back to Hanoi?

---

Hi from Vietnam…hope everyone is well. Here is an update on all things me…

At the beginning of September my folks came out to Vietnam to see what all the fuss is about. I showed them round HCMC,Danang/Hoi An, Hanoi, and Ninh Binh, taking in plenty of local food, museums, transport and even managed to arrange for our train to hit a truck and derail just outside Hanoi to provide some extra excitement for them..After that we headed to Thailand where we hung around Bangkok, and then headed out to Sayok and Kanchanaburi, where this time I arranged a nightime mystery train ride out into the Thai countryside…each roll of the wagon bough us nearer to a place in the middle of nowhere on the bend of the Kwai river…not sure my mom found that train journey as enjoyable as I really did have no idea where I was taking them…However, all in all it was a fantastic couple of weeks and gave my folks a pretty good insight, certainly into life in Vietnam…and good for them, they embraced it all withou complaint and were up for getting on the bikes in Vietnamese traffic which isn't for the faint hearted. Most teachers seem to have their folks come out to visit them and sometimes on their return to work you'll hear things like 'my dad wouldn't eat anything exept the bread'..or 'my folks were too scared to cross the road and so caught taxis everywhere...i'm proud to say my folks pounded the broken, crowded streets of
SE Asia, got stuck into the food, hell, my Dad even attracted the attentions of alady chef in a Bangkok riverside noodle dive...

After my folks flew out of Bangkok I hooked up with Nick who had been travelling round Thailand at the same time and we headed to Ko Chang, a beautiful Thai island just off the coast of Cambodia. My past experience of Thai islands hadn’t been that great but Ko Chang was amazing. Stunning scenery, nice laid back vibe and nary a pilled up raver in sight…

Other than that and recent trip up north again to Hanoi,(where I did hammered one afternoon with Thuan’s brother-he runs a bia hoi place-) haven’t been up to a mush else…had to put my intended trip to Hong Kong on hold until the new year and I’m also hoping to take a month off and head for a nice long holiday sometime in the spring.

This week I have learnt from my students that it is physically impossible for men to drink tea, and that the reason why no UFOs have ever been sighted in Vietnam is because aliens don’t like Vietnamese people. We also had a long discussion about the use of the word ‘fucking’ as an adverb. It was fucking hilarious. Whilst the downside to this job is that when you’re not really in the mood for work you can’t just go and linger by a photocopier ‘looking busy’ like many of my previous jobs, most of the time I find TEFL pretty enjoyable…At Halloween I had my kid classes design horror movie posters with tag lines…my personal favourite...GHOST CAT (here kitty kitty aaaghhh!) The poster had a picture of a big orange moggie eating a man on a motorbike…it was amazing…

Hope everyone is bearing up ok under the Cameron junta…I always keep up with the news back home…looks like we’re landed with a right bunch of tory bastards…I hope it’s not as bad on the ground as it seems sometimes when I read about it in Vietnam.

In the meantime, all the best…anybody looking to join me on a trip somewhere round Asia in the spring…let me know…or failing that, you might want to consider the Rainforest World Music festival in Borneo next July….

Happy November…

---

Photos

Bangkok
It was at this point my dad said he had never seen The Man with Golden Gun...I on the other hand know for a FACT that he has...

Comments

[Matt]

Man with the Golden Gun
The man with the golden gun used to be on repeatedly every christmas and every time there was a James Bond Season when we were growing up as kids. Dad must have seen it at least 10 or 15 times if not more....