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!)

New Word

The Vietnamese passport officials, who are always very helpful to me when I come in and out of Tan Son Nhat airport, have learnt a new English word in training after an influx of silly British girls taking flights to Singapore every weekend:

 

Now, when they see my passport, they say, 'Renew!'

I've got no argument, so I just nod acceptingly and point hopefully at the small corner I'd like them to stamp in order to save my precious blank pages. 

Wedding Diet

Some people get fit for their weddings, or do yoga to try and minimise that horrible belly line that apparently happens to the best of us when we step into a wedding dress.  Others just drink smoothies for a year, or, like complete insaniacs, cut out carbs (think of all the wasted potatoes).  When I realised that even I was not immune to the cheeky little bagel ring around naval height, I too thought that bending myself in half and lifting the entire weight of my legs above my head repeatedly using just my core strength was the answer.  Other than the odd inexplicable 10km run at the end of a bad day, however, I have been unable to maintain this, and have found that gin is a better short term solution to a case of the grumps, chocolate to unanticipated feelings of homesickness and Disney films or Cancer Research ads the best thing for inducing catharsis by way of uncontrollable and unreasonable mid-week blubbing on the sofa.

None of these things, however, are doing anything for that naughty little belt bulge that the spanx will apparently hide, and so, as a firm and long term believer in the Power of Poo, I have begun my Wedding Diet.

Really, the WD is just the expat-friendly version of what is actually a desire to Experience More, following a number of comments from friends and loved ones that could indicate that I am not taking full advantage of my time in Vietnam.  In order to rebel against these comments, and, of course, cheat my way to minimum-effort slimness, I have decided that I refuse to cook at home until I have tried all the street food vendors in my local area.  That started tonight whilst I was waiting for Wobbler to be fixed.  Wobbler has been even more wobbly since I fell off him again last week in an utterly and spectacularly embarrassing scene where I worried about my laptop slipping, stopped, was stationery, and then fell sideways into some chalky gravel and bruised my knees.  A lady stopped to help me and I almost waved her away, wanting to say, 'Don't stop; I'm an embarrassment to humanity.  I don't deserve your help.'

Tonight's dinner consisted of rice, sketchy-looking pork belly and lady's fingers.  As I ate, I listed (in my mind) all the new things I am going to experience with this new diet.  I am likely to...

1. See more stray cats.
2. Be laughed at by more Vietnamese men
3. Become friendly with all the local taxi drivers who apparently do not eat at home.
4. Become very ill and lose all the weight I would have done by drinking smoothies for a year or going to yoga.
5. Save lots of money: a plate of food costs the equivalent of 60p.
6. See more babies running around without appropriate clothing on for running-around-in-the-street.
7. Be bitten by a lot of mosquitoes.
8. Drink a lot of paranoid Smecta.

I shall, of course, endeavour to take tourist photos and post them in this blog entry as often as I can, just so you can see how adventurous I'm being and how well I'm taking advantage of all that Vietnamese culture and lifestyle has to offer!  And of course, if the Power of Poo Diet fails me on this occasion, I've always got the spanx, the gusset and the basque to hide my little bagel for the required 24 hours.

I picked out the scary looking prawns and octopus in this and gave them to the Cambodian looking child who I had commanded to sit down and eat a decent meal with me rather than beg for my hard earned cash. Smiles all round: I had dinner guests, he and his mother got sustenance with a side of tentacles. 

I also picked out the offle type stuff in this dish, and of course, the ambiguous prawns. The noodles were weird and deep fried. 

Tropical Depression

Now, like you, when I received an email with this as the subject line yesterday from my caring and kind Head, I too thought it concerned the mental strain of being away from one's family for long periods of time, sentenced to a life of sunshine, exotic food, cheap tailors and swimming pools, but apparently, a tropical depression is a type of storm, like a typhoon. Who knew?

We were encouraged to get home before 4pm and stay inside for fear of flying building materials and flash flooding. I didn't need to be told twice, so off I went, for the sake of my safety, scattering and abandoning marking in my wake. 

As I've had some lovely, now very grown up, visitors from Watford over these last few days, I hurried home to warn them that taking a bus to Cambodia that evening might not be advisable, and that RoD and I were stocking up on vitals like gin and also tonic in case we were rained in, and had to evacuate to her flat on the 13th floor rather than the 4th, where I am, and where flood waters would clearly inundate us and carry us away on a river of burst sewage pipes and cholera. 

