Travels

In early mornings, the town shuddered to life.  Women washed vegetables, laundry, and children in the murmuring streams.  Grandmothers opened steaming tins of dumplings and set out large bowls of noodles.

After half an hour of glances, the salesman climbed into his top bunk opposite my own. His name was Albert.  I pressed him for his Chinese name, but he said I would forget it and that his English name was easier to remember.

Walkways, overpasses and billboards are armed with purples, pinks, and greens. The facades of buildings offer constant distractions from its light displays; on one memorable office tower, a Tetris game blinked across 50 stories.

Most border regions are no-man's lands where countries bleed culture, cuisine and customs into their neighbors. That's what I love about land crossings.

Trust me, it was funny. Particularly when we both argued in broken Vietnamese, utilizing a hot-pot of accents unintelligible.

What does that mean? Five months? Such a flippant phrase. Does it give off anything but a dry denotation of time? Five months, twenty weeks, one hundred and forty days, and so on.