I weave between metallic shine
Of white hot hub cap, cyclo frame
And taxi bumper: brake, and pause,
Before gearing off again.
I know these roads, littered as they are
With street-vendor, conical hat and coffee stalls.
I know this city, its adrenalin glory
Bewitches travelling hoards who
Melt the sidewalks, daring to cross.
I know this city.
Am rooted here, breathing in
A now familiar pulse.
Saigon.
Sentimentally I am yours.
Energetically you are the calm and constant
Backdrop to my life.
Your ebb and flow at once collide
And soothe, and guide. And hold me tight.
Before too long I’ll view you from afar,
Becoming me, indebted as I am to all you stand for.
For all you are.
June has, and continues to be, a month of travel for me…
It is also the month I will remember introducing Florence and Martha to Shel Silverstein, whose poetry is now recited daily by them both in mock recitals at bed-times!
With that in mind, and in the hope that one day they will read this self-indulgent journal, and remember Silverstein’s “Lazy Jane” verse (Flo’s current favourite) I hope they also like this one from Daddy.
Recently, I have been over-run with plenty of work travels, and so it’s great to have been back in Saigon for the past couple of weeks. I love working in this part of the city (in the western corner of District 3) for all the local quirkiness of what’s on offer, as well as the daily hilarity of what goes on in our office…
I went downstairs earlier this afternoon for coffee, only to be confronted by a large brown eel writhing around on the reception floor. It would seem our lunch this week was trying to make a break for it, and had leapt out of the plastic jerry-can it was sharing with its mate by the front door! Eel hot-pot to look forward to tomorrow then….
Saigon is quickly gearing up for Christmas, and we are excited about being here again during the glitziest time of the year, when it is customary for a high proportion of the public (mainly young chain-smoking men) to dress up – really badly – as Santa Claus, whilst everyone else spray paints their shops in festive colours (we had a white spray-painted Christmas tree last year, photo here, and are hoping to outdo this with something even more kitsch next month.) Continue reading →
I’m back in Vietnam, after a two week trip that whisked me halfway round the world on six flights, three air carriers and through five separate countries.
From the humid south east over to the spring weather of bustling Dhaka, and onto the grey skies of London, where friends and family were all on great form and collectively excited about the clock change last night, and the prospect of saying farewell to winter days.
Saigon greeted me on Friday with that type of warmth you associate when you first step off the plane on a summer holiday in any part of the world where thermometers seldom drop below seventy five degrees. I’d not been in shorts for a fortnight, and it was great to adjust back into being ‘home’.
If truth be told, I am not a great flyer. Despite all the statistics I am still uncomfortable with the notion of hundreds of tonnes of metal, people and oversized suitcases cruising three miles up in the stratosphere. Give me a nice train any day. Continue reading →
Although I went back to work on Friday, it was with a sense of having been somewhat indulgent, as Vietnam enjoyed its annual lunar New Year shut down last week and, life as we know it here in Saigon, ground to a very pleasant halt.
Our blossoming Tễt tree
Families and friends idled away four days of public holidaying, the focus being on eating festive foods, drinking large quantities of alcohol, and speculating at length what the year ahead might hold (see previous post on Dragons, although for those with less time to spare to read post, the nuts and bolts of it is that the Year of the Dragon is an auspicious year in the twelve yearly zodiac cycle, and there is heightened expectation amongst people here about what 2012 will bring.) Continue reading →
A fitting state perhaps to welcome in the start of the festive season, although the combination of last night’s beers, 5 hours sleep, Martha wailing like a banshee, and Florence enthusiastically using me as her personal drum-kit, was not quite the ideal scenario first thing this morning in terms of remedying a sore head.
I used to love December back in the UK. It can be the most indulgent month of the year, and also the most random in terms of habits.
On the social side, for example, people start warming up their red wine and adding in fruit. More pastry gets consumed in one month than during the whole of the rest of the year. For some reason, we also decide it important that we simply must meet up with certain friends for Christmas drinks, often people we haven’t seen or heard from since the previous year when we committed to do the same, but one of us bailed out due to being “crazy at work”, “down with the flu” or “double booked” for the night. Continue reading →
Lou has started a photography course (some first creations to be found below) and is fast becoming our family expert in everything you ever needed to know about digital SLR cameras but were afraid to ask.
I am delighted at the prospect of future blog posts now being adorned with colourful photos of Vietnam, providing readers with the more preferable option of not having to read my accompanying narrative…
Anyway, in the previous and more general updates about life out in SE Asia, the tone of things has been a combination of first impressions, acclimatising and adjusting to new routines, and ultimately making sense of it all.
We’re now about to start month 9 and are feeling really settled on all fronts. I have been travelling heaps over the past 2 months and Lou has been juggling a variety of things (including keeping the children fed, watered and happy) and generally performing Super Mum impersonations in the meantime. Continue reading →
We’ve been living in Saigon for very nearly half a year now.
It’s hard to imagine that the school summer holidays are coming to an end, we’re back into a new term and new class for Florence tomorrow, and fast kicking at the heels of September.
