Chickens IKEA Bangkok

I didn't fire the maid.  

Another expat woman who volunteers at the orphanage and is very cynical after too many years in Vietnam said to me that if the maid was recommended by the landlady then I should get rid of her immediately, since the landlady will have put her in there to spy on us. 

I thought that was a pretty extreme position, but it demonstrates how bitter people an get after they've been here for quite a while.  She's been here 9 years to my one-and-a-bit, so I hope I've got a little while to go yet. 

Anyway, the reason I didn't fire the maid is just because of this: 

 That'll be me next to the guy in the suit. 

 

In other news, when we were in Singapore we bought some bed linen, because we didn't have very much, and what we did have didn't fit our king sized bed. It is pretty much impossible to buy bedding that isn't 100% polyester, and garish colors in Vietnam.  And even if you can find tasteful stuff, chances are it will be extremely expensive and the largest size you can get is queen size anyway.  

This is because Vietnamese people don't sleep in beds like ours.  They sleep on the floor, sometimes on fold away mattresses, with only a quilt to cover them.  All bedding is folded away during the day.  Most houses are too small for huge western style beds anyway, and most bedding is person sized, not bed sized.  Western style beds and bedding a considered luxury items and come with luxury price tags to match - appealing to the nouveau riche who are happy to pay A LOT for their luxuries. 

I have no explanation for the color choices though except to say that Vietnamese people really like bright colors. As many bright colors as possible. 

Anyway, so in Singapore we went to IKEA. We thought we were so awesomely grown up - we even measured our bed before we left Vietnam to be sure we'd get the right sizes. That's how organized we were. 

We chose these duvet sets:

 

Aren't they nice?  They don't fit, of course.  They exactly the same size as the mattress.  I felt pretty stupid when I realized that I hadn't made any allowance for the overhang - so at the moment we're playing tug of war in our sleep. 

 Luckily, we're going to Bangkok this weekend, where I am reliably informed by my office mate who has done EXACTLY this (buy the wrong size bedding at IKEA Singapore, then buy the right size bedding at IKEA Bangkok) there is an IKEA and it stocks king size bedding sets. 

Yes, Bangkok! Martin is going for work, so I am going to tag along and stay in the work-paid-for hotel room, visit temples, shop at IKEA and try to revive my Thai language skills. Poor Martin will have to work so I'll be doing all the touristy stuff by myself, but getting a weekend in Bangkok kind of makes up for being an advertising widow for once, n'est ce pas? 

(Tiger vs Lions) vs (Ninjas vs Pirates)

 Mr Martin and I got a little philosophical at the white tiger enclosure at Singapore Zoo.

The question of the day was: who would win in an epic battle between tigers and lion?  We definitely think the tigers would win. Apart from the fact that they're bigger, tigers are tough guys. Tigers will eat you for the fun of it.

Ninjas vs pirates? No competition.  Pirates won't even see them coming.

Your votes in the comments, please!

PS:

For the Dr Who fans with guitar fetishes

 Do you like Dr Who?  While Martin was in NZ in December I watched almost all of the new Dr Who series on bootleg DVDs. 

If you are a Dr Who fan you will know what I thought when I saw this photo among the dozens of photos of guitars Martin took in Singapore.  It's the Weeping Angel guitar! 

 

Best not to avert your gaze...

Fish food

 We had an hour or so at Singapore airport after checking in.
Oh Singapore! Singapore was a little bit difficult for me, truth be told. I was stressed before we left, and Singapore itself is hardly a relaxing place.  I got annoyed with the way the Singapore government seems to be so preoccupied with keeping the traffic moving, that they think nothing of making pedestrians walk for 6 kilometers just to get across the road.
There are shopping malls parked over most of the city subway stops.  So you get off the subway, and then suddenly you are trapped in a shopping malls.  Sometimes, it was as if our holiday was a weird 6-day long version of Mall Rats, with occasional zoo breaks.
We had hot, sore feet the whole time.  Jandals weren't cutting it, so we were wearing trainers a lot. Believe me, you're making a sad choice when you're deciding between sweaty sore jandals, or socks in 35 degree heat.
So at the airport, we fed ourselves to the fishes.

They did a REALLY good job at removing all the horrible dead skin from my feet. (Aren't you glad you know that?) It tickled quite a bit in the beginning, but you get used to it.
Mr Martin liked it too.

 PS: Mr Martin has taken to referring to me as Mrs Grits on the Internet. What do we think of this? The rational is that his moniker is HotGrits, so therefore I am Mrs Grits.  Wondering if I should start calling him Mr Grits instead.

