Goodbye Phò Now!

So now, the end is near and I can hear the final curtain. They're not the words, but have you heard, we'll never know the real words for certain.  Clearly, I am doing this song my way. 

Right, enough Sinatra reworkings. This blog salutes the end of my too brief soujourn in the most beautiful country of Vietnam.  Of course, moving a whole person out of an entire country takes some time, planning and many refined and detailed to do lists but luckily (despite what you may have heard from family members/ devined from previous posts involving passports) I am very good at all of these things. The last five weeks has thus been spent transporting suitcase loads of Stuff to Singapore and invasively settling into what has, until recently, been mostly Frenchie's domain. Now said domain is filled with photographs of my friends' faces, elephants, magnets and tea cups, none if which match, and none of which would feature in any high end Parisian interiors boutique. Hoorah!  All that has been left to do are a few minor administrative banking tasks and the management of a little puddle of luggage that make up my remaining possessions. 

When the bubble wrapping and file transferring are all over, though, and before the cling film wrapping and taxi hailing can begin, there are those thumb-twiddling hours that you're not quite sure how to fill: all your clothes and drinking receptacles are packed; the Internet has been cut off and you've moved out of your apartment; you are relying on the generosity of friends and sleeping in their spare room and you really hope you don't spill oyster sauce on your white top because it's the only thing you've left out to travel in the next day and closing the suitcase earlier was traumatic enough to favour looking like a slob over re-opening and having to go through the whole ordeal again.  The only thing you can think to put on the final to do list is 'shower' and 'change currency' and 'switch off hot water'. Then you sit and watch a whole Mariah Carey film and feel hollow inside. 

Fortunately, I am blessed to have lingering friends out here, and was delighted when Saigon offered me a last minute parting gift in the form of an exploratory bike ride that unveiled cultural delights in a hidden temple down some back street that took the fancy of Shining Shamrock and I...

... and this enviable home that I have only ever seen in the distance on my way into town:

...and this sunset view:

What a beautiful country and exciting city I have had the privilege of inhabiting for the last two years!

That wasn't the best of it, though, because Saigon decided to throw me a goodbye party at a much-loved barbecue restaurant that involved these lovely ladies:

Tiger Girls!  I feel that the general sweatiness and hideousness of me in this picture makes up for the complete objectification and oppression of women that is the Tiger Girl career, but they're like celebrities in partying expat circles so I thought it acceptable to take a break from militant feminism for a moment (especially as I managed to get a shout-out for the cause in both my leaving speech in front of All Staff and an awards presentation in front of the whole school) to get papped with some glamorous beauties on my last night in-country. 

Gosh, justifying 'a bit of fun' is hard when you're a feminist, hey?

So now that all that unexpected excitement is over, I find myself stopping in town for a Long Phuc, I mean a Phuc Long coffee, before having to give back Dark and Stormy to her real parents. You can see her out of focus outside the window. We're currently avoiding eye contact because neither of us can cope with the emotion and sense of abandonment. 

Now, I have made some brilliant friends out here (who better stay in contact, OR ELSE), meeting and marrying Frenchie has been significant and my students and I loved each other so much that they dressed up in drag to dramatise a play they entitled 'The Quiet Maiden, Hedda' and made bunting with my name on it. I salute you all, but I have a cold, cold heart, so I'm not going to get upset about leaving you (charming). I'm sorry to disappoint if you were hoping for tears. The biggest wrench - more than small children, solid friends and supportive colleagues - will be parting from my beloved motos. Little Moto, Kicker, Wobbler, Roger Red Bike and Dark and Stormy, truly you represent the liberty, adventure, strange noises, disregard for sensible traffic rules, broken indicators and permanent scarring that have characterised my brief life in Vietnam. It is very possible that I may never ride a moto again because apparently, in other countries you need something called a license.  Adieu, adieu!  Goodbye!  Farewell my motos!

Fear not, the blog won't stop for a while, as there are more adventures to have around the globe but please consider this goodbye phò now, wonderful Vietnam...

