Back to “The World”
May 4th, 2009 . by dsmuddREADER ALERT: On May 24th, I made a few additions/changes back through the first blog entry. Darrell
Good evening from Littleton, Colorado.
Just a note to let you all know I survived the longest day of my life, and made it back to the confines of my home, here in Littleton. Yesterday, May 2nd, I left Hanoi on Air Vietnam at 5:30 p.m. for a connecting flight on China Airways, leaving Taipei for San Francisco. I arrived just in the nick of time to catch a red-eye Frontier flight back to Denver, arriving May 2nd at 11:50 p.m. Crossing the International Dateline, I stretched out one day sitting on around 16 hours of quite bumpy flights.
I have my experiences to now support my fictional writing of Vietnam as it was during the war, and what it has become thirty nine years later.
I hope you readers were able to get a hint through my words as to the sights, the sounds and smells of today’s Vietnam.
In summary, I saw the resilient people of Vietnam as the most caring and helpful and nicest people I have encountered anywhere in the world. It is only their government that is holding them back, but I see that slowly changing as well. I see communism quietly being swept out into the streets and dumped in garbage cans, crumbling as it did in Eastern Europe. I see a Vietnam someday in the future becoming what America always wanted for its Vietnamese friends, and that was freedom from communism.
I will be posting pictures once I give this old body a needed rest.
Chao, tam biet bay gio … Good bye for now.
Darrell
