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!