Welcome to Vietnam:

The Land of "A Guy Mouthing the Banjo Music from 'Deliverance' Language," Never-ending Gobstopper Communism and the Ubiquitous "Boom Boom" Offer.

I dressed up just for you.

Well, actually more for Dan, The Bob's youngest brother.


Within five days of embarking upon this two-week business trip across Asia, Danny had already been able to fulfill not one, but two of his lifelong dreams:

1. He sold his company -- a former dot com darling called SalvageSale that, like fellow Houstonian Beyonce, is a survivor -- for much dinero. The money came in while we were in Singapore, and just like that, he was big time. Like that matters -- get a load of No. 2.
2. He woke up in Vietnam and screamed, "Good morniiiiing, VIETnam!!!"

Speaking of movies.....

Whoa whoa whoa.
-----------------------------------------------------------------

"If you could pick one word to describe Saigon (yes, its inhabitants still call it Saigon, even though it has officially gone by "Ho Chi Minh City" since 1975), what would you choose?"

Mr. Cuclis thought about it, and he .... hesitated?

"Umm..."

Maybe it was too obvious, I thought, like the T/F gimme that you just know has to be a trick question.

"The motorbikes," I said, unable to wait any longer to tell my story. I get impatient when I'm revving the engine, but the car is in neutral.

"Yeah," Mr Cuclis responded. "There are a lot of them, aren't there?"

I'd go with a HELL yes on that one.

And so would this Vietnamese beauty.

I don't think she's worried about SARS -- about 60 percent of the women on the streets of Saigon are wearing these deals, thanks to the pollution caused by eight bagillion motor bikes in one city.

"They're for girls," my personal taxi driver, Sinh, told me as he pedaled his heart out in a sea of petrol fumes. The smell in the air made me feel like I was waiting for the boat to pull me up, floating in the warm water of Lake McQueeney, a slalom ski attached to my feet.

"What? The masks?"

"Yes," I heard him say from behind. Sinh's bike felt like a relic of the past; I was almost scared to hold my arms out to the side, for fear of getting them chopped off by a madman speeding past on his scooter. "Only girls wear them."

A shame, indeed -- it hides their exotic Asian mugs. Before this trip, I was not a big fan. Asian women just weren't my cup of herbal tea, that's all.

"See," Lesli, the mother of the house where I crashed in Singapore told me, "you can see how all these old white men come to Asia for business and end up leaving their wives. Asian women get more and more attractive with time, trust me, you're not the first one."

That's why I'm just so glad to have Uncle Dan around -- he learned some things from his father, my grandfather, Foss.

"Bayless," Danny told me as we checked out of our Saigon hotel. "Phuong here is 23 as well." She smiled like a girl who was being put on the spot, which she was. "And she has agreed that, when you come back to Ho Chi Minh, she will go out to dinner with you."

"Thanks, Dan."

"No problem."

Phuong had checked us into the hotel two days before, and Uncle Dan waits until she's checking us out to play matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match. It was like a situation out of an Alanis Morissette song, don't ya think? A little toooooo ironic.


And yeah I really do think...

that Asian girls are hot now.