It’s been quite a while since I added to the site, sorry about that, it’s been busy over here. This is a very nice time of year for weather in HCMC, not too hot, not much rain and people are generally in good spirits due to Tet holiday approaching. For this reason however it’s very difficult to get much done if you need a shop or a tradesman. Even the lady on the pushbike/kitchen who peddles around my area and makes me my fried egg roll for breakfast seems to have disappeared and not only has my mechanic shut up shop but every mechanic in that particular street seems to have done a runner back to their hometowns for Tet. Now having spent two Tets in Vietnam already (refer to story page) I have decided that this year I’m out and I went to Laos instead. I’ve come to understand many things in Vietnam but the finer points of Tet just allude me, so this year I was determined to get the most out of my time off work and just accept the fact that Tet really is just a little boring for foreigners, and you never feel more foreign in Vietnam than at Tet , and that is saying something. And whatever you do don’t try to travel within the country (refer story page “Delta Dawn”).

Laos was great and I'll be adding a page on this soon, a very nice place to visit but I'm pretty sure I couldn't live there, just a bit too quiet.

On a different note, I stumbled across the spot where the last American helicopter left Saigon in 1975 and ended up being the location of the famous photo of the desperate masses trying to escape on that last flight. A small but interesting find.

Anyway “Tet, tet, tet, den roi”

So another week has passed, they’ve been going very quickly of late. My flatmate of 9 months and the guy who found my great little house has returned home with his girlfriend, so to Bob and Loren I say a giant thanks, it was fun. Dan’s arrival in the long, tall palace is only days away.

It’s Monday of the last week of the school year, I’ll be heading up to Hoi An for a week then home to Sydney for about 3 weeks, should be fun.

The weekends in HCMC are always fun, there is always something interesting to do or at the very least somewhere new to eat or drink. I always make sure I do no work on the weekends so my weekend starts the moment I walk out the gate at 5pm on Friday afternoon. Friday just past I went out to the Sushi Bar on Le Thanh Ton, always excellent food, great atmosphere, good saki and affordable, what more could you want? Followed that up with a couple of beers at the Irish pub “Sheridan’s” with a couple of mates. Usually they have a good little band on there and that particular night was livened up considerably by the invasion of a well behaved, but very funny group of girls on a hens’ night.

Weekends for me always consist of swimming in the local pool, coffee, reading, food, friends, sleeping and beer, in various different combinations, and I throw in the odd trip to a market or some small shops just to keep things interesting. Lately I’ve added to the mix by throwing in some cooking. I’m not sure what the initial urge was for this but I have been spurred on by my Vietnamese offsider who has not only never cooked western food before, but has never cooked anything before, full stop.

Now I’m not Jamie Oliver but I know a few simple things and I’ve been using and expanding on those. The utter surprise and joy on my friend’s face when she first ate something that she had helped cook was great and so that has spurred me (and her) on to new culinary heights. Ok so the first attempt at a cheesecake was a bit of a disaster but I blame this on the instructions on the gelatine packet being in Vietnamese. Apparently you don’t need much gelatine for this, unfortunately the batch I mixed could have been used to help set the cement on a new road. The second attempt won’t win any awards either but at least it’s edible.

Maybe it’s cheating but for now I’m sticking to western food, as she has not eaten it very often I think I’m pretty safe, after all, if I muck something up I can just smile and say “Yeah, it’s supposed to taste like that!”

Something dawned on me the other night, things came into sharp focus, the undefined uneasiness suddenly took form and was able to be classified, the unnamed was christened and the giant unlit neon sign was suddenly plugged in and started flashing the word violently until it could no longer be ignored, that word is “mediocrity”. The tipping point for this revelation was watching a well known expat band playing a set of “punk rock” songs, and mediocre is about the best description I can come up with. The mainly expat crowd didn’t seem to mind and actually lapped it up, and if people are having a good time then fine but I found it all to be a slightly depressing experience as the songs that have meant so much to me for most of my life became a badly played parodies.

