Saturday, July 18, 2009

Motobikes and Bloody Lips

In honor of the eventful day I've had, I'm posting a second blog. We had a couple errands to run, Daphne and I. The weather was real nice, blue with wispy clouds, a cool wind...so we knew a storm was coming at some point. But we didn't care, we had an early start and we had just rode up to the post office that was built long ago by Gustave Eiffel, of Tower fame. We parked in its garage, got the standard parking slip and were on our way. The post office was an attractive, train station like building, that had the majority of the interior gutted and replaced with a gift shop. But the service was very professional and we got Daphne's package shipped with the quickness.
A couple more stops and we were on our way to the garage to get the bike, blue skies gone and a menacing darkness that was as much a storm as it was the encroaching twilight. But I had lost the slip. While the attendees had no problem recognizing my face when I came to claim my bike, not having your ticket is a serious offense to them and they like to keep your bike for a day as punishment. Unacceptable, as we had a flight in the morning and wouldn't be back for a week. So I tried to play the dumb foreigner card as best as I could, but they just turned to Daphne and tried talking in Vietnamese to her, thinking she was one. I tried to pay the 3,000VND for the parking, gave the guy a 5 and asked for change, completely ignoring the ticket issue. He hands the money right back and keeps pointing at the bike asking for a ticket and pointing to a parking spot for me to return my bike to. But I'm saddled and the key is in the ignition. Finally, I had enough of negotiating, put the 5 in my pocket and revved the engine a couple times. I told Daphne to get on, but the attendants were still in front of me, one with a foot right in front of the wheel. But when Daphne got on and my foot went for the gear, they had provided us with just enough of a gap for me that I had to take it. I brushed past them, up the parking ramp, with one of the attendants running after us. What I drove out of was a mess-and-a-half, but what I was driving into was a torrential storm. Without my raincoat on.
We drove a little around the corner until we were scotfree and under shelter trying to catch our breaths. Daphne noted that my lip was bleeding. How and when that happened, I'm not sure. We thought we could wait out the storm, but seeing it was going to be a long one we put on our coats and went into the thick of it on our last errand.
The agenda called for me getting the charger to my beard trimmer repaired. Thanks to international voltage incompatibility, the charger had blown and I didn't know where I could get it fixed. I got into my head that all I needed was another cord, any cord, that I could splice with the charger's male end. So we went on a hunt, in the rain, to every electronic store we could find trying to explain what we needed to do. All we got were shaking heads and smiles. It seemed that they couldn't wrap their head around what I wanted to do and instead kept telling me, 'but we don't have that charger.' While I would've loved to have saved this futile trip for another day with better weather and humor, I needed a trimmer for the trip tomorrow. Thankfully, the last place we went to, and by last I mean that we were going to give up, the service staff there had reluctantly agreed to take me up on my plot. Did it work? Well, we'll see tomorrow.

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