Vietnam? Yes please!: My Saigon

Of course, I am on holiday again. As a teacher, this is what I get paid to do. This time, it's a holiday to celebrate the Reunification of North and South Vietnam and also a day that, up until this point, I had thought was all about cider, cramming onto motorways to get to beaches, pub lunches and royal weddings. Turns out that for all those anti-royalist countries, May 1st is for the labourers, who get a day off, not a day that gives Brits yet another reason to complain about the weather.

So, since I'd been labouring very hard since the Easter holidays (two weeks ago), and complaining at length about the weather (it is super, super hot at the moment), it was time for me to be reunified with Frenchie and spend five days doing... well... pretty much nothing as it happens. Definitely worthy of a blog post!

Now, 'pretty much nothing' obviously translates as 'some cute stuff intermingled with lots of nothing', so here are the highlights of those five days...

1. Reunification Day, the day honoured by the Spice Girls song, '2 Become 1', involved fireworks. This meant loads of people riding their bikes to the nearest street/bridge/highway they could find, parking, blocking everything off and standing to watch the fireworks under lots of Vietnamese flags that had been hung from houses and the backs of bikes and taxis. I was eating barbeque and drinking cider in an attempt to cling onto my home culture at the time, but never one to miss fireworks, I went out onto the street, nodded appreciatively at all the flags (what's not to love about this over-sized, patriotic bunting?) and rocked back and forth, toe to heel, toe to heel, saying, 'ooh!', 'aah!', 'excellent!' in tribute to the fond memories that many a St George's girl and close family friend of the Sheppards has of my father. ('Boom!', 'gosh!', 'did you see that one?', 'kablowee!'). What was especially heartwarming were the nods of approval I received from many a Vietnamese Dad. They knew this universal Father-and-Fireworks choreography and recognised it as right and fitting for the occasion. Well done, little Western girl, you have harnessed the power of gunpowder to transgress cultural, language, age and gender barriers... Wheee! That was a banger! Kaboooom! Excellent!

Then I ate more barbeque. At a place called Quàn Ut Ut, just to give it a shout out. They have an amazingly anti-vegetarian logo:

2. I took Frenchie to visit the rubber plantations of his ancestors. In this version of the story, Frenchie's ancestors are Catherine Deneuve and Vincent Perez. Frenchie, who has seen rubber trees before (quite a lot) was more entertained by me falling off my stationary bike into gravel and submissively waving my legs in the air like an inverted tortoise as the bike fell on top of me in slow motion, accepting my fate.

He also enjoyed the strangely familiar scene of a lorry driver driving with his hand brake on.

"Oo would do a stupid thing like zat?" Frenchie scoffed. "Me, I av never done anything so stupid in a camper van in Australia. Quel con, zis Vietnamese lorry driver. Ee definitely did not learn to drive from ze French!"

As the eight week countdown to my departure from this blessed country begins, the trip also gave me the opportunity to take stock of all the things I will and will not miss.

Will miss

Cattle, grazing wherever the heck they like.

10p ferry rides

My motorbikes - they have all been so good to me, even the one that left me permanently scarred. Good times.

Rubber trees - so peaceful

Rooftops

All the lines and angles you can find in urban spaces

Will not miss: detest

- mosquitoes - I got bitten seven times on this trip alone and twice whilst writing this blog

Monster trucks - much bigger than bikes and very scary

- the police - like those naughty, corrupt boys in classrooms that you're not allowed to outwit because their parents have some sort of authority over you.

3. We visited the long ignored HCMC Museum of Fine Arts. There were many beautiful things, mostly the building itself, which Frenchie would like to turn into a hotel, and I would simply like to live in and wander around in a yellowing wedding dress with a fan and a small bell with which to ring for tea/gin, depending on the time of day.

Obviously, life would be no fun if all it contained was colonial beauty, so I was glad when Vietnam threw a few of these choice morsels into the mix...

Propaganda Tin Tin