My Protanopic Life

On the morning of November 19th I was just as sick as I had been the previous day, and my throat hurt just a little bit worse. We spent the morning laying around surfing the internet and being generally lazy. The weather was still a little stormy too, pretty much exactly as it had been the previous day. We had pho for breakfast at the same place we'd gone the previous night, and would continue eating there almost exclusively for the remainder of our stay in Nha Trang.

We walked down the beach the opposite direction and found a bunch of wooden beach chairs under little wooden huts. We sat at one but were quickly told that it cost 100k for a day to rent one, so we kept walking. It began to rain lightly but with heavy wind, so we retreated to a nearby gazebo where other people were doing the same. We sat there for a while and the weather didn't relent, but luckily a woman came wandering by trying to sell fruits. We somehow managed to get into an argument about what fruits we were going to buy, I guess she thought we could eat a whole pineapple along with 3 mangoes and countless other fruits. Sometime I'm amazed at how easy it is for Vietnamese people to make each other feel guilty for breaking agreements that were never even made. In the end we got a good selection of fruit for a decent price, if only because I had the money and I wasn't going to buy shit if she kept trying to sell me fruit I didn't want.

As we were sitting in the gazebo eating our fruit, another woman came by trying to sell us cigarettes and all sorts of other things we didn't want. She was persistent and stayed there a while. All of the sudden a huge terrible breaking sound came from behind us. We turned around to see a large coconut rolling across the grass away from large pieces of broken tile. I would later learn that coconut injuries are more common in Vietnam than auto injuries.

I was beginning to get fatigued again, and really irritated that I had gotten sick in Nha Trang since we'd been waiting so long to get there. We headed back to the hotel and laid around all day as I gobbled up medicine and we both geeked out on the ever frustrating and intermittent wifi we leeched from the hotel next door.

Having read a few articles in The Onion about National Awareness Month and an article making fun of a man for defending what he believed the constitution to be, I realized that I was pretty ignorant of what the constitution really said and really a lot of other things that I'd grown up believing that I had yet to verify. Generally I felt a lot like the ignorant, misinformed people that irked me in political and religious arguments. With nothing to do in the middle of the night, I decided to go ahead and read the constitution. I didn't get very far into it because I kept getting side-tracked reading context and related information, but I must say that I did learn a lot and it was incredibly eye-opening.

We got some dinner and slept away the night, and I was still frustrated about being sick, hoping I'd be well the next day so Tien and I could enjoy our vacation.