Trusty Travel Hat

Remember the post where Vietnam appeared to be winning a few weeks ago?  Well, yesterday, Vietnam tried to get another point in the form of a broken down printer. I had- obviously - misprinted my second set of invitations, and returned, the day before I was due to leave the country for six weeks, to the printing shop. Previously, these guys have worked with an efficiency that would rival citizens of Northern Europe, but this time, the nice young man came back with bright yellow paper and tried to convince me that wedding invitations in sunflower yellow would be a good idea. I laughed, thinking it was a joke, whereupon we began a ten minute conversation consisting of him trying to explain to me that the printer that printed card was broken.  His English was admirably superior to me 'hello-goodbye-thank you-left-right-straight on' Vietnamese, but I was particularly slow on the uptake that day. 

Now this was a big problem because, as with all couples made up of two alpha males, I had a point to prove and had confidently declared some months previously, "Don't worry darling! I shall take charge of the invitations!"  Thus it was absolutely imperative that they be the most perfect invitations that have ever existed in Frenchie's understanding of the history of weddings. Two misprints later, and the possibility of not having a set of French invitations to hand over to Frenchie with a triumphant smile, meant things were not going too well.

It also meant that I wouldn't be able to drop Temporary Moto back that day, but would have to ride in with seven weeks worth of luggage on the back the following day, which looks like this, by the way: 

It looks more stable in this photo than it really is. Also missing are the hand bag and trusty travel hat, which cannot be secured with straps or clips. 

I was doing quite well until I reached a set of traffic lights and the bags fell off into the road. No panic, though, as the lights told me I still had 45 seconds to reconfigure. All done with speedy expertise, and off I rode again.

Then, disaster!  At another set of traffic lights my hat flew out from between my knees and landed in the middle of the road!  Before I could react, the lights changed and lots of mopeds came roaring towards me (I was on the wrong side of the road as this is sometimes allowed in Vietnam) and I watched in horror as each bike skirted around my precious hat, and then a car. The waiting traffic on the other side of the road watched the scene blankly, because clearly, they had no souls and were incapable of human emotion.

I quickly scrambled off my bike, flashing my pants to everyone because I didn't stop to think this morning that this dress was not conducive with bike riding: 

 Now you think that's a lot of thigh? You should see what happens when you're straddling a handbag and a hat on a vehicle specifically designed for leg-spreading. 

Anyway, knickers flashed, I hopped about frantically, waiting for an opening to retrieve my hat. One was coming up... Just after this taxi... It was clear...

The taxi ran over my hat and squished it!

Thankfully, the trusty travel hat is as robust as I am and doesn't need numbing fluid for piercings, either, but now there's a great big dent in the side!  Poor hat.

With everyone's vitals checked, I continued on to the printers, and most wonderously, the printer was working and it took all of 10 minutes to produce the invitations.  I think we can consider this a joint victory for Emma and Vietnam so we have put our differences behind us and called a truce.  

Now it's just a shame that Frenchie reads these blogs, because otherwise I could have tricked him into thinking I'm really organised and not a disaster zone as well as tricking him into marrying me.

I've got an iPad mini, by the way - an OFSTED bonus from my school (lol!) - which is why I am blogging obsessively. 

It's possible that I'll update you tomorrow with another story about something shiny.

Over and out for now. 

Gap Year!

Many people who are not teachers spend their lives articulating their envy of the teaching profession by telling us - in scathing and slightly accusatory tones - that we get too many holidays. It's true. We do. We should really eek about an honest living like the rest of the world by only having two weeks' holiday a year. As far as I can figure out, this academic year will have blessed me with around fifteen weeks holiday by its end.

But frankly, all I have to say to you haters is that you should have been a bigger geek at school and picked the most inspiring, noble and adventurous of all professions. Too late now. Bad luck. Enjoy your desk job, suckers.

Anyway, after spending the other fifty something weeks caring about signatures on planners, word counts, where the commas are, whether nouns have been colour coded correctly and who said what to who first on Facebook/Twitter/ask.fm, it took me approximately four hours to revert to my 19-year-old gap year student self.