Mr Martin gets a big balloon

On Sunday night we walked from Little India kind of aimlessly until we suddenly found ourselves in town outside the front of the art school. We're in Singapore, and it's Chinese New Year. Sunday night was the night before the first day of the festival, and there was a feeling of calm anticipation in the air.

And then suddenly a woman gave us a giant helium balloon.

 We weren't the only people to be handed big balloons, there were a bunch of them around the place. Im not sure whether the balloons were city funded new year thing, or an art project. But whatever they were, they were a lot of playful fun.

 It was also an opportunity to practice our interpretive dance skills.

 And after all that excitement our balloon led us through some zen-like moments of quiet contemplation:

Earlier in the day we had been lucky enough to see Van Gogh's painting "Starry Night" as part of a temporary exhibit at the National Museum.

I was reminded of the painting as we watched somebody else's released balloon swimming into the murky night between the treetops above us.

Finally just as we were wondering what we were going to do with a balloon so huge that both of us could have fit inside it, we were approached by a pair of young girls who wanted to know where to get a balloon from.

Here's to wishing that your water dragon year is filled with moments of playful absurdity.

Katrina (doing the p p pigeon) in Hanoi

So last weekend I went up north in search of crisp uniforms and temperate climes.

I went up on Thursday night by myself - arriving at the very annoying time of midnight - so as to be available bright and early in the morning for meetings for work.  I got my first taste of crisp uniforms straight away on Friday morning.  In Hanoi, the security guards are an altogether more serious affair than in Saigon. Because I was early, I had ten minutes to observe the security guard at the gate of the hospital campus where my meetings were to be held.

On the hospital campus in Saigon the security guards are sort of dishevelled looking.  They don't wear hats.  Sometimes they wave a bit at people, but mostly they are just there to hold the gate open and tell you where to park. The Hanoi security guard is different.  He wears a hat, and polished leather belt.  He holds a loudhailer and you can't see his eyes because he's wearing enormous, opaque aviators.

Not the hospital guy - but these guys were out taking their loudhailer
for a walk on Saturday so I snapped a shot - for you!

The hospital guy was a classic bully. He buzzed his loudhailer at nearly everyone in his vicinity (including me) and barked orders down it at people who were standing not 3 metres away from him. But the thing that surprised me was that nobody seemed to care.  If anything, he was welcome. People needed him to tell them what to do.

So that was weird.

Temperate climes were also easy to find.

By the lake in the afternoon.  Seriously - it was almost cool!

Hanoi is at least as far away from Saigon as Invercargill is from Auckland, and the difference in weather is noticeable.  At this time of year, Hanoi is delightful.  It's warm enough that you can still go sleeveless, but cool enough that you can wear jeans and walk around and not feel like you're going to melt. Even in the middle of the day!  And as we all know - I am a complete wuss about being too hot, or too cold.

Martin flew up after work on Friday night, and so we spent the weekend there together.  Really the only dull part of the whole weekend was that I had a cold and so with all the snuffling and wheezing I kept running out of steam.  I'm glad I toughed it out though - because there was some really cool stuff to see.

Like the ethnology museum:

There was an extremely embarrased bunch of

teenage boys hamming it up around this exhibit. Of course. 

 

You probably can't tell, but I'm throwing my goat  buffalo here.
Total lady-rocker.

 Waka?

The Temple of Literature

and of course...


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wait for it...
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wait for it!
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The tanks!

Ha!  Hope I didn't get you too excited, there!

In the eternal competition that is Hanoi vs Saigon, Hanoi wins because there's a cafe at the war museum.  Saigon would be way better if its war museums had cafes. Or if any of its museums had cafes.  It there was a cafe at Remnants, then next time I got visitors I could just send them off with a packet of tissues each and calmly sip my coffee-flavoured sweetened condensed milk until they returned. All harrowed. I wouldn't even have to get sore feet.

And I didn't get sore feet at this one either, because I just sat and sipped my drink and emailed pictures of my husband to my mother-in-law from my ipod.

This little trip was different from our usual weekend trips as well, because this time we had friends to meet.  I imposed on both Helen from Blue Dragon to entertain me on Friday night, and Tabitha (and Nathan - you only get parentheses Nathan, because you don't actually write the blog!) from The City That Never Sleeps In on Saturday.  Helen deserves a medal for looking after me on Friday night - when my exhaustion had loosened my tongue so much she couldn't get a word through my incessant slurring.

And Tabitha?  Well - she fed us pigeons!

My grandfather was a pigeon man you know.  It felt terribly wrong.  It felt like it should have had a real stiff drink of secret pigeon loft whisky to wash it down.  (I settled for rice wine and licking my fingers.)


