Should have had that Anti-TET-ness shot!

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Tet was pretty chaotic, well, the lead-up was absolutely chaotic, and in this city that's a big call! The fireworks on New Year's Eve were seen through a thick haze, some internal, some external. The closer ones we could see quite well, the further away ones, well....

Tet is the lunar new year by the Chinese calendar, although here it is claimed as local, and it's the year of the rabbit here, the year of the cat in China. There's a bit of an anti Chinese feeling here but quite subtle.

No overly obvious sentient sentiment evident but by choice the locals seem to prefer buying things from anywhere rather than China.

One curiously sleep-depriving feature of Tet is the karaoke machines, everyone has one and everyone gets a go, and all night. From the youngest babes-in-arms to the geriatrics, everyone bellows out these painfully tortured wailathons, and there will be several competing for your sleep as all the surrounding houses are going at it hammer and tongs.

Cat From Hell
The end of the top floor where I sleep has a doorway out onto the verandah. There's a solid door and a security door, steel to waist high then an open grill for the top half. The other night I woke about 3am, not the karaoke this time, and heard a scratching noise outside on the verandah. Burgulars I thought. I grabbed the torch and swung open the solid door. Nothing. I flashed the torch around but no sign of anything. Then the bloody cat, that must have been locked out, suddenly launched itself up and leapt through the grill straight at me. I nearly shat myself.
This cat, well, what can I say? At least I haven't seen any rats in the house. But neither have I seen the cat actually catch one. It is the most antisocial animal I have ever encountered and makes an awful, strangulated meowing at all hours of the day and night. Any attempt at patting and she claws and bites like a banshee. Draws blood from the unwary. It only eats one brand of food, Ayam brand, lite tuna in spring water, anything else and she throws it up. Usually in a walkway, usually in the dark.

Whether
The weather has changed again, warmer but wetter. Out on the roads, as soon as the rain starts, most riders stop and whip on a plastic poncho. Now the streets are a mass of flapping, plastic, fantastic, fauxvercoats in all the colours of a poor painters easel.

Traffic Tinnitus
It is quite noisy all the time. Up on the dyke road, about 50 m away there's a constant muffled roar of traffic. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, relentless. Sometimes it could almost be a soothing, distant surf sound, except for the constant beeping of tinny horns. It becomes more of a traffic tinnitus, once you concentrate on it, you can't shut it out.

More Noise
And the other night, (another other night), i woke to the sound of sheets of corrugated iron being hurled from the fourth floor of the house next door and crashing onto the concrete. WTF? It wasn't, of course, but I still have no idea what was going on.

And also, constant dog barking, it diminished over Tet when a lot of them were eaten, but there's always more. Just a pity the fucker that bit me wasn't eaten. We park the motorbikes in the yard of the house across the v narrow lane, one afternoon I was peaking the bike and this big old alsation bitch snuck up behind me and latched onto my leg, as soon as I turned around she nicked off and the woman of the house came running as I was yelling abuse at the dog....I wanted to kill it but she indicated that she would take care of it...she was holding the persuader, a metre length of rebar, I could hear a series of whelps as I staunched the bleeding. The next time I saw my doctors I told them, and showed them the holes in my leg, when I asked them what I should do they had two pieces of advice...1. Go see a doctor (hahaha) and 2 watch the dog, if it's rabid it will die in 3 days!! How reassuring! It seemed to heal OK but I've got a hole in my jeans and a big scar in my calf.
And roosters, the same brief lull over Tet as they were cooked up but now they are back. Lots of wild birds and lots in cages, all contributing their little bit of racket to the mix. How did I get from the peace and quiet of Brogo to here? Good question. And now I'm going to come back in June and settle for a year or three.

Work
I started work. (Yes, I know). Teaching English. Working through an agency I have a group of 4 recently graduated doctors and a few privateers who have signed up. I think ill end up with 7 or 8. They have done their basic English so can maintain a basic conversation and best of all, they get humor! It is so good. I love it! The first night was arduous as I haven't done this before but by the second session they, and I, have relaxed a bit. They are so keen to learn and they are all very intelligent so it is a pleasure and a privilege to be working with them.
After class last night I went over to the Oz embassy where they have a mediocre bar and a bunch of dickheads. Last night was a Queensland flood fundraiser. What about the Victorians, I asked.

