Getting hammered isn't exactly a rarity for me so the fact that it happened on Christmas isn't really a surprise to me or any of my friends here in Vietnam. Christmas isn't as widely celebrated here as it is in the west and actually I am quite happy that this is the case. I received zero gifts and also purchased exactly the same amount of presents for other people. I do NOT miss that aspect of the holiday season at all.
So what happened was that a bunch of people are visiting from bigger cities such as Hanoi and we met for "lunch" which is just a code word for inappropriate time of day to start drinking. Of course it carried on for many more hours after that as well.
If you look closely you can see that Hillary Clinton was in attendance and was having a great time. I wasn't making fun of whoever this woman is, she was having a great time and so was everyone else that was there. I also made friends with a reindeer who was seated next to our table.
The area had marked off the entire street down near the beach in Hoi An, which is about 20 km from Da Nang, where I live. Before anyone asks I took a taxi... I'm a heavy drinker and am what many people would probably consider to be irresponsible for a man in his 40's but I don't drink drive and honestly, I have very little nice things to say about anyone who does especially since taxis cost almost nothing here.
Some of my pals on here live in places that probably look and feel a lot more Christmasy than it does in a tropical country that never has any snow in it and I'm gonna flex on you for just a minute and say that even though it is the "cold" time of year here the temperature dropped to a freezing cold 65 degrees or so. It's funny to me that when it gets to this temperature, which is only for about a month per year, the Vietnamese are all bundled up in puffy coats, scarfs, and even mittens. I remember as a kid growing up in Nebraska, me and my siblings would be pestering my mom to take us to the public swimming pool any time the temperature got anywhere near 70.
One Christmas gift that I gave to myself is a really stupid one in that after drinking for 12 straight hours I got home and decided to put on my running shoes and go for a near 10 kilometer run.... well, let's not get ahead of ourselves, it wasn't really a run so much as it was a staggering jog. At more than one point i had a difficult time staying in a straight line and really shouldn't have been running at all. Today, if it wasn't for this app I have on my phone, I probably wouldn't even remember doing it.
It says that I burned around 700 calories and I don't know if that is true or not but this doesn't even come close to the amount of caloric excess that I accomplished throughout the day yesterday.
Later I sent some messages to my family who are all on the other side of the planet. 5 of the 6 of us do not even live in USA anymore, which is just crazy to me when I think about our deeply patriotic and "staying local" roots that are very common for people that come from the center of the country. Almost all of my extended family lives less than an hour from where they were born and raised - the most adventurous ones are us by far and in second place would probably be my cousin Jill who moved to Kansas City which is probably 2 hours or so from where she was born.
We are definitely the weirdos in our family and we don't consider what we have done with our lives to be superior, it's just different. I would imagine that they are at times envious of how "exciting" our lives are but on the flip-side we are also a bit envious of their strong family connections and how if they want everyone to get together at the same time and place it just involves a tank of gas instead of thousands of dollars worth of flights and some serious jet lag.
So now it is boxing day and for all your Americans out there a lot of the world considers this day to be even more important than Christmas is and I can already see where this is going to go. I am going to be slobberknockerd drunk again in probably 5 hours or so. Then I think I will need to take a few days off to prepare for when we do it all again on the 31st.
So how was your holiday?