Friday

Last night Sunshine and I enjoyed a nice Valentine's Day dinner at the little French-slash-African salad bistro across the park from our apartment building. The second floor there is really charming, with large windows looking out over the green space around the intersection of Lê Duẩn and Pasteur Streets, northwest of Reunification Palace. The city is still partly decorated after the recent Tết holiday: the park's still hung with string lights and large pink and white flower lanterns. Or it was then. Tonight, while walking through the same area on the way to an Indian restaurant (hey, it's already been almost three whole days since we ate actual home-cooked food in India), we noticed the lights were off and the flower lanterns were piled unceremoniously at the street corners in a tottering dump of sheer pastel--butterfly wings scattered after some fairy atrocity. The food was still excellent; and these walks in the dry, seventy-degree breeze are even more satisfying after the northern Indian chill, though my body ultimately craves real winter. Good news: during our vacation a new wireless broadband router arrived in the mail. I managed to get it working tonight. I knew I could do it. I'd come to have a lot of faith in my belief that the reason our first router wasn't working was because it was actually broken, not just some whim of the service here in southeast Asia. That belief turns out to be correct only after a few hours of uncertainty and then the five minutes of continuous service needed to convince the router, too. Now I can access the internet from anywhere on my floor. This is particularly important to Sunshine, who was growing tired of plugging her computer manually into my office wall just to check her email. [Cavin]