The streets in our neighborhood are lined with different shops and food stands. And Erica and I have ambiguous names for local places but we both know exactly what the other is talking about. For example, “the rice place (every place has rice),” “the omelet lady,” “the Latino guy (ok please don’t be offended by this, but there are a hundred sandwich stands and this helps us distinguish a good one),” and “Our coffee place.” It is OUR coffee place. It consists of a little room with an awning spread over two plastic kiddie tables and a stack of kiddie chairs. All of this in a small alley. We love it, and our loyalty has many benefits: they never misunderstand our order, we are never shocked by the price, and the couple that runs it takes care of us like their own children.

On Friday our school was closed for some kind of fumigation, for the N1H1 flu virus. Erica and I went to our coffee place and had our cà phê sũa. It started to rain and the woman ushered me to a chair away from the edge so I wouldn’t get dripped on. It rained harder and the woman and her husband motioned for us to come inside and we motioned that we weren’t getting wet and were ok. Her husband stood and said, no longer smiling, “Come now.” So we did.

The rain intensified and the little alley flooded almost immediately. Some boys who were walking to school stepped up on a ledge out of the water. The woman brought in the chairs before they floated away. The thunder and lightening came and the power went off. We sat in the front of the room with the couple and the husband used his few English words to tell us that it was raining and teach us how to say it in Vietnamese. I had a dictionary and the woman took it to look up the word. She gave it back to me pointing to a word in Vietnamese. The definition stated: to drizzle.

Later Erica and I walked down town to find a market. We found that after this "drizzle" the streets were flooded. We were very clearly the only fools on foot, and there were places where the water was up to our knees. There was a strong current in places and when big trucks would drive by, waves were created. At first it was funny, but after walking through it for a while, I wanted to get out. I couldn't see my feet at all and I couldn't see holes or slopes and trash kept getting caught on my shoes.

At one point we walked on the median. Now the medians are usually manicured very nicely and kept well. There was another man walking on the median and he walked off the grass, balancing on the curb like a trapeze artist. Erica and I thought that it must be bad to walk on the grass since no one else was doing it, so we copied the trapeze man. A few others came behind us and did the same thing. Here we are, a line of us now, walking and balancing on this narrow curb, inches away from speeding traffic. There aren't any pictures of this because we had to concentrate pretty hard to be successful.