My Protanopic Life

The winds howled through the cracks of the door and windows of our hotel room all night and the next morning was very breezy. I spent a large portion of the morning catching up on all the internet stuff I'd missed during my offline stay in Mui Ne. Most notably, a 3D mandelbrot set had been discovered and rendered into some impressive images. I also noticed that I had exactly one week left in Vietnam.

I was feeling significantly more I'll that morning, but I thought I might only have a sinus cold or something lame and trivial so I didn't pay much attention to it, expecting that it would go away in a few days

The cold water In our bathroom was broken so that only boiling hot water came out of the shower until there was no more, then it went to only cold water. This behavior would continue throughout our stay there, requiring us to take cold shower baths.

We got breakfast late that morning at the place directly next door to The Manchester that I wouldn't recommend. Over breakfast Tien and I talked a lot about humor and jokes. Even though there seem to be a lot of differences between Vietnamese and American humor, there also seem to be some global constants to humor. I tried to explain things like Knock Knock jokes, one-liners, and other types of humor. Most jokes in Vietnamese are longer jokes with a lot of context. This goes hand-in-hand with their love for comedy theater.

After breakfast we took a walk down the beach where it was incredibly windy. It was nice though to be out in the sun. The wind wasn't cold either and that was nice. The weather looked stormy though, the waves were huge and the water was really rough, so I wasn't too hopeful about getting to swim.

We found our way back onto the sidewalk by the main road and passed an area where there were about 50 large dragonflies hanging out. I thought about photographing them, but didn't because I didn't have anything that would make it easy to get a good shot. We also found many shops that were selling seahorses, both alive and dead and in various containers. Some were floating in liquid, some were dried and ready to be eaten whole, and some were in fish tanks with nothing more than water. Tien said that seahorses are supposed to have amazing medicinal functions, just like eating live lizards. Lore is always a little humorous to me.

The destination on our walk was a place called the Vinpearl, and it was amazingly difficult to walk there. We actually had to walk beyond it over a hill and then come around back to it, winding in the roads of its campus that had no sidewalks. Clearly this place was made to be traveled to and from by motor vehicle.

The Vinpearl is actually a huge island theme park with a lot of attractions. We didn't know this when we set out to go there, but discovered it when we arrived at the mainland side of a gondola that takes people to and from the island. There were also boats of various size that would ferry people back and forth. I was feeling pretty tired from my illness and the walk and didn't feel like I had the energy for a theme park, so we opted to go back another day and instead spend our day on the mainland. We intended to visit an aquarium, but when we got into the taxi and told him to take us there he said it was on the Vinpearl island. This was another mistake of not doing research and not using the guidebook. I'm never going anywhere without the guidebook again.

Instead of going to the aquarium we went to a place called Ponagar Tower that was an ancient stone temple. It was a bit like something you'd find at Angkor Wat. It was a small temple but Tien enjoyed it much. There was an older Japanese man doing tricks with tops, swords and yo-yo's on the upper landing of the complex. He was pretty funny, partly because he kept messing up. He would say everything in Japanese and there was a translator and a few drum players beating on tribal drums for dramatic effect as he did things like accidentally throwing a top larger than my head, nearly hitting a bystander.

I was feeling increasingly ill and tired so we headed back to The Manchester for a nap. I was developing some flu like symptoms like fever and sore throat, so I assumed that's what it was. We went for dinner and found an absolutely delicious pho place at the end of a dark alley and conveniently near a pharmacist. We had our dinner and picked up a cocktail of medication for my symptoms.