Herding

Because sometimes, of course, fields get boring, and your herd are bitten by the travel bug, like we all are, so you take them on a small tour to the local apartment block...

Left: my apartment block; right: herd with moto-cowboy; foreground: un-phased resident, because this is completely normal, apparently. 

Pho Sho Mo Fo

Pho is delicious. This might seem like a boring statement, but it is honestly so delicious and I have only discovered this since forcing myself to eat my way up and down Trãn Nāo, the street near where I live. I am so sad that for the first 15 months I have lived in this country I have wasted so much money on food when I could have been eating out every evening, consuming bowls of deliciousness, and watching the fascinating world go buy for just 72p a meal. 

This is pho tài from my absolute favourite pho restaurant and I love it. It is probably the best pho tài in the whole of Vietnam, but I would need to check out a few more pho places before I could verify this. 

In other news, I am stuck in Vietnam in a similar way that I was stuck in Darwin, except the people have been way nicer about my legal documentation here. Turns out that even though entry into the country on a new passport was seamless, thanks to the wonderful ladies in my HR department, exiting and coming back into the country say, to see your husband for the weekend in Singapore, is a no no with a single entry visa.  Fairly obvious when you think about it, but hey, who spends their time thinking when they could be, I don't know, eating pho tài?  Poor Frenchie thus has to do even more traveling to attend to my every need and whim.  Hopefully it'll all be fixed in time for me to enjoy my Tet holiday to some cutsie little destination with Buddhist temples otherwise I might have to get on my new little moped, Roger Red Bike, and drive to some strange, reachable destination in Vietnam for my cultural and Li Hi kicks!

Blank Beauty

Look how wonderful this is:

The immigration guys can stamp wherever they want!  In fact, I'm going to ask them to stamp right in the middle of the page, just for the sheer hell of it. 

What you don't see, though, is a Vietnamese visa.  Normally this would be because I have a residency permit, but nowadays my passport doesn't say the same name or number as my residency card, so I'm on a flight to Vietnam with just an exciting letter from my pals at the Vietnamese immigration office, asking the passport guys if I could kindly come back into their country. 

Isn't it fun, that in this day and age, you can get on a flight booked in one name with a passport that says another and enter a socialist republic without first having visited the embassy and waited around for six hours by just producing a shiny gold marriage certificate, being polite, and making a few phone calls?  Globalisation, hey?

Being a Feminist

Upon getting married this month, Frenchie and I were very fortunate to receive lots of cards, letters and drunken notes from family and friends wishing us all the best in our marriage for the years to come. One very special set of letters came from some ex students of mine, and one particularly apt message from a young man, clearly scarred by my teaching of feminist lit theory, read: 'what?  I thought you hated men?'  This, combined with a whole day of sitting still to have my hair and make up done, and then being physically given away by my father (a man) to Frenchie (another man), lead me to challenge my assumed 'raving feminist' status, and I sadly had to admit that I probably no longer promote my feminist rampage in neon lights, but rather wave a post-feminist bunting flag in Cath Kidston pattern that says, "It's my choice to stay in the kitchen!"  (Who wouldn't?  Cath does such pretty homeware stuff.)

This made me sad.  Where had the proud man hater of yesteryear disappeared to?  Who was this baby-obsessed maniac who had cuckolded my body?  What would GI Jane think?  Oh dear, oh dear.  It would seem that the only thing I still have in common with Simone de Beauvoir is that neither of us live in the same house as our significant others.  One has, indeed, become a woman, having been born an Afro-haired monkey thing of ambiguous gender. 

I mulled this over on yet another plane journey, my self-loathing growing, until - like a beam of light through stormy clouds - I heard a voice - a woman's voice - on a tannoy, like the voice of God or my subconscience, and it said:

"This is Mandy from the flight desk. We're currently cruising at an altitude of seven million feet over Limoges. The outside air temperature is currently -78 F and we've got some good south easterly winds making the journey easy for us at present."

Or something like that...

I was delighted!  A female pilot! A woman!  Surely something blog-worthy could come of this. 

