Sunday

Yesterday we took a taxi from a coffee place called Star to a District Three church selling Christmas trees. Star is near our house. The workers there wear blue uniforms: the guys in flower- or butterfly-print Hawaiian shirts, and the gals in sassy little stewardess costumes. This is totally normal, by the way. I only had one iced coffee before leaving. It was crowded and loud. Vietnam was playing Laos on TV. The Christmas trees where in a paved parking area behind a catholic church, lined up in temporary sheds surrounding the church's permanent store. Everything from rosaries and prayer cash to six-foot wooden Jesus and Marys are for sale in the permanent store. The stalls outside offer lighted and motorized Christmas pinwheels, strings of flashing whatever, and some pretty gimcrack synthetic trees. It's obviously odd to browse Christmas trees in the tropical dry season, but Sunshine pegged what was most strange: wandering the rows of a Christmas lot without smelling the pine. On Wednesday, Sunshine and I had priced trees in District One: an aluminum colored four-footer was running an eye-popping two hundred US dollars. Yowza. I don't even want to know how much the fiber optic trees were. Yesterday in District Three, however, a slightly more modest tree (three feet, Vegas white) ran us something like six bucks. The light up Santa heads and pastel stars, the green garland, and the taxis back and forth added another eight or so. Every now and then, in traffic, a group of high-speed scooters would flash by waving the Vietnam flag, a street signal to passersby that Vietnam had scored another goal. We would have never discovered this hidden fake tree lot, tucked behind its unassuming church, if we had not been directed there by one of Sunshine's coworkers. [Cavin]