Mathletes

Living in Vietnam, surrounded by expat friends and a French husband and speaking exclusively English at work and (mostly) at home, it is sometimes hard to remember that I'm living on the other side of the world in a culture that in many ways is quite different to my own.  My day to day life revolves around Shakespeare, cappuccino, Joanna Lumley monologues, Sylvia Plath, Apple and philosophy inspired by 'Not Now Bernard', or at least today did, anyway.  This is not much different to a day as a teacher in the UK, which revolved around Peter Pan, crying in the English office, red wine, Of Mice and Men and the dead feeling inside that comes from lying to children... oh wait.  Sorry.

So, anyway, after two years of hearing young people dropping their articles and using whatever tense they fancy at that present moment, speaking in present tense all the time and skipping out the arduous 'the', 'a' and 'an's in sentence and becoming, frankly, flamboyant with plurals becomes the norm.  It's difficult then, to realise sometimes that you are not in your home environment and you are working with young people who, despite all the wonderful universals that you do have in common ('Look! The rain!'; 'Tidy desks are happy desks'; 'I like your colour coding'; 'oooh: glitter'; 'you're right, the word 'penis' is funny, as are the words 'prick' and 'fiddlestick' because they also mean 'penis' and it's even funnier that we're allowed to say them in the classroom!  Let's giggle!'), come from quite different backgrounds to you.

This week, however, I was very much reminded of my current very-not-in-the-UK-residency.  In the Big International School we have a House System, because God saw that they were good and proper and installed healthy competitive spirit in children that they carry with them for the rest of their lives, especially if they are tenderly and lovingly planted into the winning GOLD House as young people.  I am the Head of House of the GOLD House of our school, because to be in any other coloured house would be to relinquish my attitude of GOLD supremacy and would be utterly unthinkable.  The GOLD House at the Big International School does unexpectedly well at things despite a depressingly low sign up and general apathy about sports activities.  We are regularly embarrassed by the Socialist Republic that is the Green House (Green has always been the colour of highly structured, title-giving, powerhouse Houses) but somehow my students manage to win events without telling me they intended on doing so.

Anyway, this week is the week of the Interhouse Maths Challenge.  Allow me, please, to profile the students that signed up, enthusiastically and with determined, winning resolve for said Maths Challenge.  Were they spotted and slightly sickly looking?  Bespectacled with mops of ungroomed hair?  Sporting jack up trousers and pringle posture?  No, no, no.  Our Mathletes over in Vietnam are not like yours back at home.  Ours also moonlight as champion swimmers, thespians, dancers and public speakers.  Ours have shiny hair and swooning fanbases of year 7 girls.  Ours take Maths very seriously and consider it probably the highlight of their school career that they got to see Ngo Bao Chau (who?  Exactly.) in the flesh talking about the Fundamental Lemma for Automorphic Forms, which in my mind, looks something like this:

For those of you who are actually Mathematicians, this is a word joke about Lemurs.

Imagine me, therefore, who still views Maths with suspicion and frustration, thus:

...standing at the back of a large hall filled with Mathletes with a Maths teacher reminding me that 1 and 3 are indeed prime numbers, only to have this enlightening conversation interrupted by two girls: good vision, school bags from known designer brands, socks at ankle, not knee length, skirts somewhere around the respectable thigh rather than mid-calf, running, yes, running: out of breath and running, sweating a little in their haste and panic, running into the hall.

I thought: there is a fire and the fire bell is broken.  They have come to tell us to evacuate.

I thought: they have not done their homework for next lesson and have faked anxiety and sweating outside for a minute before coming in to convince me that the printer in the Library is not working.

I thought: their friend is having a diabetic attack and the nurse has gone to lunch - they want me to administer an insulin boost to her heart.

Before I could grab my epipen, though, the girls tugged at the sleeve of the Maths teacher and said, 'Are we too late?  Are we too late?  Can we still start?'

The Maths teacher looked at them without mockery or sarcasm and said, 'Well, girls, the timer's on.  Get going.'  And, as if they had actually understood what this really meant, the girls rushed to their team desk to start the Maths Challenge.

Wow.  It was as if the Vietnamese national anthem rose to a crescendo in the background and a flag that was definitely not the Maths-Hating Union Jack unfurled in front of me.  'Yea verily,' it said, 'Remember that you are in Vietnam.  We do things differently here.'

Wow.

