Highlights of my day

It's only 9:23 in the morning, and there are already several highlights of my day:

First, my mom successfully booked my plane ticket to Thailand. No, I am not being Princess Allie and requiring my loyal servants to book all of my travel plans; however, every website I tried (Air Asia, Kayak, Vietnam Airlines, Thai Airways) either declined my credit card or offered me system error messages. My guess is that this has to do with server connectivity and security from a Vietnamese Internet source, not that my credit cards actually don't work. In any case, Mom simply came through for me, and now I am going to Thailand, by hook or by crook.

The visa situation will just have to get figured out, or I will hold Ha Tinh University (and Fulbright) responsible for getting me out of Thailand and back into Vietnam if anything goes wrong.

Secondly, I got a phone call from Hannah today, which totally made my morning.

Thirdly, everyone at Ha Tinh University and Fulbright has responded quite positively to my "I need you to help me and advocate for me, since this is too difficult of a process for me to handle on my own. Please meet me halfway if I am being proactive enough to inquire about my visa process" e-mail, and things seem like they are FINALLY going to get rolling.

Thank goodness for Mr. Duc, really. He is such a wonderful man and SUCH a helpful host. He wants so badly for me to be happy and satisfied with my experience here, and he is so willing to make that happen. Furthermore, he just found me sitting here in the courtyard, typing on my laptop, and he asked me why I'm not in my room using the Internet. PERFECT.

I had been keeping the "My Internet is broken again" problem on the back-burner,  only because I wanted to choose my battles wisely. If I was going to be relentlessly nagging my hosts about one thing, I would rather it be about how to get me in and out of the country in a few months, as opposed to how I will get on Facebook several times a day. Priorities, you know? But this was the perfect way to casually mention that "Oh, Mr. Duc, I didn't want to trouble you with the Internet problem when we were dealing with so much other stuff!" And in his typical, easy-going manner, he just said, "No problem! I'll talk to the IT department and they'll come back to work in your room." SCORE.

Lastly, the major highlight of my day was calling out a Vietnamese man who littered right in front of me (and, incidentally, right in front of a trash can). I have been sitting on the steps here to use the Internet, and he and his buddies pulled up in a car and parked the car in front of the building. He threw a bottle out the window of the car, even though there is a trash can about twenty feet away. I cocked my head at him, pointed to the bottle, pointed to the trash can, and then glared. Like a puppy with his tail between his legs, he picked up his littered bottle and brought it to the trash can. His friends were all laughing and gesturing to me and saying things in Vietnamese that were presumably the equivalent of "He is such a bad man!"

In any case, things are starting to look up.