So. Upon exiting the aircraft, I mustered up the courage to stop and talk to this pilotesse on my way out. I actually walked past her, embarrassed and eyes averted, up the gang plank and then told myself I was a coward and turned back. The conversation went thus:

Me: hello, I'm really sorry to ask, but I teach in a girl's school and we have a board where we post and talk about women in the work place and different careers that women can do. Like... inspiring role models.  That are women.  Um... We get a lot of creative, arty women, but not a lot of mathsy-sciencey type careers. Like pilots. Like you. Gosh. Would you mind if I took a photo with you for our board?

All a COMPLETE LIE but I couldn't think of any other way of saying, "IT IS AWESOME TO SEE A FEMALE PILOT!" so I went with it, and then... and then and then!  She invited me into the FLIGHT DESK, like the Star Ship Enterprise, and so I got a photo like this:

Doesn't she look smart and awesome?

Obviously, I felt bad that I lied, but I feel GOOD that I got to sit in a flight desk, and I feel EVEN BETTER to think that me and pilotesse Smith/Jones might help, somehow, to further the feminist movement of Women Doing Awesome Things somehow with this picture... Somehow...

So anywho, men are alright, but women are better. Hoorah for girls!

In other news, I drove all the way from Heathrow and back to Heathrow without dying, or killing anyone else, mostly because I sat on the inside lane on the M25 and drove at 55mph whilst making soothing noises to keep myself calm.  Driving a car on the motorway is definitely more stressful than driving a motorbike downtown in Saigon rush hour. 

Also, good friends are the best thing ever, so if you have a good friend living in, say, Vietnam, you should GO AND VISIT THEM and try to get married in the school holidays, and also have your babies during this time so that this good friend can attend, be a bridesmaid and squeeze fresh plump thighs and be a godmother. That is all. 

Homecoming

So.  Coming home for Christmas this year has been awfully exciting as, having found that the average Christmas has become a little mundane, Frenchie and I decided to spice things up a little by asking my sister to organise a Wedding of Epically Complicated Proportions to overshadow the birth of Jesus in our, and some 63 other people's minds. 

In the last three days,this has required following the Schedule of Colour Coded Uber Control, which has organised every 15 minutes of my life into manageable, bullet pointed chunks. 

'Get on the Plane', however, wasn't in the Schedule, which only started at 7am this morning when I touched down in Heathrow, but I was lucky enough to be babysat by eight other teachers, and as we all know, teachers like giving clear instructions like, 'Emma, pick up your passport', 'Emma, don't leave your passport there' and 'Emma, point to where your passport is right now.'  As well as this, they also got me in a taxi, to the airport, through check, security and duty free, to the bar, to the gate and on the plane. 

Whilst they were all busy herding me in the right direction with calm, outspread arms, I was busy having the following conversations:

Me: hello, Lovely Check-In Lady - I am getting married on Saturday in England. 

Lovely Check-In Lady: oh, congratulations. 

Me: I'm really keen not to be tired and jet lagged. I hear they have flat beds in business and first class. Any chance of an upgrade?

LCIL: I'm afraid not. 

Me: oh.  I really am getting married. I'm not making it up just for an upgrade. 

LCIL: congratulations. Try talking to the stewards when you get on the plane. 

Me: got it. What about the captain?

LCIL: the captain is married. 

Me: me too, but if there's an upgrade in it for me...

When I did finally talk to the stewards on the plane, I was delighted that they moved me to a row all on my own and promised champagne later. When they did bring me champagne, though, I had already realised that the plane was very empty and I could very easily have upgraded myself by just moving to an empty row, and that champagne was in fact available from their trolley for everyone. Hmph. He sure fooled me!

After a stopover at Doha, and the last two Godfathers (what a disappointment the third one is), the Schedule came into action and whilst wandering, slightly star-struck and overwhelmed through London to renew my passport, I noticed the following things that I probably took for granted when I was living in the UK:

- Paddington Bear is awesome. I've always known this, but it's worth reiterating. 

- the Heathrow Express is really very fast. What a delight!

