BACK!

Just to clear things up, I got deferred on my ED decision. So, sorry Juliet, I told you I cannot make it. And seeing as how like, the valedictorian or something wants to apply regular, I don't really see how I can get in. I'm fairly certain this is a bad omen of worse things to come, especially because I'm such a fantastic pessimist. I constantly fear failure to the point that I FEAR I will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I wish I had someone to be nice to me just right now.

How terrible! I started my entry off on a sad note! On an extremely bumpy ride back from Dalat to Ho Chi Minh, I came up with a very funny entry. This was somewhat dulled by the ED news I received in my email upon arriving home. But whatever.

Things I learnt about or in Vietnam :

1) Everybody rides motorcycles or bicycles.
2) Traffic is lawless to a humorous extent. It is not uncommon for you to find vehicles travelling in the same lane TOWARDS each other in the midst of a lot of car-horns and minor heart attacks.
3) I don't really hate playing cards anymore. I used to. Laura taught me how to play bridge, or at least rudimentary bridge, and after winning 7 games in a row (followed by a loss of 5 games, however) I concluded that it is really fun. My favourite card playing memory was sitting in cold weather in the highlands on a beautifully manicured lawn of the nicest hotel in Dalat playing bridge, being fed apple pie and ice cream by my mom as I stared at the cards and sipping hot chocolate.
4) I compare all scenic Vietnamese things to Canada, i.e. "The lake in Canada is a nicer colour" or "The coniferous trees in Canada are decidedly bushier".
5) Parents should learn to trust that their children will always be more punctual than they are.
6) I really, really like Pho, but not much else of Vietnamese cuisine.
7) Education, or at least history and literature, really can come alive for you. It did for me, anyway, at the Vietnam War Museum, which was the only real bit of historical sight seeing I got to do. I gave the mothers a running commentary of what I learnt about the Vietnam war because our guide was hopeless and the information provided was paltry. I took pictures of tanks and airplanes and bombs that sat in the dusty yard of the museum, relics of former tragedies and gross mistakes of an epic scale.
8) For a third world country, Vietnam boasts amazingly clean toilets. I've never been to China, but the others that have all said that the toilets superseded the Chinese ones by leaps and bounds. The worst toilet, ironically, was at a former Summer Palace of the Vietnamese royalty.
9) When frightened by paranoid mothers about the state of the water in the country and its potentially damaging consequences for my body, I can drink inordinate amounts of soft drink. I just drank Sprite round the clock, dreading the weighing scale. Weirdly, I did not put on weight.

I didn't buy too much and felt sad when my parents bargained for items and got discounts that were pittance to us but invariably more to the sellers. I'm sure the sellers jacked up the price for us silly gullible tourists, but I felt really bad. I didn't like Vietnam all too much but it was interesting nonetheless, I just wished there was more we could have done. I wanted to go crawl in the tiny Vietcong tunnels and tell my history teacher about it, that would have been fun, but the older folks said they would be too fat ( and truthfully some were ) to crawl through.

Anyway, I'm home. I have a pile of applications to do, but people are coming home to me and I shall be content. I'm going to watch CSI, or something, and feel sorry for myself.