Here's one for the Sesame Street fans.  My grandmother used to sing this to me!

Dear Phil - lunch in the Philippines

Our trip to the Philippines way back in May involved lunch at a tropical island.

Being the Philippines, lunch involved meat, with more meat and meat on the side.  And being an island, most of the meat came from animals that live in the sea.  (What do you mean chicken isn't a sea bird?)

Here's a shot of our conveyance:

The two little huts in the background behind me were our restaurant.  This restaurant is extra special for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, when you step off your boat you are ushered towards another hut opposite which features a live seafood market.

Don't you just love the way the gentleman in this picture is fondling his cods while talking to me?

The idea is that you go to the market and pick out the things you like, and they will barbecue them there on the spot.  We were a large group, and our organisers had arranged a set menu, so this part of the experience was really more for show so far as we were concerned. The big ticket item at the market is clearly the sea mantis.  

It looks kind of like a lobster, and probably tastes like it too - but we didn't buy one.  The sea mantises are only put out on the market table when a boat pulls in. As soon as the potential customers have moved they are put back in the water at the shore.  They're not released, though.  The fishermen use 600ml plastic soft-drink bottles to store their catch. They put a split down the length of the bottle, shove the animal in, and let the slit close around it.  Then they put the bottles in a net in the shore.  The fish can't escape, and stay alive until the next boat comes in.

A bag of bottled sea mantises under the water at the shore.

One guy at the market also had a bowl with three or four stone fish in it, which was surprising.  There are quite a lot of different varieties of stone fish, and some of them are very poisonous. I'm not sure whether these ones were poisonous or not - but I think that they are probably not what you would call a sustainable catch.  They were pretty amazing to look at up close - their skin had a mossy green texture and really resembled seaweed.   The stone fish are stored in the same manner as the sea mantises.

I was pretty glad that our set menu didn't contain any of these more exotic creatures. I'm an adventurous eater but don't really like to eat (or buy!) endangered species. Our food was really delicious.  Definitely one of the freshest most delicious barbecues of my life.

As memorable as the food was - probably the most fun part of this restaurant was the fact that it doesn't have a floor. Instead, the tables and chairs are just plonked directly into the sand - and in the high tide, that means in the water.

The waterlogged beach was like quicksand, so for the first few minutes you gradually sink until a kind of equilibrium is reached. After our meal, we just walked out into the water for a postprandial snoozy kind of swim.

A lot can happen in a month

Today is the 22nd, which means it's been almost a month since I've signed in here to give you all an update on my wee life.

Actually a lot has happened.  First of all, Mummy and Nana finally came to visit!

We failed to pose for a family photo, of course. This is the best I've got of all 3 generations together.

It was quite the family reunion with my grandmother coming from Abu Dhabi and my mother coming from Hamilton in NZ. 

We went to Hoi An, which meant walking in ruins:

My mother wore this orange t-shirt, which was wonderful because she kept wandering off and it made her easy to spot.
I suggest if you have a toddler with wanderlust that you clothe them entirely in day-glo.

Restaurants:

Going on a boat:

Some beach time:

And psychedelia with geodes at the Marble Mountain gift shop:

Nana was spotted stuffing dong into the pockets of the girl who was leading her around the gift-shop.  As we were leaving the girl said to me: "Your grandmother very good!".  It was a mutually rewarding transaction - Nana says the Vietnamese are very friendly.

We learned that Mr Martin never naps during the day, much as he'd like to.  Poor dear.

We had a few days in Saigon too.  There was some eating:

Some marketing:

What is this? Spotted at Benh Thanh market. Is it sea slugs?  Is it food?

And of course, a cyclo ride:

On the cyclo, Nana was urging the driver to "Go faster! Go faster!" - so she ended up way ahead of us.

My Nana is 75 years old and managed just fine getting around considering that Vietnam is a challenging environment even for young, fit people.  Of course, the heat was difficult, and we had booked a tour to Cham Island not realising that getting on an off the boat was going to be too much of an ask for Nana's knees, so unfortunately she couldn't come along that day.  However, she was quite happy to have a day resting in the air-conditioning and cafes of the hotel.

Hoi An was the perfect place for us all to go and relax, as the streets are easy to walk on and there are plenty of cafes and shops to stop in where the staff have very good English and are used to dealing with older tourists.  We were very well looked after for the entire course of our stay - especially by the staff of my own apartment building who really went out of their way to make sure they were looked after.  A celebrity in my own neighbourhood, I have been asked by complete strangers in stores and on the street about how my parents are doing, and am still being asked now, 3 weeks after they have left.