Please, UK Maths teachers, raise your hands if in your wildest dreams you have imagined students running to an extra curricular Maths activity in their lunch break and really, truly, authentically being concerned about the impact of their tardiness on their mathematical success...  I see no hands.  This is because even the concept of an extra curricular Maths activity that isn't a GCSE revision session is beyond dreaming.  But in this part of the world, you guys, it's real.

Apparently the next round of this Maths Challenge involves a relay and actual sprinting across the length of the assembly hall to deliver solutions to highly trained Maths teachers who pass judgement on answers before bestowing new problems on the 'runners' who then sprint back to the Mathletes who eagerly await the new set of algebraically titillating puzzles.

Wow.  Really, this is culturally alien to me.

Luftwaffe Boom

This weekend I saw my life flash before my eyes. Three times. 

Frenchie will say that I am exaggerating and that I was, at all times, perfectly safe, and had nothing to fear, but he has not stared watery death in the face like I have or experienced the lurching forces of near drowning and lived to tell the tale. 

After a trauma, the body becomes adept at recognising the warning signs that it failed to notice the first time round, and the senses become acutely alert to sensations that bring the familiarity of past death into the present moment.  Thus, my body - my stomach and heart area in particular - are close friends with that feeling you get when you are about to fall and realise in split-second horror, that this fall could mean serious pain or infinite darkness accompanied by a growing pinprick of light and, depending on your beliefs, naked glowing harp-playing babies.  The antidote to this feeling is wheeling your arms around in a windmill motion and leaning forwards - you know it well - but alas, when you're on a plane plummeting in turbulence, or a small, unstable boat, holding onto the tiller, this gesticulation just isn't possible, so instead, you have to risk pooping yourself by gritting your teeth and internalising the horror by pushing it down into your intestines. 

Imagine the scene, if you will: Frenchie and I, young, adventurous, in love, glamourous, European. If it's easier, imagine a Ralph Lauren advert on a posh sailing boat, but reduce the boat by ten and replace 'windswept' with 'frizzy'.  This is how Frenchie and I have spent our last two weekends in an attempt to break the monotony of plastic Singapore: we want to feel alive and free, with the wind in our hair and nothing but the wide blue ocean and some container ships and a twenty metre marker buoy in our path!  

Frenchie, who believes in gender equality, has decided that I shall take the tiller once again today, and I am very pleased with this. The wind is strong, the sun is shining, I am in control of something and we are flitting along the waves being glamorous, as previously mentioned. Our first turn goes well: Bridget Clay would have been proud. I seat myself on the other side of the boat without becoming tangled in ropes or having to drop onto all fours and avoid the incoming Luftwaffe Boom. Very good. Very neat. Everyone feeling confident. 

We carry on. The waves get a little choppier and we speed up. I refrain from telling Frenchie that the tiller is behaving badly and actually my arm is getting tired because I don't want him to think that I am undeserving of equality. We turn again. Everything is fine. I am still in control. We are sailing 'against the wind' apparently. 

The waves get increasingly disagreeable. Frenchie keeps repeating things like, 'whoa, this is great' and 'look at us!' à la my father watching fireworks. In his excitement, he does not notice that I have been silent for some time, gritting my teeth against the increasingly difficult tiller and growing fear that my tension has clouded my knowledge of the fact that left means right and right means left.  Frenchie, confident in my own abilities, informs me that we shall turn again, but this time, I will tell him what to do with the sail. All I need to do, he assures me, is think about which direction the wind is coming from. 

I laugh, because clearly he is joking. I remind him that the sail is his job. He laughs, in hindsight because he thinks I am joking, not because he is agreeing that yes, he is joking.  His laugh is sort of carefree and boyish. Mine is nervous and hysterical. I should have realised what was really going on. 

We turn. The boat veers wildly to the right. This was not what I had intended. The Luftwaffe Boom whips round, as is it's wont.  We replace ourselves on the other side, panicked, and nearly capsize. Before I can grab the tiller, the boat spins violently to the right again. Frenchie yells 'your head!' and I narrowly miss decapitation as the Boom swings over again.

