Triangulation

So after: a) a great train ride (19 hours) from Penang to Singapore and b) an awesome time at the East Coast Seafood Center in Singapore where Deanne and her friends treated me to the best crab meal ever (white pepper and chili crabs, crayfish, etc.), I c) found myself back in Vietnam..

Whereupon I faced an interesting "The World is Flat"-Friedman-esque story, although it has that creepy entrepreneur Vietnamese edge.

First I lugged the backpack towards the airport shuttle. When I realized that I would be waiting for other passengers to fill up the empty seats, I opted for the taxi.  The attendant girl waved me down, gave me a ticket and off I went – with a crazy driver who felt the need to be fast and furious, knocking his front bumper against motorbikes and cargo trucks and sedans on the two lane highway. 

Twenty minutes into the ride, the driver's cell phone sounded to the ring-tone of Vietnamese folk music  Not my favorite kind of music, but another supporting fact for the 'technology/globalization/progress is great' crowd.

Snippets of conversation. A laugh. Realization. The conversation was about me.

Whenever other people talk about me, I have uncontrollable urge to figure out what the hell the details were. Doesn't matter if they're high school choir girls, or analysts in the next cubicle, or the family on vacation.

"What was that?" I asked. Afterward, I asked How.

It turns out that the shuttle driver ran up to the attendant girl after I climbed into the taxi and got the cabbie's cell phone number. Since he had lost me as a passenger, he figured he wouldn't lose me as a customer. So he called my driver and requested that I be taken to an 'affiliated' guesthouse. The cab driver would get a cut, along with the shuttle driver.  Given that the price or a room goes for $10-$12/night, I really don't know what the cut would be.

The cabbie laughed and said I was from Hanoi and I had an apartment already.

In any case, it seems that airport drivers and hoteliers have adopted mobile technology for their own use.

Not the best anecdote in the world, but it was a wake-up call that yes, I was in Vietnam again. One week left.