My mother is still young and so the trip was not physically too much of a challenge for her, and she seemed to love every minute of it. I think we will probably see her again - maybe next year!

If you have parents or grandparents thinking of coming but who might be worried about it being difficult - encourage them to come anyway.  I am too young to remember the Vietnam War, but my mother and grandmother both do remember (and my Great-Uncle served 3 tours here for the Australian army) and I think for them seeing the recovery in the country and experiencing generosity and hospitality of the Vietnamese was really amazing. And I really can't stress enough how much care and attention my grandmother received from the locals - there was no chance of anything going wrong!

Snorks

The best part of the Philippines trip for me was the snorkeling.  On the second day, we all went out in boat for an island hopping tour. There is a common kind of tour boat you see in that region. It is not a catamaran exactly, but it has large supports on each side of the hull.  My guess is that they are designed to keep the boat as close to the surface as possible - because the waters from time to time get very shallow as the coral reefs rise beneath.

You can see the coral just beneath the surface in this photo, taken from the side of the boat. 

I am from New Zealand.  Famous for its marine wildlife.  And I am a dyed in the wool rock-pooler.  But I'm from the SOUTH ISLAND of New Zealand, which is also famous for its frigid waters and proximity to Antarctica. And when you combine that with a personality that is distinctly averse to extreme physical exploits ... I've never snorkelled before. And I was DEAD KEEN.

I was so excited that I was gearing myself up to be all disappointed . Because, you know, maybe the sea will be all murky, and all I will see is a submerged coke can and a grimy sea slug.

This is funny: a bunch of people who have never worn them before, trying to put on flippers and then climb down a ladder into the water below - wearing them. Everybody was standing on each others 'toes' and tripping one another up. We looked like a boatload of demented naked penguins.

It was great.  I saw many many fish, and jellyfish and coral. Not one coke can. I am a complete convert/devotee.  Our next long weekend away in Vietnam is going to have to include swimming with the fishes.

No internet? Look out the window.

This is post is brought to you by the wifi at Noa Cafe in the Centec Tower.  Mr Martin, formerly known as RSB (Rock Star Boyfriend) very inconveniently forgot that he band practice tonight. So, as a Good Wife I had to lug two electric guitars to his office. Much to the amusement of the xe om drivers at the end of my street.  Lucky for me they have taken it on as their vocation in life to flag down taxis for me. And now I am having lunch by myself in the cafe, but I can't say I'm that upset about it because not only does Noa have truly great coffee, but it's a chance to squeeze out another one of those posts about the Mekong Delta trip.

Apart from the ubiquitous wily sparrows that seem to own every city in the world and a few mangy pigeons (nothing like the sleek musty birds that used to rub their scent off on my grandfather's hands) I almost never see a bird in Saigon.  Bats - yes.  By the hundred every evening at dusk, but birds not so much. At actually, at the Mekong Delta the birds were not so easy to spot, either. But we could definitely, always hear them.

New Zealand birds are famously stupid when it comes to hiding from potential predators, but getting out of sight and staying out of sight is something their distant Vietnamese relatives are definitely NOT bird-brained about by comparison. The Vietnamese have been too hungry too often to leave the feathered folk alone and the birdies know better than to hang about when someone's watching.  So obviously I didn't get any pictures, but I spent a lot of time gazing out the window saying things like "Big red bird! Big red bird!" and desperately trying to get glimpses of the big blue parrots I could hear cackling in a stand of trees on the next lot.

There was something else I didn't see in Mekong that is everywhere in Saigon - cars. After stepping off the bus on the main highway there was not a car to be seen - not even taxis. We had to get xe om to the tourist pier. It gave us a glimpse of what life in Vietnam was like before cars - and not that long ago, either.  Many of the roads were very narrow - wide enough for two bikes to pass one another but that's all. And they were often in surprising good condition - smooth surfaces that had obviously been swept free of stones and other things that could pierce a thin bicycle tyre.  The local still ride bicycles a lot, and motorbikes, of course. And the ferries (of which there are many) are all designed to carry bikes as well as people.

The sky looks a bit heavy and dark in that photo and it was a bit rainy that weekend.  We had a brilliant electrical storm on the second night, with loud cracks of thunder and fork lightning striking the island across the river. The lodge where we stayed at has a sort of eco-philosophy that translated to some vegetables and fruit growing in the garden on site, wooden chopsticks and no TV or internet (or fridge, which bothered me a bit because I wanted cold water all the time) in our room.  So our options were reading books, talking to each other or staring out the window.  Somehow, staring out the window was never boring for me - especially in the storm.

Our room at night.