I am now hysterical. What has gone wrong?  I scrabble wildly for the tiller, because the tiller is the source of all control and we have lost control and are going to die. But the tiller cannot help us anymore.  The tiller is under the impenetrable power of the waves and continues to push the small boat around and around in circles. The Luftwaffe swipe overhead and by the time I regain consciousness of my own actions in the thick fog of terror, I am on all fours in the middle of the boat, wailing at the oncoming wind, 'Frenchie!  This isn't fun anymore!  I don't LIKE IT!' like a frightened cartoon donkey braying at the moon, and still the Luftwaffe is circling overhead. It never lets up. This is the scenario of my death. 

Thankfully, Frenchie reinstated the patriarchy and took charge of both tiller and sail and after a while, we were floating quite happily and calmly towards the container ships. I was still in a state of delirium at this point though and possibly asked for a divorce through my hicoughing tears.  Meekly, Frenchie offered me the tiller again, hoping that jumping straight back on the beast would cure my fear but, from underneath my waterproof sailing hat, which I had pulled down over my eyes to hide my toddler tantrum, I simply told him that I didn't want the tiller, I wanted to go home. 

Oh dear. Wasn't lying when I said I'd retired from the Li Hi lifestyle, was I?

We Are Sailing

Two weeks ago, without Frenchie's company to pay for a taxi drive from Changi Airport to our humble abode, I decided to rough it and re-live my student youth by taking the bus.  That's right, the helpfully signposted, easy-to-understand Singapore bus.  This turned out to be an utter delight as for 70 minutes I was treated to a tour around lots of Singaporean neighbourhoods that I had never seen before, including the 15kms of East Coast Park, a beach stretch happily imported (sand and palm trees) and designed for all your water sports and coastal leisure needs.


There was roller skating (my new favourite), biking, sand-castle building stations, sea kayaking, wake-boarding, kite boarding, wind surfing - all the double-barreled sports you could ever ask for!  There was yet another alternative view of Singapore's only skyline, and what's more, all these things were available with a backdrop of container ships, which Frenchie loves more than any other kind of mass transportation vehicle.  Surely, this was the place for us.

So, forgetting that I was weak, lazy, allergic to sport and had recently retired from the Li Hi lifestyle, I organised a weekend of action packed, seaside fun for Frenchie and I.  First stop was the right car park.  We picked the wrong one, obviously, and were quite disappointed when the National Sailing Centre of Singapore told us they didn't 'do' sea kayaking, but only wind surfing, as this made little sense to us: if a sailing centre does 'surfing', then surely they should do 'kayaking' also, especially if they don't actually do anything with the word 'sailing' somewhere in its double barreledness.

Determined, despite this initial set back, we set off to promenade along at least 5km of the 15km stretch, and a calming, early 20th century voice in my head said, 'how lovely: we've avoided the silly energetic activities, and instead are having a gentle walk along the seafront with our husband.  The clouds are beautiful, the breeze is delightful and all the town's out and about doing family-type things.'

Before I transformed entirely into my late-Victorian self, though, we stumbled across the Mana Mana beach resort, only to discover that we were entirely unequipped for sea kayaking.  Did Frenchie have swimming trunks on?  No.  (Cue re-enaction of the 100 Years War whereby England insists that she told France multiple times that trunks would be a good idea, and France claims not to have heard/understood because England speaks too quietly).  Did either Frenchie or my Li Hi self have a hat to ward off damaging sun rays?  No.  Did I want a new pair of water sports shorts and a Magnum ice cream to throw on the shop floor because Frenchie was treating himself to presents and was not indulging me, his wife, who should be treated at every possible opportunity and on a regular basis?  Yes.

So, having bought the shop's entire stock, and tiptoed away from the quickly melting chocolate splodges, we retired to a food court to sit in our waterproof hats, waterproof shorts, sun block and life jackets to mull over about whether we actually did want to go sea kayaking or not...

Obviously we did, sillies.

Sea kayaking with Frenchie was a lot of fun because he insisted on doing all the paddling, allowing me to lie back, sunbathe and sea swim.  I tried to offer to help, but he was adamant that he could do it all by himself.

Really insistent.

I offered many times to help.
 
At one point, I did have a small panic about the impending Great Shift and tried to swim to one of the container ships and escape to a life of piracy and adventure, but they were too far away and my arms got tired.


Swim, little Ems!  Swim!

