The Great Return

Ah!  Vietnam!

Land of mopeds and chickens in cages;

Great paysage of paddy fields and brown rivers. 

Where else can I eat a banh mi for 80p?

Or purchase great swathes of white cotton?

Yea verily, I understand not your bank accounts,

Or why the shop sells not bread,

But ah, Vietnam!  How I love thee!

So. Vietnam, ey?  Country of economic boom and rapid industrialisation?  Well, if you, like me, don't know what these things mean, I shall describe them in Emma language, which involves concrete objects that you can visualise.

All of that FTSE 100 stuff means that in the five weeks I've been away, the following stuff has happened:

- there are lots of new roads and buildings that had been started are now finished. There's even actual work going on at the site where the metro station will apparently go. Wow. Infrastructure. 

- there's now a yoga studio, a cafe, a shop that doesn't sell bread, a card system, a new entry system to the car park and new staff at my apartment buildings and apparently there will be a bakery very soon. Maybe they will sell bread? I now no longer have to go anywhere, but I will still go to my veggie market because it is cheap, local, awesome and has ball trees:

Not to mention flower towers:

Cool. 

- my bike man has moved house and his daughter is bigger than she was before. Apparently babies grow. Who knew?

- they have made a paved bus stop instead of letting people stand in the middle of the highway to flag the bus!  True progress. 

- Slender Laurel has an entirely new bathroom. Shiny. 

Some things do not change though: the Internet took two days to kick back in, and after riding around for 30 minutes trying to find the post office where my packages were being held, I gave up and came home. People in Vietnam think that places are in completely different places from where the previous person has said they were. I asked like, 8 people (in my amazingly proficient Vietnamese) and they all said the post office was somewhere else where it wasn't. No good!

However, all very good to be back, especially as I was greeted almost immediately with a wonderful shipment from home: