Sunday

Yesterday's religious outing was certainly interesting. Unawares, I'd sort of begun expecting some isolated wingnut sect, chanting devotions to a florally hung representation of French Catholicism in Victor Hugo's unlikely form, perhaps with a Hindu number of gesturing arms and Taoist aura of flame; seated perhaps serenely atop a tiger atop a turtle. And, to be fair to me, there was a certain amount of that: the dragon-headed horse dancing on the globe being a particularly fetching example of can't-we-all-coexist meaningfulness. But it's evident this is serious business (there's no gift shop) and the devout mostly lump blithe attitudes from the loudly trampling cult tourism; so for me, an outsider who sees no great gulf between the eccentricities of any two religions, it was easy to become maturely baffled instead of bemusedly kooked. The drive there was more exotic, frankly: here, at long last, were bucolic landscapes just forty minutes from the city center. Water buffalo worked marshy fields delineated by narrow stands of super green bamboo and tall thin palm. There was a shocking deep blue sky. Our tiny travel guide talked constantly while we motored along, making me feel inattentive for looking out the windows. His patter ranged from too-basic introductory material (the Vietnamese vowels, for example) into too-personal history (local banana wine solved his kidney stone crisis). Between, his litany focused on rote paragraphs of dates and percentages, carefully leaning away from one or another political agenda, and careful to stay amusingly off-topic ("I was afraid about my English" he quipped, "English pronunciation so bizzarry"). Returning home, with extra time, he convinced us to detour at a lacquer souvenir workshop run entirely by the handicapped. While we were there, it rained like hell for the first time in months, deafening under the warehouse's tin roof. [Cavin]