They regarded me with a look of cool gap yah students as I listed all the exciting things I could do if we got the following day off school (catch up on marking, ironing, clean the flat, check the wedding list, reply to my emails) and stared expectantly at the cloud free skies outside. 

At around 6:45, there was a brief shower, and RoD messaged to say that yoga had been CANCELLED.  Horror of horrors!  Thankfully, yoga had not, in fact, been cancelled, but for a moment it was touch and go, but I did eventually 'go', rather than 'touch' and waited for the first torrents of rain to interrupt the peace and serenity of my downward facing dog. They did not. 

By the time the used-to-be-young-and-now-are-adults guests left, there was still no sign of this storm, which was a colossal anticlimax, especially as one news article said that ALL schools in HCMC would be closed. What it really meant was 'All Vietnamese primary schools, not international schools' would be enjoying an evening of gin followed by a day of marking and tea and ironing. To add insult to injury, during the night, I was not awoken by inconsiderately loud claps of thunder, or cranes smashing through my window, or rising floodwaters, or the howling of rampant winds. Very disappointing. 

In the morning though, it was raining, like it often does in Vietnam during rainy season, and I made the uncharacteristically sensible decision to take a taxi, rather than my bike and arrive at school dry, rather than soaked to the bone with hair sticking to my face. 

Now this is where the story gets interesting (that was all the lengthy, tension-building exposition). On my taxi journey, I realised that even the highway was flooded, which almost never happens, and my taxi driver refused to drive down another flooded road, which is normally the quickest route to school. After we'd found a detour and rescued another teacher, the driver finally abandoned us - like that lift operator who abandons Jack and Rose in Titanic - and we had to wade the rest of the way. Have some pictures to see how bad it was:

Gross slimy stuff floated past and touched my leg. I don't know what it was, but I imagine it was entirely disgusting. 

Luckily, I was rescued by the Ginger Swan who ushered me into a taxi where we both squealed in excitement and took photos of the impact of tropical depression like tourists, not experienced expats. 

Ginger Swan: this is the sort of thing that they show on the telly!  (Snaps some more photos) We're supposed to be British, but we never get rain like this!

Emma is Helpful

Many a thing has happened since returning from the adrenalin pumping Batu Ferrenghi.  Almost too much to keep up with!  Not only did Frenchie and I flash the proverbial vs to all the red tape that said that as two citizens of the world living outside our passport countries, and loving those of different political nationalities and with a history of cultural antagonism, we could not breeze through a wedding ceremony with the ease that a middle class, daughter of the village brownie pack leader and son of the butcher could have done and get legally married (long sentence), I also managed to prepare a picnic for four, remember all the important documents (including my and others' passports) and I am yet to lose the marriage certificate: a catastrophically impressive achievement in my books!

I then came home and consolidated my eighteenth to twenty second words in Vietnamese (see you later, fish, water, tree), returned to school, and, oh, had a visit from these two goddesses:

Who, frankly, exposed my so-called Li Hi expat lifestyle by floating across busy roads, navigating themselves without maps, remaining hydrated and without the runs, catching horribly early and late flights without complaint and jumping in and out of taxis like they'd been here for years. Slightly put out that my life wasn't as challenging as I'd made out to everyone, I drove a little faster on my moped and stopped for street food that was only a tiny bit likely to make me ill!  That's right! And I practically speak fluent Vietnamese now that I know the words for 'fish' and 'water'. That's pretty much a sentence. 

On my way home from school on Friday, though, I was once again reminded of the differences between Saigon and the Home Counties when I rode past a lady who had come off her bike and was twitching upsettingly in the middle of the road. Having only recently had a less dramatic and spasmy crash myself, I was moved to help rather than drive past and leave it to the experts, especially as everything seemed to be happening furiously slowly, whilst this poor woman still lay fitting in the road. 

So. Like the heroine I am, I discarded my bike by the side of the road and authoritatively smacked the door of a passing taxi so that it stopped. In teacher mode, I took charge and two men, disregardful of potential spinal injury, picked her up and slung her on the back seat. I jumped in front, making soothing noises and holding the lady's hand (thinking, 'what should one do?  Should one be worried about choking on vomit, or putting her in the recovery position, or checking airways?'), and off we sped to the hospital. 

