Blue Birthday Cake

Written 4/17/2013

Ocean salt stuck to my skin. Each step I took tore the hole in the crotch of my poor quality pants a little larger. The green strapped flip flops on my feet struck the ground. I hurried along. My strides ate up city block after city block. Since my hands were full, I used my shoulder to wipe sweat out of my eyes.

How much longer until the turn? I wondered. I wasn't bothered by the heat or the long walk. But I looked down at the parcel in my arms. Maybe it didn't appreciate the heat so much.

I was holding a cake. It was carefully packaged up in a box, but it was a cake all the same. A birthday cake--which made it all the more precious.

Yesterday, when I'd bought it, it was beautiful. A round vanilla cake with vanilla icing. But no ordinary icing. It was decorated with beautiful white and blue flowers that were huge. Four of the flowers stood tall, taking up at least half the top of the cake.

It had been in the fridge for the last 24 hours. I doubted that 15 minutes of the outside temperature would do much damaged...but still.

I walked on.

I passed bright western cafes, serving up expensive food. I passed a street stand selling sandwiches and another selling fruit. I passed clothing stores and hostels and pho shops. Here and there were tourists. Vietnamese were scatted about. Both groups of people appeared to feel incongruously at home in their surroundings. The city had never quite chosen an identity. Not quite French or American or Russian, but not quite Vietnamese, it straddles too many worlds. And there I was, in the middle of it, dressed in my now customary uniform of lightweight clothes, holding carefully a birthday cake as I walked from one pat of Nah Trang to another.

Something about this scene struck me as incredible. There I was. In Vietnam. Walking in a new city on my own. Delivering a birthday cake to a wonderful friend I'd only met weeks before.

Despite having spent the last seven months living in any country but the USA, I was still struck occasionally by the miraculous fact that I had repeatedly found myself in the most fabulous of locations, and in the oddest of situations. There I was, walking through Nah Trang with a birthday cake.

Of all places, of all moments I'd dreamed up, this has not been on of them. Even so.

My flip flops struck the broken sidewalk as I stepped down the city's blocks, beautiful blue cake in hand.