Today, this manifested itself as me riding around Pham Ngu Lau, the backpacker district, for about an hour and a half. Now, the Pham is a funny one: one should only ever go there when drunk and never before and because of this, only taxi drivers who are tolerant of Take That being sung very loudly by a group of British and Irish girls know where it is. I thought I knew where it was and how to get there, but after about half an hour I had to admit that I did not. 

The other funny thing about Saigon is that it loves one way systems, so, when you're lost on a bike and trying to use GCSE Geography knowledge of the grid system to get back to Ben Thanh market, you are foiled at every possible right turn by a 'no entry' sign until you end up in district 5 and you have no idea how to get back. 

However, when my spidey sense eventually did bring me back to my starting point (after a fascinating detour through parts of Saigon I was entirely oblivious of), I found TonyInk and my gap year mentality destination. 

TonyInk had been recommended to my by some good friends in the previous tattoo parlour that I had stopped at and these guys had never let me down in all the long 60 seconds I'd known them, so I thought I'd give it a go. There were fish:

 Loud music, and of course, a resident chihuahua: 

So since it had almost all you would want and need from a tattoo parlour, including clean, sterile needles, but not numbing fluid (li hi), I thought 'why not?'  I am on holiday, after all.  Without the numbing stuff it hurt so much I was almost sick, which was less li hi and all the piercists and tattooists stood around and watched me nervously for a while, hoping they hadn't killed a tourist. 

Result (excuse end-of-hot-day-on-bike-sweaty-hair):

Yes, they are tea cups, but get over that novelty and look closer... 

Vietnam piercing!  Yay!

Welcome back, exciting travel blogs!

Travel Agent

For some time now, I have been employing the services of a French travel agency that comes highly recommended.  I have a member of staff assigned personally to me, who sees to my every need and books my flights to Singapore every other week or so.  Perks of the Platinum Service to which I have subscribed include meals out, trips to the theatre, small gifts and the washing up done.  Here is my personal travel agent, hard at work in his home environment of Changi Airport (he lives here, in the orchid garden in Terminal 2):

A bit of a looker, I'm sure you'll agree.

Since employing his services in September, my dearest travel agent - Frenchie, I like to call him - has booked for me a holiday in the Mekong Delta, a holiday in Hanoi, return flights from London to Toulouse, countless flights from Saigon to Singapore, numerous nights in the Holiday Inn in Singapore and also the Intercontinental Singapore, tickets to a rather good show, numerous taxis to and from airports and three flights around Australia.  He has never let me down, and for this he has been handsomely rewarded with kind words and hot meals.

Hopefully I'll soon have images to add here of the performance of 'The Rite of Spring' we went to at the Esplanade Theatres on the Bay.  It was awesome and a little stressful, as Stravinsky often is.  I had to take them surreptitiously to avoid getting into trouble with the usher lady.

When I go to Singapore at the weekend, I always take a 5:25pm flight on a Friday, and a 5:35pm flight on a Sunday night.  Always always always.  Without fail.  Imagine my surprise, therefore, when Frenchie opened his laptop in the taxi to the airport (he has a high powered job as well as running his travel agency service and often has to pretend to be busy on his laptop/Blackberry/iPad in order to keep up appearances) and looked at me solemnly.

Frenchie: Emma...
Me: yes?
Frenchie: Emma...

Now Frenchie is French, and as such is normally very romantic (most inappropriate for a travel agent, but I don't mind), and will often spend long periods gazing into my eyes repeating my name in a low, sensuous whisper.  It's all very well and good, but sometimes there are things that need to be done, like feeding the fish, so I often tell him to get on with it rather than murmuring his name back to him in similarly Mediterranean love tones.  I am British, after all and we don't have time for such nonsense.  Occasionally, to help him snap out of it, I ask ridiculous questions like, 'Do you need to poo?' or 'Did you forget to turn off the air conditioning?' or I finish his sentence with things like '...I've discovered you're actually a man', which puts a suitable dampener on the mood and gets more things done.  On this occasion, as a joke, I decided to take the conversation in this direction:

Frenchie: Emma...
Me: yes?
Frenchie: Emma...
Me: have I missed my flight?

