touristy. And yeah the décor is over-the-top trying to be so cool it’s not cool feel and the majority of the audience are older white tourists…But I just like to think of them as Aron’s dad. The fact of the matter is these guys are consummate musicians. They play 3 hour sets day after day and say they never like to play a song the same way twice… that’s dedication that’s hard to find in the United States these days.  It’s weird because when we were there a group of four Vietnamese ladies walked in a bit late and were talking obnoxiously loud during the songs. It was obvious by the Band’s looks that they certainly weren’t enjoying the “authentic” audience (and yes there were also attentive/respective Vietnamese in the audience as well). Which led me to thinking, is Jazz some sort of apex of cultural sophistication/maturity, and what does that mean exactly? Certainly there seems to be some sort of empirical evidence in the fact that many college-aged people we’ve met love Hannah Montana and other Disney shows that cater to the adolescent audience back home, but maybe that’s the norm not the exception… There was a point, when I can hardly remember that I enjoyed a Maroon 5 song or two and other pop songs that are all the rage here for people of all ages here but maybe that’s just personal preference… Anyways deep questions with vague answers… I’ll have to check back on the music scene here in a decade or so.

Funny conversation thread I have going with the same Jazz Club coworker. How Mondays have turned into the day where you pick up the pieces of your shattered physical and emotional self… Physical because I left my Birkenstock dress shoes with cork footbeds at home like an IDIOT, and only brought boat shoes and loafers; soles/arch support=zero. Idk though, I really love those shoes and it’s practically inescapable of not getting your shoes soaked in rainstorms while driving home plus there’s some modicum of comfort knowing I could run to the airport and fly home and not really care what I left behind, but I can’t really see that ever happening.  The emotional shattering to pieces is what really drives home the point that I really could never do this for some extended period of time; but who knows, maybe after a certain number of RPG’s to my pride, enough pieces would become lost in the cleanup that I could embrace it… Idk though, it feels pretty degrading when some 8 year-old, completely out of the blue, tells me “You’re stupid.” I really just want to flick him off but then again, he’s 8 years old. It really is fun sharing these instances with one another in the break room though, one of my coworker friends is gaining a beer belly and the students in one of his classes tells him he’s getting fat, in the spirit Halloween, one of the students in Jazz club coworker’s class drew some twisted Eulogy of him looking like the Devil. Still taking measurements, but I think it’s the heat here in Southeast Asia that makes the kids more squirrelly than the other Asian kids.