Monday

Yesterday's (and today's) web content was brought to you through the free wireless service at Le's Café, a little two-story white French colonial coffee shop with terracotta tile roofing and heavy shutters on the windows. Le's serves indoors at dark wooden tables surrounded by the sort of chairs you might find in the comfy TV room of the student union; Le's also serves outdoors on a pretty cobbled patio that meanders around the building, crossing a working stream in the form of stepping stones. Yesterday, while drinking Le's terrific iced coffee and using free wireless, we were sitting inside. For the past several days, it's constantly looked as if it was about to rain. A change from the weather when we arrived in this country: two weeks ago it really did rain multiple times every day. Since I began taking this computer outside, however, it has only been darkly cloudy with that type of gusty bluster which usually presages big electrical storms. Le's Café is about six blocks away from the apartment, on the northernmost block of leafy and relatively sedate Le Quy Don Street. I like Le's because the walk is easy: there's palm shade and few dicey intersections (a constant consideration in Saigon). It's probably the closest free wireless to our house, but it can still take fifteen minutes to walk there due to patches of impassable sidewalk shopping, cooking, and parked scooters. It's a long walk with my computer wrapped in a plastic bag because it's convincingly threatening rain. But yesterday, the biggest storm I've seen so far--one-and-a-half hours of punishing rain, startling lightening, and deafening thunder--missed us by moments, blitzing Le's patio while we sat around in cozy comfort drinking coffee. Ha ha; but it was still raining when we walked home. [Cavin]