Hue, Vietnam
Oh hello, fancy finding you here.
I'm having a fearful strife getting pics off my camera at the moment so there's no visual titillation (unless looking at Verdana font rocks your world...it does mine, I can assure you). Bit worried about it as the last time I tried to 'Explore' my memory card I briefly saw a collection of folders on there that I don't remember having added myself, one entitled Administrator Porn. Nope, I'm pretty sure that one wasn't one of mine. Maybe all this promiscuous dirty 'porting', sticking his USB cable into any old cheap foreign slot in Cyber Cafes has got Cam a nasty dose. And if some digital gremlin is going to infect my camera, well fair enough, but share the love - let me see this porn as well. Hey ho.
Weather (I am English after all)
So what's new? Well, it's been raining a lot...and I mean a lot. Enough to make Gloucestershire feel like the Atacama desert I'm sure. Some cyclone passing through that has been shedding its heavy tropical tears on the region. Perked up today though you'll be glad to hear. So that's the weather done with.
Swimmers of Hoi An
Had a lovely time in Hoi An, a Unesco World Heritage City and also city of a thousand tailors. And yup, got the swim shorts made up. Felt a bit bad cheating on my original tailor in Singapore but that's the cut & stitch world of tailoring for you. The shorts weren't quite as natty as I had in mind - was thinking red, yellow and orange trim on a brown base - but in the end they ended up just plain Orange & Brown but hey...that's what it's all about. In fact had some made up with pale blue trim on a brown base as well, so thanks for the advice Evan, but I was there a little before you. In fact I got a bit carried away and also had a pair of O&Bs made for Dan, I mean at $7 a pop, it would have been churlish not to. It will be good to have matching swimmers for our bid to represent GB in the synchronised swimming pairs event at Beijing 2008. (Pictures to follow...of swimmers...not us in the 2008 Olympics...when/if I can clean up my camera.
Other than that, Hoi An was charming and had more than its fair share of lanterns.
Ming the Merciless
After five months of noodling about the tropics I think it's fair to say that some, most in fact, of my clothing isn't in the best of shape. As a product of endless sweating, getting rained on and in the rainy season often clothes taking a long time to dry after being laundered, some of my T-shirts have developed that clawing, sweet-sour, fusty, just-not-right smell: Ming the Merciless. Once in your clothes then that's pretty much it. You can wash them and wash them, add as much disguising fabric conditioner as you like but somewhere in there lurks Ming and out he will pop, and then even you are upset at having to sit next to you on an eight hour bus ride. I remember Ming the Merciless visited a pair of Radar's snowboarding gloves once and they had to be quarantined and then burnt. It took months for him to scrub the smell off his hands. I think I'm going to have to ditch most of my T-shirts when I get back to Bangkok, which is a shame as I rather like a couple of them, but that's the only way to get rid of Ming. That or skewer him with the point of War Rocket Ajax.
Plumbing the depths
So, here I am in Hue, Vietnam and what do I find myself mostly doing? Scouring the web for SE London plumbers. Kerrr-Ray-Zeee. It's all musical flats back at the Borough Bunker and there's a slow bath drainage issue (gripping stuff huh?) that needs resolving before the next incumbent takes up residence. So has it been getting awestruck by the Tomb of Tu Duc, the Tomb of Minh Mang or the pagoda of Thien Mu? No it's been emailing or trying (unsuccessfully) to Skype Steve-The-Plumber or DIY Darren. I did find a plumber in Walworth called Yen Lin Chong, so that made me feel like I hadn't completely lost that SE Asian connection. And I did manage to get to the Citadel (Kinh Thanh) and the intriguingly named Forbidden Purple City yesterday, which contrary to its given nomenclature is neither purple nor forbidden. I wanted my money back; the bare faced cheek!
So killing a spot of time just now waiting for another bus, perhaps my last 'eric' overnighter in SE Asia, up to Hanoi. As potentially the finale, I'm really going to cherish this one, maybe try and stay awake all night just to soak up that wonderful experience: the bladder shrinking air con, the blaring DVD of Vietnamese pop videos, the constant beeping of the horn as we high speed snake amongst traffic, most of which seems to be coming straight at us.
Right, better skip off and write my last will and testament...actually something I should have done a long time ago. Be good now and eat your greens. You know how I worry about you.
2 comments:
Believe it or not, I've actually met Yen Lin Chong! He's a really nice bloke - we called him out to fix a broken tap but he didn't want to do it because the only way to solve the problem was to apply brut force which might have knackered the whole thing, so he showed me how to do it for no charge and left it up to me. I laid seige to the tap with a hammer and it worked a treat. If you still haven't found anyone suitable it's worth giving him a call I reckon.
Yen Lin Chong hits the world wide high fame highlights of being discussed on Spratticus. He's made it. He'll never be out of work again...especially if I enagage him on a retainer to fix the bath drainage, which has so far employed three separate plumbers and with no resolution. Maybe it's one of those plumbing conundrums to which there simply is no solution.
Think Pie's found a plumber fella. From her description of the problem to him on the phone, he thinks it's a blockage problem. Oh the poor niaive bastard!
Post a Comment