After that, it wasn't very exciting. I left the lady at the hospital, and I hope she is okay now, and got back in the taxi to pick up my bike. The taxi driver, Thong, having established that I wasn't the lady's friend, told me I was a very good person. I humbly agreed and taught him the word for 'saint' so that when he retold the story to his mates over a beer, he could refer to me thus. The police were all over the place when I got back and initially, I think I was the target of police rage before Thong explained that I had in fact been the saviour of the incident (I taught him the word 'saviour', too) and then all the police and the curios bystanders waved me off into the sunset calling, 'thank yoooooouuuu!'  I waved at them, satisfied at the recognition and warm and fuzzy inside at having done a good deed without having my bike impounded. 

Batu Ferrenghi

After almost ten hours of relaxing and taking it easy, both RoD and I had gone a little stir crazy and so secretly, lest the other fat, lazy, book-reading, cocktail-sipping holiday-makers (aka The Enemy), or the indulgence-encouraging, polite and attentive staff (Puppet Government of the Relaxation State) heard us, we planned our getaway, disguised by a game of scrabble played on a Malaysian board for extra covertness, wine, sushi and four games of shithead, which I lost.

The escape plan was executed first thing the next morning, after a lie in. Destination: the lighthouse at Muka Head (to signal to other adrenalin seekers, of course, who would parachute out of a low flying plane to rescue us). First, we had to stock up on free lunch from the breakfast buffet, but sadly my heart wasn't in it, so we snuck away with just a mini apple Danish and a blueberry muffin. The Puppet Regime offered to pack us some more snacks in an adorable picnic basket, but this was just a ruse to lure us away from both Risk and also Death, and thus away from the core ideals that make up our sense of Selves. 

We managed to allude the Enemy and catch a bus to the gates of the National Park, where we paid a man to take us on his boat to Monkey Beach, after swearing him to secrecy and refusing to wear our life jackets to show him we meant business. From Monkey Beach, we trekked a mountainous and accursedly slippery path (in flip flops, because we are Li Hi) up approximately 227m to the lighthouse. When we arrived at our destination, we signed the guest book in one final act of rebellion against The Enemy and their Puppet Regime!

Unfortunately, there was no word from our fellow Riskers, and we had to assume, whilst morosely eating our pastries, and reading our books at the top of the lighthouse in the sunshine with a beautiful sea view, that they too had probably fallen victim to the Puppet Government and were nibbling on fruit platters by the pool and sipping on fresh lime juice. We no longer acknowledge them as Brothers in Arms for this treachery. There was clearly nothing else for it but to sit in the sun a little longer, emulating our mothers in a sort of National Trust, pass-the-cucumber-sandwiches kind of way, and then return to be picked up by Akrim our private boatman, I mean, co-conspirator, and stop off at the Tropical Spice Gardens on our way home.

The Spice Gardens were a delight. There was a gift shop. I spent all my money, and then we had coffee and lunch in their treehouse restaurant.  Wonderful!

Satisfied that our protest would be recognised by the Puppet Regime, and they would no longer regard us with the same pity as they do the Enemy, but rather with a sense of awe and respect, such as one gives a great and dangerous member of the opposition, we retired to the poolside to sunbathe.  

However, when a member of the Regime dared to ask if we required drinks by the pool, we realised that these guys didn't know when to back down, and thus made a great display of showing them our Li Hi prowess by going for a run on the beach (or at least I did, RoD more maturely completed hers in the in-house gym where there is water and air conditioning).  My run, though, consisted of many film-like moments, as a tribute to Batu Ferrenghi, invented 1950s Italian film director who founded the town in which we now find ourselves. Parts of my run were like the opening of 'Chariots of Fire', except without the homo-eroticism, and more sweat; one moment was reminiscent of 'Amores Perros' when a puppy, initially frightened by my sudden presence, alerted three of his big friends, who began a stand off that had me backing slowly into the sea like the climactic scenes of 'The Last Unicorn'. Some Malaysian men helped me, initially, by clapping at the dogs, but when they saw that the danger had passed, they just laughed at me. 

After all this, I can confidently, without a slither of a doubt, confirm that we have both been reinstated as both Li and Hi, and thus can once again regard ourselves with respect and dignity. 

All cool and arty photos c/o the RoD Shiny New Birthday Camera Photo House.