It’s been a while since my last entry so I thought I should sit down and write something. As I’ve mentioned before, the life here isn’t so exciting, and thus neither is writing about it.
But there have been a few things of note that may be of interest to you out there wondering about life in Saigon. So I’ll just write down about my outings last week.
On Tuesday I played with my team in the Saigon Darts League which has weekly matches at different bars. Each bar has their own team and we play “501” in Triples, Doubles, Singles and one team game. Our team is pretty good and we won the match against “No Star Where.”
After that I went with a few of the boys to a new bar on Ly Tu Trong called “Lush” which actually looks like a club you could find in Columbus, Ohio. The difference is that this bar was shut down by the police around 3 months ago for serving hard alcohol. The wine and beer industries have a lock on the market here and have tailored the laws to suit them. The bars try to serve spirits anyway, but if the police come to check the license then they are in trouble. This happened to Lush, but now it’s back in business with beer and wine only.
Another good club that has opened up is called “Yang” and is the former “La Villa.” Basically it’s just a bunch of people dressed up, drinking and looking at each other. I went with an entourage of Japanese girls, one Vietnamese friend and a crazy American friend and we all decided to dance anyway and have a good time. Being that the ex-pat community in Saigon is not all that big, I knew about half the people in the bar. They were basically the socialites who live to go out, drink, hook up, and then gossip about it. But let me back up. Before we went to Yang, we went to Casa Latina since a good friend of mine is leaving his position at the Spanish Consulate and going back to Spain. They had some excellent salsa music playing and I taught a few of the Japanese girls to dance.
As for work, I got an interesting little assignment which was to draft a letter to send to all the Consulates in Saigon which was an invitation to join our Country Club. It was special because the North Korean consulate was on my list. I really would have liked to go in there and see what they would say, but unfortunately North Korea does not have a consulate in Saigon.
