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September 27, 2005

Saigon Life

It's been a while since my last entry so I thought I should sit down and write something. As I've mentioned before, the life here isn't so exciting, and thus neither is writing about it.

But there have been a few things of note that may be of interest to you out there wondering about life in Saigon. So I'll just write down about my outings last week.

On Tuesday I played with my team in the Saigon Darts League which has weekly matches at different bars. Each bar has their own team and we play "501" in Triples, Doubles, Singles and one team game. Our team is pretty good and we won the match against "No Star Where."

After that I went with a few of the boys to a new bar on Ly Tu Trong called "Lush" which actually looks like a club you could find in Columbus, Ohio. The difference is that this bar was shut down by the police around 3 months ago for serving hard alcohol. The wine and beer industries have a lock on the market here and have tailored the laws to suit them. The bars try to serve spirits anyway, but if the police come to check the licence then they are in trouble. This happened to Lush, but now it's back in business with beer and wine only.

Another good club that has opened up is called "Yang" and is the former "La Villa." Basically it's just a bunch of people dressed up, drinking and looking at each other. I went with an entourage of Japanese girls, one Vietnamese friend and a crazy American friend and we all decided to dance anyway and have a good time. Being that the ex-pat community in Saigon is not all that big, I knew about half the people in the bar. They were basically the socialites who live to go out, drink, hook up, and then gossip about it. But let me back up. Before we went to Yang, we went to Casa Latina since a good friend of mine is leaving his position at the Spanish Consulate and going back to Spain. They had some excellent salsa music playing and I taught a few of the Japanese girls to dance.

As for work, I got an interesting little assignment which was to draft a letter to send to all the Consulates in Saigon which was an invitation to join our Country Club. It was special because the North Korean consulate was on my list. I really would have liked to go in there and see what they would say, but unfortunately North Korea does not have a consulate in Saigon.

Posted by Mateo at 5:47 PM | Comments (0)

September 16, 2005

Another entry

I finally won GTA- San Andreas. There are still a million sub missions to complete but for the most part, I'm free from the games clutches. I will not play another game until they come out with another GTA game and will concentrate on my blog, writing back e-mails to friends in good time and really try to create a decent design for the blog.

If you read this blog, it may seem I complain a lot. I am not a negative person, it's just that my day to day life here in Saigon now seems ordinary and I just feel it's not interesting to write about. A friend of mine told me that it may not be interesting for me, but people who do not live here would find it interesting. So I will try to make an effort to write about the happenings here..... but not yet.

My rant of the day concerns the medication of America. Browsing the news today I came across this article. "Adult use of ADHD medicines surges" and then was dumbfounded when I read these paragraphs.

"ADHD symptoms include impulsivity, trouble concentrating, disorganization, procrastination and hyperactivity."

- This describes approximately 80% of the people I know.

"The increased medication use is good because, along with behavioral therapy, it can improve adults' relationships, job performance, parenting skills, even their sex lives."

- Why am I not on this medication!!!!

"Whenever you get someone with ADHD diagnosed and treated successfully, everyone wins."

- I can imagine the patient jumping up and cheering, "Yes I have ADHD!!!"

"Spending on ADHD medicines has shot up with the growing popularity of new, brand-name versions that last all day, limiting ups and downs of symptoms."

- I sure feel sorry for those losers who take the generic drugs. I can imagine daily banter going from "Oh, how I admire your brand name running shoes." to "Wow, you are on (insert brand name drug)!!! I wish I could afford such high class drugs as you."

Seriously though, what the hell is going on in America. It seems the drug industry wants to medicate all of America and anyone who has any sort of emotion at all needs to be medicated. This is ridiculous.

Posted by Mateo at 10:02 AM | Comments (1)

September 10, 2005

Addiction

It's been quite a while since my last post due to a certain, horrible addiction that consumes me every time I turn on the computer. That addiction is in Grand Theft Auto - San Andreas. This is the exact reason I quit playing video games (or tried to) and concentrated on other computer related activities like webpages and then blogs. Sometimes I slip however and am consumed by these games which just seem to get better and better. It all started with "Warcraft" about 10 or so years ago, and then GTA - Vice City. Now San Andreas is 5 times as large and does not seem to want to end, not even including all the sub missions. Hopefully, I'll win soon and can be done with it, although at that point I'll probably have to go complete all the sub missions which will take another month or two.

Posted by Mateo at 11:19 AM | Comments (1)