friends, you have come to the right place

woohoo my very own travel diary! this will solve everything!

after weeks of listening to people asking me if i'm suitably scared of travelling solo thousands of miles (in a big metal tube 30000 feet up) to a distant, alien land (Vietnam) with strange foreign customs (no patting people on the head)- it's apparently X100 worse than mentioning the war to the Germans) and even weirder food (sticky or dry rice - the interminable question), i have succumbed to their infectious terror. I leave in four weeks time, i have my giant rucksack which i can nicely squeeze into AND zip up, most of my jabs (tetanus is the worst, which is surprising - i thought rabies would be), i'm about to order my US dollars to bribe the custom officials for a visa (I'm in a dodgy, uncomfortable situation where the people i'm going to work for as a teacher (ILA) are sending me a letter in Vietnamese to give to the friendly man weilding a gun at the immigration desk in Saigon).By the way, tieng Viet is possibly the world's most difficult language due to it being tonal, i.e., if i said the last sentence in 'wrong' pitch in said language it would probably insitunate bad things about your mother.... But hey I'm Irish right? The Vietnamese and the Irish are brothers...sorry... 'comrades' in arms right? we all experienced the oppressive hand of the colonial machine and triumphed, finally selling out to fiendish capitalism. surely we have lots to share.

follow my blog updates to track my journey into the wild. i promise surpassing all of your expectations and destroying my misconceptions about this fascinating country. Included will be:

possible prison photography if they let me keep my camera
satanic-driven ramblings about teaching 6-17 year olds
yakkings about my biggest concern in any travel i undertake: food
details of any other trips i make once deported

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