Surving the Rest of the Lunar New Year

In less than a couple of weeks or so, the Year of the Tiger will end and the Year of the Cat will begin. In Vietnam, the celebration of the Lunar New Year is called Tet and is the biggest holiday here. I will be in Vietnam for the first two days of Tet and then will spend some of my vacation time in China. I went to China in 2008, and I'm looking forward to seeing my old friends there. I'm also looking forward to celebrating Tet here in Vietnam.

But right now I'm sick with diarrhea, stomach flu, and a mild fever so I'm spending this week sleeping, going to the bathroom, sleeping, watching Ricky Gervais stand-up on youtube, and sleeping. So before I need to rush off to the bathroom again or lay down because of stomach cramps, here's what's been going on in this last leg of the Year of the Tiger:

I visited Ha Tinh province, which is in the central part of Vietnam, with my host brother and host mom. We went to celebrate my host mom's death anniversary. My host mom's sister is a hairdresser, so I also got a free hair cut out of the trip.

Yesterday, I called back for another shoot for the TV show I had appeared on before. The scene was an opening ceremony so I had to wear a suit. However, I don't have a suit here so someone on the film crew called up their friend who works at a wedding photography studio. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending how you look at it), the only suit they had that was my size was a tacky pink suit. So while everyone else in this scene are wearing dark suits, I'm in a full pink suit, pants and all. The scene was pretty much just of the French shuttlecock team mingling with the various other shuttlecock teams. Which means for most of the time, I was really actually mingling with people. Since this is TV, most of the people there were rather good looking. Mingling with a lot of young attractive Vietnamese women in a pink suit was not a bad way to spend the morning. Unfortunately, I got sick later that day.

But no worries, I think I'm beginning to get better. Hopefully it will be gone before Tet.