This was all so much fun that we vowed to return the next week to re-live Frenchie's outdoorsy childhood by hiring what Frenchie sold to me as a vehicle of great nostalgic wonder and freedom; a boat of delicacy and wind-through-your-hair-ness bound to make me feel like Mrs. Ainslie on a weekend getaway.  This boat was called a Laser, and we booked one for the following week, only to find out that it was a boat of death threats, panic and fear.

Looks so innocent: actually boat of trauma.

In the taxi to the beach, our conversation went a little something like this:

Frenchie: I cannot wait to go sailing.  I 'av loved sailing since I was a leeetle boy.
Me: Me too!  How exciting that I married a man wealthy enough to own a boat!
Frenchie: ... zat is not -

Me: So romantic and charming and handsome and manly!  Sigh  Yes, so happy to have married such a manly man.
Frenchie: ...Yes... a boat...

The conversation whilst getting into the boat, however, went a little like this:

Mana Mana Man: don't touch the boom, please.
Me: but it's about to decapitate me.
Frenchie: don't touch ze boom, Emma.
Me: but - !

Once in the boat

Me: I'm so glad you know what you're doing.  I am pooing my pants.  The boom is out to get me.
Frenchie: ... know what I'm doing?  I don't know what I'm doing.  I 'av not sailed since I was a leeetle boy.

So, turns out that despite the above charming and convincing pose, Frenchie had in fact not sailed for a significant period of time, and so the initial part of the trip was spent with me rupturing a disk in my spine because I was so tense staring unfalteringly at the boom that was bound to swing violently my way at any moment and knock me unconscious into the water where I would get sliced into a thousand pieces by the rudders of other boats and kite surfers.  This paralysis was interspersed with me throwing myself onto all fours in the middle of the boat as Frenchie yelled, 'Get down!  Get down!' at me, like a WW2 officer, whilst I adopted a foetal position, protecting my head as if sheltering from shellfire during a Normandy landing.  On top of this, the boat was quite small, so at the slightest incomprehensible unbalancing, it threatened to capsize and we had to lean back in the removing-skinny-jeans-when-calves-are-a-little-bit-fatter-than-normal pose, or hunch forward in the just-a-few-more-minutes-and-I'm-sure-this-poo-will-want-to-come-out pose.

It was all very stressful (but to be fair, Frenchie did a very good job).

Luckily, we're going back next week and this time, to avoid Frenchie holding the rope between his teeth whilst navigating, I am going to be in charge of the rudder.  That's right.  Me.  The girl who cries when learning how to reverse park or when trying to figure out how aeroplanes get off the ground, or apples fall from trees.

Excited!

Who's in Charge?

So.  This post is entirely not about Vietnam, Singapore, or any other South East Asian or Australasian destination, just a short rant, accompanied by some pictures.  Apologies for the false advertising in the blog address.  I'll name the next one emmagetspissedoffwiththepatriarchy.blogspot.com.

Now I know that a lot of people might be boooooooooooooooored with me going on about that outdated feminism thing, some so much so that they have begun claiming that feminism doesn't exist if I bring it up at the dinner table in an effort to wind me up into silence, but here's a thought I had as a teacher today...

Secondary school is a time where young people learn a great deal.  Before they learn a great deal, teachers have a lot of fun times inside their heads being amused by what they don't already know and by the ways they express themselves.  This week, a 14 year old boy shouted at his friend in one of those awkwardly loud voices at the precise moment when everyone in the class did 'thinking faces' in silence rather than 'discussion voices' to create general hubbub: 'because rabbits are bigger than chickens!'.  Another child shouted, near-hysterically at a group member across the table: 'I know what you're trying to say but it's so difficult to say it in words!'  Yet another confidently told me (having watched the entire movie, completed many comprehension quizzes and spent six weeks studying) in a levelled assessment that half way through the play, Juliet decides to break up with Romeo to do what's best for her family.  And today, a young man looked at a piece of scrap paper I had given him with a quiz printed on one side, showed me the mumbo jumbo on the scrap side and said, 'sorry, what am I supposed to do with this?'  We did a workshop on how to turn a piece of paper over, and it was like the Age of Enlightenment had dawned in his teenage world. 

