Blond Giants Invade French-Indochina Series

I think I might finally be ready to start working on this series. I haven't been posting, obviously. Very cool things have been happening that under normal circumstances I would have been mentioning here or one of the other dozen or so blogs I keep...Norm and Holly had their second baby (welcome Simon!); A-Rod's gotten himself suspended for the entire year ((sigh) chode); the Sherweezy game is in full effect for the time being...

That last one has had more to do with the lack of posting than anything else. That's something that I'd like to speak to as well, being a full-time fully-involved adult for a hundred-plus rough South-Central LA kids, but, like so much other stuff, that's for another time.

This series, apparently another in the "Invading Blond Giants" category, will occupy the next few days of my time. I have a few other post ideas I've been marinating for over a year (seriously...) that I'll be getting to in the next few months, but I felt like if I didn't address these anecdotes while they're still fresh, they would essentially be part of the oral history surrounding me and Corrie, and subject to easy relegation to the background.

I don't now what that means, really, since they're already there, relegated to the background. It's just part of the fabric of our lives...but I'm a writer and I need to write, and I have pictures and anecdotes and maybe thirty posts about some weird shit they throw at you while you holiday in South-East Asia.

We were there for fourteen days, and it's been seventeen days since we returned (as of this writing), and this is the first time I could get some time to focus on putting these ideas to cyber-space.

So, like the February 2012 Blond Giants Invade Mesoamerica series before, I'll start out the series with a post about numbers and relative sizes, and a post about the background of the countries we visited, and then a post surrounding the idea of Day Zero.

Day Zero on a trip to a new country is a combination of excitement, anxiety, and stress; this adventure's about to start (excitement), I hope whatever cabbie we get will get us to the correct bus station (anxiety), when is that booth going to give me my passport back and where's the goddamn food (stress) all happening simultaneously as you wait in customs.

Somethings we do to ourselves, and somethings are done to us...we try to set the former up well enough to be able to at least get through the latter with our good humor intact...