Free Radical Market
For most of the shopping I love heading off to the market. There is one just over the dyke road, walking distance, filled with the most amazing selection of fruits and veggies and meat and fish, and herbs. Everything is either alive, freshly killed or straight out of the garden. The back section has low slung plastic tarps hanging off shaky bamboo poles. I have to stoop to get around and now leave the bike helmet on as I have to concentrate on not stepping in someones produce, or a puddle of mud and bash my head against a post. The market people get a few laughs out of me!
It is one of the very best things about this country, the people are inevitably friendly. Ok, sometimes you might piss someone off but by and large they are so tolerant, so polite and obliging. And although it is not of their nature to smile or give much facial expression at all, when you do smile at them they always smile back and the way their faces light up is fantastic. It is quite humbling.
Watching my students working out what to them must be an inordinately difficult language is brilliant. You can see the cogs turning, the faces grimacing, brows furrowed, then out comes the sentence, grammar, stress, pronunciation all perfect...whoo hoo. What a treat to be here.
I am 'their regular' teacher, with a change of spacing I am 'the irregular' teacher, hmmm

Out on the road this morning I saw lots of empty cumquat trees going home. Part of the Tet thing is every house has to get a cumquat tree. They are grown in various locations around the city and in the weeks before Tet, dug up, stressed to fruit and planted in shallow pots. The fruit is sprayed with something that keeps the fruit ripe for a few weeks! Then the fruit is either used for jam, I made some marmalade, or chucked out and the trees are returned to the plots and put back in the ground!

Crikey, that was all so long ago. Now it's April already and I'm down south in Nha Trang babysitting HQ so D&H can have a break.

I was working with another group of doctors in one of the big hospitals in Hanoi, a couple of hours, a couple of nights a week. Just fantastic and really fun work, I'm hoping to get something like that on a regular basis when I get back in June. They work 24 hour shifts and the overcrowding is unbelievable, for every patient in a bed there are 6-8 family members crowded around them, they have to bring meals to the patients and many have come a long way from out in the country and are understandably scared and unsure, I wonder how the patients feel.

The Sham Cham Scam
We hired 3 faux Chinese "choppers" and a taxi and made a trip to Dalat last week. A family of 6, a family of 2.5 and moi. Lovely country but what a sore arse! The roads are in pretty good condition until you hit the bad parts, usually unexpectedly, but the whole trip took me back to the motorcycle diaries journey through the Americas, however long ago that was.

We were discussing the possibility of getting an acre or two, about 40 kms out of Nha Trang, on this beautiful river, gum trees even, build a little house with a shed for the groundsman, time share and all that, retirement home jajaja

We visited a supposed Cham village, just out of Dalat, the Cham, an ethnic minority were shuffled off many years ago, like most of the minority tribes they have been pretty securely fcuked over, but I can't say too much or I won't get another visa....but this place was something else. From the Esplanade-style hippie bead stalls and massively ornate mock entrance gates, across the pseudo-but-genuinely-shaky rope bridge, the stuffed animals, the stuffed tourists, really big and absurdly inauthentic concrete animals, and then, aha, a genuine (?) Cham hut, and a almost genuine Cham woman doing the most beautiful weaving, small sacks of sand tied to strings that held bunches of thread, she would lift several of them up do a few lines, lower others....she told me she can do 1.5 metres in a day, she was humiliatingly sweet and polite, I felt really bad that I couldn't buy one of her scarves, or even more, that I couldn't talk to her about her people, their miserable, displaced lives, where her family were now.....jajaja

Further on, we came to the Traditional Cham Sports area where you could fire a slug gun at small dolls about half a metre from the end of the barrel, fire arrows from a traditional plastic bow at a large billboard with an eagle and a tiger barely visible through the million holes punched into it, then the javelins, thrown at a log....probably the one almost traditional thing there, then the small plastic handled slingshots....ayayay those Chams were really something.....then on to the ostrich ride, I kid you not, four utterly mangy but huge ostriches, and you always thought they came from S Africa, didn't you? some people took a circuit of the cage atop these giant turkeys, kept under control by viscous punches to the head by the boy, and then the elephant ride whoo hoo....then it was a dodgey local ice cream and back to the top via the cable car, I tell you what ....

Anyway, back in Nha Trang and I'd better get something to blog before I forget where I am.

Back to Oz next Thursday at 6.30am.

I still can't upload pix from this limited iPad although I am getting used to the keyboard, I had a go on a regular keyboard the other day, I was pounding away, what a lot of work...and no self-correction....slacker and slacker gets the day....

I'll post some pix when I get back to the lappo.....chau

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