Young people are so wonderful and I am very privileged to work with them, but what's true is that between the ages of 11 and 18, they still don't know what to do when their laptop battery dies when they are sitting next to a plug socket, they need clear explanations as to why 'little rolled clusters, like sausages' is a sexual innuendo, they think that Queen Victoria was queen of all Europe and they pronounce the word 'distraught' as 'distraughted' and spell it 'distrort' despite you repeating the word to them slowly and clearly and accepting that it's a funny old spelling and so spelling it out for them at least three times.  There are unlimited things that kids simply do not know.

What they do know, however, is the answer to this question: 'Who was in charge at this point?'  I have to have this conversation every single time I teach a new text in order to talk about social and historical context, to talk about power balances, to talk about character relationships, to talk about 'voice', to talk about empathy, to talk about imagery, to talk about writer's intention, and you know what?  Without a shadow of hesitation, every single child aged 11-18 can confidently, without preparation or revision, respond with 'The men'.

They don't know where that knowledge has come from; they don't know why It is Like This.  You ask them who is 'in charge' in their house, and a lot of them will say, 'MUM', but you ask them who is 'in charge' in life and they say 'MEN'.  That fact is something deep and ingrained into their inherent understanding of life, and in my job, all I seem to do is confirm this fact, through great works of literature.  Just to show you that I'm not making this up, let's have a look at the texts I've taught this year and the men in charge (and if you are a teacher of any subject, I challenge you to do the same):

Greek Myths: Zeus



King of Shadows: Shakespeare



Short Stories: Travis, The Mean Sheriff, Mr. Maloney (though he gets his comeuppance), the crazy and unreliable male narrator



Advertising: MEN



War Poetry: MEN



The Sorrow of War: Kien and other Vietnamese MEN

 (This is Bao Ninh, the author, rather than Kien the character, just to clarify - there are three narrative voices in this text, one of which may possibly be his, or all of them... whatever you decide)

The Quiet American: Fowler and other white MEN



Regeneration: MEN

Hedda Gabler: Brack and other Norwegian MEN (eventually)



Death and the Maiden: Chilean MEN (to begin with and then eventually)



Poetry from Other Cultures: Korean fathers, Vietnamese patriarchy, white South African MEN, Jamaican MEN, Pakistani patriarchy

Macbeth: medieval Scottish MEN



Romeo and Juliet: Lord Capulet, Lord Montague, Tybalt, Romeo





A Midsummer Night's Dream: Oberon, Theseus, Egeus



Of Mice and Men: the Boss and all the men who own/are mean to Curley's Wife



I'm the King of the Castle: Mr. Hooper



All My Sons: Joseph and Chris Keller



It is quite literally exhausting.  It doesn't matter what time period I'm teaching, what country, what genre of text: Q: 'Who is in charge at this point?'  A: 'The men!'

The only texts that buck the trend are the Cuban poem Mother and Holes, where the Warden is in charge.  Thank goodness, even though she is mean and eventually outsmarted by a teenage boy.  Let's take a moment to thank Sigourney Weaver, as the Warden, for being a heinous bitch and putting it out there for female authority:



That's right, Sigourney: deny them water.  Deny those convicts water.  They deserve it for being born part of the oppressive force.  Deny them water in floral.  Deny them with that braid.  Abuse that new-woman power.  They've got it coming to them.

Let's get back on track! I don't want to present an argument that suggests that there are no women in the texts I teach and that I don't spend hours and hours and hours of my life talking about women's issues like pregnancy and misogyny and objectification and female empowerment and maternal instincts and gender neutrality and taking on masculine traits and discussing why it's inappropriate to make lewd comments about the woman licking an ice cream in the Magnum advert.  But check out that list of topics: any conversations that do focus on the significant women in the text - here they all are: Curley's Wife, Hedda, Paulina, Kate Keller, Annie, Mrs. Kingshaw, Lady Macbeth, Juliet, Helena, Hermia, Titania, Sarah Lumb, Mrs. Maloney - focus on how these women fit the social expectations of their time, or break out of them.  Breaking out of them might make them 'in charge' temporarily, but by the end of the play./novel/poem/article/advert/film, this always ends badly (Hedda, Lady Macbeth, Juliet - suicide; Curley's Wife - death; Mrs. Kingshaw - loss of her son; Annie - broken engagement) or with the  restoration of the patriarchy and a wedding/traumatic repression of voice.  Regardless of any 'breaking out' that may be happening, the mere concept and need to 'break out' or 'rebel' or 'refuse to fulfil' necessitates that there is something in charge to 'break' or 'rebel against' or 'refuse', i.e. the patriarchy!

