aint nothin going on but the rent...

A few weeks ago I took a trip with Matt and Alex (two other teachers) to Ba Vii national park, about 40km out of Hanoi. I hadn’t really been out of the city since I went away at the beginning of September so it was nice to get out on the open roads and see some of the Vietnamese countryside madness…psychotic truck drivers, entire families piled onto tiny motorbikes, cows being transported by bicycles…that kind of thing. Ba Vii itself is lovely, pretty hilly so it’s a steep climb on my bike, to the extent that on more than one occasion I ran out of gears and had to push. However, this was more than made up for by being able to freewheel for an hour on the way back down out of the park…no traffic, no bike engine noise, just gliding and avoiding the drop on every bend….

On the way home we stopped for food in a small country village…Alex received a lot of attention because she has long blonde Nordic looking hair, Matt received attention for being too big to sit in the local furniture for more than ten minutes without it collapsing on him, and I became perhaps the first foreigner in the village to have his hair cut at the yoghurt shop/hairdressers…we were a bit of a freak show that day but it was good fun and she did a good job with my hair…on the way home I hit the rush hour traffic and got a puncture…I pulled off the road to a repair shop and eight minutes and a couple of dollars later I was back tearing through Hanoi…

The following week I went to the movies to see ‘Surrogates’ starring Bruce Willis…it was dreadful, absolutely awful…I wish i'd had a surrogate of my own to send to see it....then on the Sunday I went to a launch party at some fancy restaurant up on west lake…the place was heaving largely due to the free bar (there seems to be a lot of this going on lately). Afterwards we went to Karaoke at a dodgy karaoke/knocking shop (its hard to find a legitimate joint after midnight) and got into a spot of bother with the owner after she tried to charge us 150 dollars for 3 hours of Karaoke…As we poured out into the street at 5am it turned a bit nasty as some of her staff ran off to a building site to get weapons…still it came to nothing eventually…we compromised, she compromised, the lads put the bricks down….

Last weekend I went to Sapa in North Vietnam with some friends from Saigon. It was a really good weekend, a spot of hiking, lots of motorbiking round the mountains…whisky in the evening, that sort of thing. The scenery on the far side of the Tram Ton pass is awesome and as its also one of the warmest spots in Vietnam it was strange riding around at such altitude whilst the weather was so hot. In contrast the Sapa side of the pass is the coldest place in VN and the quick change in temperatures made me a bit ill on the last day.

At work we’ve had some new teachers start,who seem nice , but i wonder how needed they are when I and others haven't been teaching that many hours...which isn’t particularly good, but I still have 9 months of my contract left so I’ll be able to make them up, especially when I get back to Saigon in January. On Thursday a load of us when to the launch party of a new bar, free mojitos and food. The bar is actually a sequel to our local neighbourhood bar, a cool little place that makes goodn cocktails and serves burgers the size of your head.

On Saturday night we had a big Halloween party at our house. One of my housemates, CJ, organised it. It was a really good party, I knew a load of people who were up from Saigon to do a charity bike ride so they came along and between the five of us living in the house we mustered up a huge crowd. A pretty mixed bunch, people from work, people from the pub, westerners, Vietnamese…it was sweet. In the past six weeks or so I’ve really been getting in to living in Hanoi…it’s perhaps not such a dull city after all…

In four weeks i'll be back in England. I'll be home for a month. Looking forward to seeing everyone when i get back...

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