Living where we do in District 2, a heavily concentrated area for foreigners, there has been noticeably more ex-pats moving around over the past fortnight, as a new influx of residents arrives, and those overseas from their summer vacations return.
In the local supermarket yesterday we saw a couple piling high their trolley with mops, buckets, coat hangers and many other tell-tale signs that they were obviously fresh on the scene, and kitting out an empty apartment. Continue reading →
Fast approaching mid June, and 2011 is flashing by.
I was back from paternity leave last week, and in Bangkok for a few days. On the home front, we’re preparing for our summer visitors in the form of both sets of parents. I say ‘summer’, however it’s been consistently around 36 degrees out here since we arrived…
In many ways I’m sure it won’t feel like we have been away that long when we sit down for dinner tomorrow night with Lou’s Mum and Dad, freshly off the plane. Although the truth is that many things have happened since we boarded our own plane over 16 weeks ago now.
Lou and I attended a short parent’s meeting in the week to discuss Flo’s progress this term, and commented on just how normal and familiar the journey, the buildings and the faces of the people we know there, are to us. Our first scoping visit to the school back in early March is now distant in the memory, and the associated senses of newness and apprehension are forgotten.
Turns out Flo very possibly feels the same, as her teacher, ‘Miss Emma’, filled us in on just how content and absorbed Flo is in all that she does in the classroom.
We’ve noticed at home her increasing confidence, questions, jokes, energy and perhaps most entertainingly, her propensity to turn on her musical doll’s house and dance around the living room floor, offering up samples of new moves learnt with her friends at school.
Flo has a hot and cold relationship with Skype, and is either uninterested being in front of the camera or, conversely, and mainly through the medium of her unique take on dancing, she will perform, with intense determination and often semi naked, a series of wobbly pirouettes and lunges, and insist on taking centre stage on the webcam.
When she’s exhausted her repertoire of dance moves, she progresses on to giggly impressions of a snake or a frog, writhing or hopping respectively, around the kitchen. All of which serves to eclipse any other possible conversation we might want to have with people at the other end of the line.
Martha can only lie there in bewilderment as much as we do, on the odd occasion glancing at me as if to say “what’s up with my sister?”
Martha has had a good first 3 weeks. Where Lou has unfortunately put up with various ailments since the birth, and Flo and I have carried off the infamous “Saigon cough” between us for about a month now, Martha’s world has been a daily routine of waking up to be fed and then nuzzling back down in a state of drunken stupor.
Martha enjoying the Saigon cafe scene
She has been out and about on a few occasions, and whilst her feeding and sleeping habits were unaffected by taxi rides, beeping horns and escalators, at times she didn’t look totally thrilled to be wrapped up in an all-in-one sleep suit, under a blanket, given the humidity out here.
We’ve not been sure how best to clothe Martha but have been conscious that the Vietnamese way is for mothers and their babies to be confined to their houses for the entire first month, and the child’s head, hands and feet need to be covered at all times.
There are some other tough rules to be followed (mothers not allowed to wash their hair for the first month either, for example) and so Martha gets plenty of attention when we are out given the lack of other newborns cruising the sidewalks in their strollers.
Martha’s positive well being has been despite our worrying premonitions before she was born about what baby number 2 was going to be like.
Based on some brief research amongst friends, we formed the opinion that couples with two children seem, through the baby-toddler years at least, to have one angel, and one Beelzebub incarnate.
Am sure time will tell whether Flo and Martha conform to this or not, but so far it has been a real joy spending time with them both, and Flo is certainly very proud of being a big sister. She has picked up on things we say to Martha and we caught her the other day sat next to her sister, patting her tummy as she was crying, and saying “don’t worry Martha, Florence is here”.
Just what both girls will make of these early months and years together, out here, is difficult to predict, but we are relishing the time we now get together at home and the easy going nature of our weekends and socialising.
Preparing for our guests has, of course, involved a slightly more chaotic weekend to normal, and the inevitable rearranging of various aspects of our apartment.
In between Flo’s Saturday morning swimming lesson, a play date with one of our neighbours at a local children’s centre, feeding Martha, and me sloping off last night for some beers with a mate whose family have gone back to Europe for a few weeks, we’ve also put in some steady shopping hours.
As well as now having a suitably stocked fridge and bar, we are also the proud owners of a new mirror, an arm chair, tea, coffee and sugar ceramic jars, 2 bedside lamps, a hand-woven basket (“for things”), some new knives, and a butter dish. A more accurate description of this last item, Lou has just pointed out, is actually a small flan dish (this purchase was one of mine) and so am not sure whether its life expectancy is that promising.
As I write this Janice and Gordon are somewhere between Dubai and Bangkok, and landing here in Saigon at lunchtime tomorrow in time for us all to toast Janice’s birthday.
Another anniversary of sorts tomorrow goes back 12 years ago, when Lou and I were flying out to Greece on separate holidays, and were to meet for the first time that night, me flanked by Derek and Paul, and she by Sarah and Laura. Who’d have ever predicted what was to happen next.
saigonsays 