… message appeared my Hotmail inbox this morning. Apparently it’s from someone in Saigon (officially Ho Chi Minh City), who signed the letter with “nho anh nhieu” which means “miss you very much”. Naturally I have no idea who this person is, how she found my E-mail, nor who she thinks I am. She’s obviously mistaken, as I don’t think I know anybody who’s over there.

Adding to my frustration is my inability to decipher all but a few phrases of the message. The task is made all the more difficult since the E-mail, sent using only the standard English alphabet, contains none of the accents normally found in Vietnamese text—so the only way to unambiguously read most words is to infer from context or recognize a familiar phrase… a fairly hopeless task for my basic (Vietnamese) reading skills and even more basic vocabulary.

Anyway I replied with what little Vietnamese I could manage, explaining that she’d probably written the wrong person, and that I wasn’t able to read all her message due to the lack of accents and my limited literacy. All I could do was try my best to make myself understood, with a little bit of help from this handy English-to-Vietnamese online dictionary I found. I sure wish AltaVista’s Babel Fish could translate Vietnamese, though… The message contained a few embedded icons that suggested a romantic tone, and my curiosity is piqued.