My Protanopic Life

Today I was planning on taking part of the morning to check online for options to go to Ha Long bay and to call Igor to ask him about some comments he left concerning traveling Laos and Cambodia. Before doing that we had a somewhat American breakfast with eggs and bread, but with the addition of peppered soy sauce, radish and cucumber. It was really freakin good, you should try it. It was raining pretty heavy and before I could go online the power went out in all of Binh Hoa, which Tien said is pretty uncommon. The rain stopped but the power was still out. Tien and I decided to go cruise around the and take photos so we mounted up on her scooter and headed down the tiny streets of her village. When I say tiny, I mean about maybe 8-10 feet wide for two-way traffic. Smaller than the sidewalks on Market Street in San Francisco. I got to photograph the cool foot-bridge style bridges that people ride over the rivers, and actually got off the scooter to photograph some stuff. That's awesome because it's so hard to photograph things from a scooter not only because things are flying by, but because your brain composites the pieces of information that your eyes take in and makes it appear like you have a better view than you actually do, and the truth about this shows up in a photograph.

When we got home there was a terrible smell in the house, which I thought might be due to spoiled food, but was actually some pigs that the neighbors decided to let out in their back yard. I never got the whole story on that, but we ended up sitting in the front room fanning ourselves for a while until somebody filled the house with perfume and we came inside to eat fruit and try to stay cool. Most of us ended up napping, me in a hammock in the living room and Tien on the couch, taking turns fanning each other. Torrential rain came back and cooled everything down, which was nice, then Tien and I laid around some more listening to music off my iPod. I really wish I could've gotten photos of it because it's totally the kind of thing I'd love to photograph, but that's the problem with experiencing things first person. The power came back on, but now it's like 1am in San Francisco so I can't call Igor yet. Oh well, it's not like I'm in a rush to get anywhere.

A gecko just ran across the floor. This is remarkable not because it's a gecko and it's inside, but because it's on the floor. There are tons of geckos all over the walls. They chirp at night and sometimes wake me up. They eat bugs, so that's good. Nobody even pays attention to them except me. I asked Tien if she'd ever caught one and she said no, and she was totally unaware that if you catch one and pet its belly it will fall asleep. Maybe I should catch one and show everybody how it's done.