- nobody in England likes to open their tills to give you change. 

- photo booths for passport photos make you look terrible and are very annoying. 

- people in the UK are unused to you starting a conversation, 'hello, how are you?  Gosh, that's a nice hat/scarf/pair of shoes', or 'morning!  This is lovely smelling coffee!  How are you?', but when you do start conversations like this, people are generally very nice to you and everyone's day is a little bit better. 

- 5 degrees is not as cold as I was worrying it would be, as long as the wind's not blowing. 

- M&S sandwiches are the BOMB. I love them. 

- travel is expensive. Gosh. 

- tannoy announcers have British accents!

Shockingly, I noticed this whilst everything was going according to the colour coded plan, which is spooky because things don't often go according to my plans. I don't want to jinx it, but the only loss so far has been a pair of wooden poles intended for signposts for wedding decorations which were clingfilm wrapped in Vietnam and made it all the way to Victoria before I noticed I had put them down somewhere and not picked them up again.  However, these were miraculously recovered by the lovely staff at the Victoria Pret-à-Manger, which, when combined with the friendliest service I've had in a long time from Kay at the passport office, got me feeling very Christmassy indeed. 

To keep up these festive spirits, and because I had four hours to kill before picking up my passport and  because London was looking particularly sunny and beautiful, I took myself on a little tour of my old haunts and visited some old friends:

Tea with Ole Liz at Buckers...

A tiptoe past my secret garden - a little spot I used to walk past and peak in at on my lunch break...

Some biscuits with St James at his palace...

A quick chat with my old boss at the Avenue (I used to stand there and take people's coats!)...

Then I got bored taking photos and met Laura for lunch instead and we ate sushi!  Because even when you're not in Asia, sushi is a GOOD idea. 

Advent in Asia

Vietnam is definitely getting prepared for Christmas. This was my evening entertainment as I waited for my bành xèo:

I know exactly how this little girl feels:

Can't get more exciting than tinsel, can you?

Here is my bành xèo, which as you can see, looks suspiciously like Vietnamese omelette, so it was very brave of me to sit down and agree to eat it because omelette upsets me:

However, it's not omelette, it's more like a lentil pancake with dubious prawns in it. In this picture is also my trusty coca cola which I order in case of taste emergency where I want to spit out the contents of my mouth onto the floor, but can't, for fear of offending. 

By the time I had made friends with the little girl, the little girl had made friends with a flearidden kitten, and the kitten had made friends with me, Jimmy Le, who I'd also made friends with, had finished his Christmas tree...

And everyone was feeling very festive all around. When combined with the briht blue lights on the palm trees around my swimming pool, this is all contributing to a veritable winter wonderland!

Qantas Lounge

There are many cons to being married to a man whose job requires him to spend more time intimately acquainting himself with the Jetstar, Qantas and Tiger Airways schedules than he does with me, his legal spouse, but occasionally there are some very convenient perks that come with the magic words, 'no, don't worry, we'll put this on the company', and are always accompanied by an expenses receipt. 

Today, by some fluke chance with flight timings, Frenchie and I ended up at Changi airport at the same time. For some, queuing for check in, passport control and immigration stamps with the same date on them are not symbols of romance, but for Frenchie and I, this is practically a second seduction. Imagine my confusion, therefore, when Frenchie rushed me through my end-of-term-approaching duty free purchasing to insist that we 'spend some quality time together'. Surely being in the same place at the same time is quality time enough for us?  No, no, Frenchie had other magical surprises up his sleeve...

The Qantas Lounge for Gold Clients!

Was anyone else aware of the existence of such a paradise?

Believe it or not, everything in this photo is FREE: the delicious plate of assorted salads, the attractive European husband, the enormous glass of sparkling wine, the coasters I stole for my living room. Free! So free, that, like any self-respecting child who grew up with a chip on her shoulder because she wasn't quite as middle class as all the other children at her Home Counties school, I went back for more:

Free!

(The delicious-looking brown and white pudding was disgusting, but that was okay, because it was free!)