CHICKEN is not recommended for moped drivers

Thursday, June 10, 1999

For anyone not familiar it, Chicken is a game where the drivers of two vehicles drive towards one another on a collision course. The person to veer off first is the chicken and the other is the winner, for being brave. Well, riding a moped with Uncle Minh to my other uncle Sung's (sic) house, I kinda realized that it's best to get out of the way of oncoming vehicles, especially ones larger than you. No sideswiping today though, thankfully, because we'd definitely LOSE.

For road travel in Vietnam, it's occasionally wise to wear a dust mask. Not very STYLISH, but wise considering all the dust that gets kicked up. I noticed lots of other people wearing them on the trip.

Uncle Sung has a pretty nice house - it was built just a few years ago. The floor, consisting of black and white tiles, stretched all the way out to the front porch. I never noticed before, but those tiles are MUCH cooler to lie on than hardwood floor, especially considering how hot it was over there.

Luckily, there were electric fans. Even more luckily, the house was wired. Unluckily, though, electricity in Vietnam is more sporadic the further you get from the big cities. We were pretty darn far from a big city, so we got power outages about two or three times a day, it seemed.

The rest of the day was pretty lazy, we sat around most of it. The others talked; my Vietnamese ability, being limited to saying 'hi' and 'bye' and 'grandma', didn't prove very useful. I did, however, get to show people how well I played freecell with the cards I got from China Airlines. They seemed to enjoy the game, but I'll probably have more stories about that later.

By this time, I started to notice that my cousins had this really weird habit of swatting each other. It was infectious, though, and they started swatting me too. It was a little bit annoying, but roughhousing with them was something to do other than just sitting about and doing nothing. They eventually left me alone when it came time to go to sleep, though. They started up again real early the next day though.