[ThanhPhero]

A few years ago I rode a Sinh Café van from Đà Nãnh to Nha Trang with a bunch of backpackers. There was a Finnish couple, a Spanish fortyish woman who had been doing it for 20 years, a year of trucking about in Asia and a year at a University, the Sorbonne or Oxford etc., a Czech an a really obnoxious Hindu who was instructing all the others who had been doing it far longer than he on how to backpack. Turns out he was a banker in Mumbai and had fled with a legal cloud over his head. To avoid having to talk to the Hindu or even to recognize his existence i spoke only to the driver and a young Vietnamese pair of newlyweds in Vietnamese and never gave any hint that I understood or spoke English, the lingua franca of all the foreigners aboard. The Hindu got highly irritated because he just knew I must speak English.

[NativeSon]

I’ve come to the conclusion that I am very boring.