Who Reads This Blog Anyways?

To blog or not to blog, that is the question. It's been the question on my mind for the past while, wondering if I should just delete the whole thing. Back in January, while with Tuyet in HCMC, I had gotten a comment - which gets sent to my email. I was reporting all the spam and thought the one from 'thirstythong' would be an automatic deletion - but I noticed it was sent via the blog. So I read it, and turned to Tuyet and said "uhh, I just got a message from 'Thirsty Thong'". Before I could continue, she said, "Oh I know that guy." I began to wonder what sorts Tuyet had been hanging out with in Vietnam.

Turns out Thong is a normal guy - well, at least not some random porn spammer as I originally thought. The identity actually masks several people, two of whom I then ended up meeting on a later trip to Ha Noi. Jimmy Thong and Ben joined us at Dragonfly and it was a really odd experience. Before I could say much, Thong would remember the details of my life, having seen my blog already (being linked from Tuyet's). The normal questions that come up between two strangers happened, but I didn't get to answer them - because Thong would finish my answers. "I spent a month in France..." would be cut off with "Oh ya, your sister lives there with her 3 kids, right?" Ummmm, ya. That was weird. Interesting, too, as it meant fast forwarding through all the intro stuff. I ended up asking him more questions than him me, since I hadn't had a chance to read his blog. And in fact, I didn't get to talk to him much as I was sitting so far away from him and pretty involved in a game of Jenga and trying to understand the pleasing accent of a Nigerian soccer (football everywhere else) player sitting closer to me. But the idea of blog circles intrigued me - a community of people who have potentially never met in person, but can know a helluva lot about each other.


Earlier that night I had met Julie, another local blogger, at dinner. She had to attend to someone after the meal but got us in contact with other bloggers she knew - which happened to be Thirsty Thong. She had also just picked up a friend, Mike, who joined us for dinner. He was just moving to the country, and he mentioned the One Laptop Per Child project, that I had never heard of.

Blogging circles in Vietnam seem pretty tight - there's a big group in Ha Noi and another in Sai Gon (I guess they're similar to ex-pat circles). At first I thought that keeping a blog would be so impersonal. To my friends, "Hey I'm leaving, and I'm too lazy to write to each of you personally on a regular basis, so take time out of your day and read a generic post every so often." It felt cold. But once I was unemployed, I was reading blogs out of boredom, catching up on friend's lives that I hadn't been good about keeping up with. I realized that my blog could just be a source of entertainment and maybe even a travel guide (having used Dean and Marita's as a planning source). I could fill it with mundane things and not feel guilt in flooding people's Inboxes.

So far it has turned out differently from expected - I didn't do much travel blogging, as my philosophy was to not sit behind a computer if there was something better to be doing. So India and parts of Singapore, Australia, and Malaysia were all missing, as I was either experiencing the country and spending time with people, or using computer time to research the next destination. (After that is another story that won't be shared here, being an issue of privacy - I'm still not comfortable putting most of my thoughts out on a public domain...)

For many reasons, I'm not sure how much post-travel write up I'll be able to do. My motivation comes and goes - when I get a CD of some backup pictures that Tuyet found on her laptop, there may be a splurge of posts. But don't hold your breath. Until then, the occasional cute pictures of kids in France will have to do. Here's Hugh...