In the texts, I teach, the children look up, essentially, and what they see is male.  And they know that it is good and right and proper and the Way Things Are.

Is this a curriculum issue, or is this society, or is this just me?

On the plus side: my job looks very cool when you put it into pictures like this, regardless of the gender of the protagonists.

Done.  Thanks for reading.

ThurSkate

Hello. This week I have decided to consider taking up roller derby.  For those of you who are not American, or have not seen the film Whip It, roller derby is a sport introduced to me by my dearest friend Courtney, who communicated its wonder through the medium of fancy dress parties and pseudonyms.  With such an introduction, I was sold. 

As far as I understand (and admittedly, at this stage, I don't understand very much), this is a sport that involves being kick-ass and aggressive on quad roller skates, skating around and around in a circle and elbowing other people out of the way, like pushing in the lunch queue, to earn points by over-taking members of the other team.

Wow. Think of all the ingrained behaviours that this sport will allow me to subvert!  

Ingrained British behaviour: "Oh dear, that looks awfully boisterous. I think I'll sit this one out and have a cup of tea. Monopoly's my competitive sport, what, what!"

Roller Derby behaviour: "Bring it!"

Ingrained British behaviour: "Let's just wait patiently behind these ladies until it's our turn. I do love a good queue. It gives one such precious time to reflect on the beauty of small things."

Roller Derby behaviour: "MOVE, bitch!"

Exciting!

The reason for considering such a new skill is due to the impending months of thumb twiddling/friendlessness that is likely to accompany the Great Shift, which is the name I am giving to my move from Saigon to Brisbane via Singapore, which, were it included in a work of literature, would represent many a thing, like my transition from Northern to Southern Hemisphere, one person to two person meal preparation and, if there turns out to be nothing better to do, strategic baby avoidance to strategic baby expelling.  So multilayered.  I thought this Shift would be a great time to invest in all those things that I've always wanted to do, but never had the balls/time/opportunity: write a book that no one will read, paint a picture to hang in the downstairs toilet, learn to make my own bassoon reeds and, of course, join a roller derby team. 

Roller derby, I think, is the sport for me. It will allow me to build a friend-base of like minded, aggressive, intimidatingly sized, tattoed women and it will allow me to nurture one of the following doppelgängers (you have to have a sort of, beasty stage name to be a roller derby-er):

1. The Killer Queen

2. The EMMAncipator

3. ExtrEMMAsis

4. Danger-Dechans

What do you think?  Votes cast on your preferred form of social media, please.  Once I have my name, all I have to do is skate confidently and really fast. This is a small barrier to my success, I feel, especially as this week saw the inauguration of my new all-inclusive club, ThurSkate, which takes place at this magical Vietnamese roller disco:

Wow!  I mean, really, WOW!  Once we had discovered this venue of great wonder, Shining Shamrock, Slender Laurel, Poker Face and myself, the founding members of ThurSkate, ate barbeque and jumped on our scooters, whizzing through the Saigon night for our first try at quad skating. 

Oh, what a joy it was!  The skates: amazingly old school and smelly.  The staff: completely bemused by our presence.  The clientele: at least ten years our junior. The music: oh, the music!  For a long time I have not been blessed with the intensity of Vietnamese disco beats this roller disco had to offer and yea verily, it was entirely appropriate to the setting, including the brief moment where the Vietnamese lyrics stopped and the singer introduced the chorus with a determined, 'fuck you'. If I'd understood the rest of the song, I'm sure this would have made sense, but as it was, this unexpected little expletive broke my concentration and I fell onto my bum, arms wheeling madly like a panicking seagull.  

Check it out!  The scene is so disco, you can't even differentiate people from awesomeness.

My bruised bum was the only casualty of the evening, though; the rest of the night was spent going round and around and around and around on skates, staring at my toes and the floor about 50cm in front of me, and holding my arms out in a sort of unstable scarecrow pose. 

I, for one, think I'm going to be ready for roller derby in no time...

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

Works of sublime talent and beauty by leading Vietnamese artists:

... no words...

Thanks, Vietnam!  You sure know how to put on an exhibition worthy of this blog!