Except that Frenchie then nodded, which was a direction I wasn't expecting to take.

I rubbed his leg comfortingly and said nothing.  In a sort of a fluffy daze, I rehearsed the same imaginary conversation that I had with my Head Teacher when I was sitting in Kota Kinabalu Airport at 2:30am hoping that my passport would be returned to me: 'Hello, Head Teacher, I have recklessly taken a weekend flight to an exotic destination knowing full well that I am terrible with flights, passports and general organisation.  I won't be able to do the job I'm paid to do tomorrow because, well, I'm stuck in that exotic destination without a flight or a passport.'  Unprofessional much?

We made it all the way to the airport, with Frenchie so tense that he looked like he really was about to do a big poo, and with me murmuring words of gentle encouragement, a la Helena Bonham Carter as the Queen Mother in 'The King's Speech': 'you're doing marvelously, darling', 'we'll put on a brave face, what?'

At the Singapore Airlines desk, they told us that there was a standby ticket available at 5:35pm (my flight) for a mere £250 one way.  Still as calm as a cucumber and imitating my Windsor accent (I get posh in times of crisis), I said, 'thank you so much for your help.  I wonder, could you tell us if there are any other carriers who offer flights to Saigon this evening?'  It turns out there was, so with Frenchie now apologising profusely, we got on the Skytrain (oooh, space-age) to Terminal 1 and - still on a sort of a I-don't-know-what-the-consequences-of-not-turning-up-to-work-in-the-morning cloud, said, 'Hello, I've just missed my flight - terribly foolish.  I wonder if there is any space on your flight at - I think 7:50pm?'

Turns out there was.  PHEW.  And it cost a darn sight less than Singapore Airlines, too, which was a RELIEF!

Phew!

So I got to stare at this lovely face for an extra three hours whilst I waited for my flight!  Silver linings, hey?

Vietnam 5-5 Emma

So.  When Things Happen in the UK, it can sometimes cause annoyance, or temporary discomfort or loss of time.  When Things Happen in Vietnam/Singapore and you are a slightly disorganised British citizen, it can be heinously annoying and have repercussions that vibrate outwards like the sound waves from the bang of a huge Mongol war gong that echoes over the mountains of your life to strike fear into the envisioned future you hiding over the horizon.

Boris knows the feeling:



For example:

Some Fridays, I take a flight to Singapore to see Frenchie.  In itself, the fact that I take a flight to spend time with my almost-other-half is complicated enough.  The happy routine that I have grown accustomed to involves me riding to the airport on Little Moto, parking, strolling to the check-in desk five minutes before it closes, strolling through immigration and asking the passport man/woman to help me save valuable pages in my quickly filling passport, having a beer and a sandwich in the restaurant and waiting for Tiger Airways to call my name and inform me that I need to report to the boarding gate, pronto.

All was going according to plan this Friday until, arriving at Changi airport, which is essentially like stepping off a budget airline into a paradise of orchids, Starbucks, eateries, shops, free internet points, boiled sweets and places to charge your phone in tiny phone lockers, I decided to broaden my Asian literary awareness by getting over excited in a book shop.  If you know me, you will know that this is not an uncommon occurrence.  However, much to my dismay and embarrassment, when I searched through my compactly organised hand luggage, my wallet was not there.

We shall cut forwards to my return to Vietnam, with a brief interlude of pictures of chickens I cooked this weekend for Sunday lunch:

Hideous.

Like something from a nightmare.

Yep, we don't know how good we've got it back home with our Tesco-butchered headless and footless chickens.  It had all the guts in it as well.

So, after saving some children from a Chinese international school from being taken to the "special room" by immigration staff back in Saigon (another story for another day), I changed the Singaporean rations Frenchie had entrusted me with to Dong (hehehe, dong) and set off home.

