Backstory

Through inattention or stupidity I seem to have begun my blog with chapter 2, leaving some readers scratching their heads over why I am in Vietnam with broken ribs but (unlike Adam) no wife. Let me backtrack and fill in the blanks for those of you who haven't been tuned in to this station lately.

In the spring of 2006, Cynthia and I flew to Costa Rica to explore the idea of spending our retirement years in a tropical paradise. Our goals were: consistently warm weather (no mittens, parkas, snow shovels), casual lifestyle (swimming pool, coffee shop, sightseeing), low cost of living (cheap housing, food, clothing). While Costa Rica scored high in those categories it also scored high in these categories: pollution, crime. I came home with serious doubts about relocating and Cynthia came home with no doubts at all—Costa Rica was out.

I think that trip underscored a basic difference in our outlooks. Since moving from Oakland to Charlottesville, I had given up my stressful computer consulting work to devote myself to the less stressful (and less lucrative) work of tutoring French and writing a book (about learning French). I was all about downsizing and finding a simpler way to live that would conserve the capital I had managed to accumulate during the dotcom boom in California. Meanwhile Cynthia's new Pilates studio in Charlottesville was doing well off the folks with big discretionary incomes that Charlottesville attracts. She was doing sessions with—and socializing with—tenured professors, stock brokers, attorneys, successful artists. Rather than downsize, I think Cynthia was looking to gear it up a notch and try to climb a rung or two higher on the ladder. Or at any rate, I think downsizing looked to her like losing ground.

That's a simplistic version, of course, of a more complicated story which I'll tell you over a glass of wine sometime, but the bottom line is that in the end we couldn't hold it together. We divorced in 2007. Cynthia remains in Charlottesville and I decided to relocate to Vietnam (like Costa Rica, tropical and inexpensive, but with much less crime). I'll be starting a 4-week CELTA course on September 8 to earn a low-level TEFL certification and then will try to snare a teaching contract at one of the many language schools in Hanoi.

I originally had booked a flight leaving SF on August 9, but a day before my departure, while running on a mountain trail in California, I twisted my right ankle and took a header on a downslope, falling heavily onto my left knee and rib cage. I bandaged my bloody knee and spent the afternoon icing my ankle. It wasn't until later that night that I discovered my sprained ankle wasn't the worst of my injuries. By morning I was experiencing excruciating muscle spasms from hip to shoulder every time I moved.

I cancelled my flight to Hanoi and tried to tough it out with handfuls of Ibuprofen, but after four days of steadily increasing pain I threw in the towel and had friends drive me to the nearest ER to get a shot of morphine. What I got, of course, was an X-ray and a prescription for Vicodin. Disappointed in a heartless American medical establishment, I rebooked my flight, wrapped my ribcage in an Ace bandage, and on August 17 flew to Hanoi with my pockets full of Vicodin, Ibuprofen, and cough drops (I would rather drink skunky beer than suffer a fit of coughing right now.)

So there you have it. My wife doesn't love me, the gods of trail-running hate me, guess I'll go eat worms—and who knows how to prepare delicious mint worm patties better than the Vietnamese. (This is no joke—I saw a video of it on Youtube.)

I won't prolong today's blog with details of my second visit to Language Link or my stroll through Lenin Park, but you can check out the photos I took at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/gregnelson0/hanoi3