Step 1: cancel all cards.  What would be easier: contacting a bank on the telephone that was a million miles away and 7 hours behind and explaining that you live in a different country to their records, cannot remember any of your security details, and need the card sent to a branch, and not your old address?  Or cancelling and renewing a card in your current country of residence?  You guess.  It is a trick question.

Step 2: figure out problems caused by loss of drivers licence.  According to my friends at the DVLA, the fact that I have taken four practical and two theory tests, and passed three out of the six, hold a British passport, am a British citizen and am capable of driving a motorised vehicle is entirely invalid because I live outside of the UK now.  Their automated machine told me to get a new license in my current country of residence as they would not be renewing mine.  What?!  Can you feel the repercussions shattering windows in nearby temples with their reverberating?  This means that Frenchie will be doing all the driving on our 5 week holiday to Australia.  It means that unless I figure out a way around the system, I will be car-less in the three days before my wedding at Christmas.  It will mean that I have no way of driving a car anywhere, in any country, until I am once again a permanent resident in the UK.

Step 3: pick up new Vietnamese bank card.  This first involved looking up where the heck my bank was actually located, as I'd never visited before.  Google Maps showed me a location I felt confident finding.  I drove to it.  I drove around it.  I drove on the pavement.  I asked a man.  I drove around some more.  I retraced my steps.  I looked at road names.  I checked the address.  There was no bank.  The next day, Risk-or-Death snorted and said, 'Why were you around there?  The bank is near the zoo', and I felt like I was in a strange, twilight zone KS3 French lesson, or a mid-nineties Eddie Izzard sketch: 'La banque est pres du zoo'.

Step 4: combine trip into town with attempt to get wedding invitations printed.  My goodness: I wasn't even aware that so many things could go wrong in simply trying to get a picture printed onto a piece of paper.  The paper wasn't thick enough.  The paper wasn't the right colour.  I had to get a certain number printed.  The paper was a weird texture.  My USB stick stopped working.  There were an endless number of complications!  Eventually, after about eight different printing shops (they have a whole street of them) and the death of my USB stick, I gave up, disheartened and blaming it entirely on Frenchie, who - bless him - had not received the pdf I had sent - which was obviously the most heinous of crimes, and returned to my bike.

When you start a motor bike, it makes this sound:

BrrrrUMM-brum-brum-brum-brumbrum.  BrrrrrUMM BRUMMM BrrrrrrrRUUUUMMM brumbrumbrumbrumbrum.

And lots of little lights flash in front of you, around ribcage level in a happy, dancey, colourful sort of way.

I put my key in the ignition, turned, and heard this:









I was in the middle of an unfamiliar district, at about 7pm at night, little cash, hadn't eaten lunch or dinner, was very thirsty and my. bike. would. not. start.

I did almost cry like a big girl, but a man came and helped me kick start Little Moto, my relationship with whom is now irretrievably damaged, and I rode home in the dark, with no lights, horn or indicator, with no idea what gear I was in.  This is not as big a deal as it is in the UK, but still!  Half way home, Little Moto tried to make amends by flashing gear lights erratically and straining to turn on his headlight, and I'll admit, I was excited for a second, but then I slept on it, and woke with the realisation that Little Moto is a hunk of metal, and I shouldn't be so attached to an object and should exchange him right away.

So, in the space of 5 days, Vietnam 5-0 Emma.

Happily, though, Wednesday was a Good Day and I figured out where my bank was, got a new card, swapped Little Moto for Wibbly Wobbler, got my invitations printed and tricked the DVLA into renewing my license.

Vietnam 5-5 Emma.  It's a tie.  For now.

Clarification

Just to make it clear to everyone reading: despite recent smushy, ridiculous, Austen and Pinterest-type posts, this is still who I am on the inside:

Down with domestic oppression!  Up with female empowerment!

Bingleys, Bennetts, Darcys and Demblans

I think, Courtney Davis, maybe yes?

Thu Thiem Time Lapse

Just in case you wanted to press the fast forward on your visualisation of where I live, here is a cool time lapse of my district:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eg3RUejsS-U

I ride through the tunnel every time I go into town, and the big, loopy highway is the view from my roof.  Cool!