If Mssrs Strummer, Vicious, Ramone and Ramone had been resurrected to witness the “punk rock” show I’m sure they  all would have jumped right back on the train for the return journey to “the other side” ASAP. “Straight to Hell” as it were. 

Some observations; (1) Ramones songs were fast for a reason i.e. they sound terrible played too slowly    (2) If you are going to advertise that you play songs by the Clash (and use a picture of Strummer in your print ad) please play something other “Should I stay...” the only Clash song that got a run.

 (3) “Pretty fly for a white guy” by the Offspring may well in fact be the worst song ever written.

It all turned out ok though. I went home opened a beer and turned on The Hold Steady, who may well be the best rock band on the planet right now, and silently “raised a toast to Saint Joe Strummer”.

Khe Sanh on CD...$10    (Hcmc)Big Day Out Ticket....$60

 Hearing Jimmy Barnes sing Khe Sanh in Vietnam.....Priceless!

Left my heart.........

I remember attending the first Big Day Out in Sydney when Nirvana played. It still rates as one of the best days of my life. I could never have imagined all those years ago that I would be attending a festival of the same name in Vietnam in 2009.

                                                                                          .....and their minds were always closed....

With Jimmy Barnes as the headlining act it was certainly enough to stir the emotions of the teenage “Aus Rock” fan that still lives deep inside me. I still can’t quite believe it actually happened.

All my years spent in the alternative music scene in Australia never dimmed my love of what was then considered a musical dinosaur by the music/fashion elite, the mighty Cold Chisel.

                                    ....and the telex writers rattled.......

What dawned on me in the hazy heat of a Saigon evening was just how well those songs stand up now, so many years after they were written.  And also, what a genuinely unifying effect they had on the crowd   I’m pretty certain the music of Cut/Copy or the Presets will struggle to have the same effect on a bunch of expats 20 years from now.

...and I’m drifting north.........

Tickets were $60 for all you could eat and drink (and eat and drink I definitely did), which is expensive by Vietnamese standards but it definitely turned out to be worth it. ...only seven flying hours...... The fact that my friend had her bag stolen on her way to buy the tickets the day before meant I actually ended up paying double,  .....it’s really got me worried......     but after sweating and shouting my way through the Saigon twilight, only metres from the stage, to Cheap wine, Choir girl, You got nothing I want, Astrid, the Rising sun, Working class man, the magnificent Flametrees and of course the absolute greatness of hearing Khe Sanh played live in Vietnam, I realised I would have quite happily paid 10 times more. ......ALMOST GONE!!!!

No one single person has done more for me since arriving in Vietnam. I met Quan over a year ago and I lived in the guest house he worked at for a few months where we became good friends. Since then he has booked every train, plane or bus ticket I have needed and saved me a lot of money in the process, helped find me a house, found me my first job, done all my visas and just this week organised his mechanic to find and restore a motorcycle for me. He has taught me more about Vietnamese culture and the way things work than almost anyone else and he has always been willing to offer advice and help whenever I asked. An incredibly social and intelligent man, fluent in Vietnamese, English and German, his incredibly friendly and inquisitive nature has made him very popular with a wide circle of Vietnamese and foreigners. When a tour group can’t find an English speaking guide he often steps in and takes the tour. He did just this on Friday 20^th March taking a tour to the Mekong delta. The tour boat they were on was rammed by another boat and sunk. Quan drowned on Saturday 21^st March. He has left a huge hole in many people’s lives. He was one of my best friends, I will never forget him and I will miss him a lot.

Learning Vietnamese can be an interesting yet very frustrating experience. As many know it’s a tonal language, which doesn’t sound too terrifying, after all don’t we all use tones in our native tongue? The thing is, with Vietnamese the tone you use actually changes the meaning of the word, for example “ban” can mean busy, table or friend (and probably a couple of other things) depending on how you say it. Now the fact that there are six different tones means that many words with similar spellings can have completely different meanings. The fact that Australians naturally go up in tone at the end of many sentences has caused me all sorts of problems. And don’t think the linguistic minefield ends with the tones, there are also three versions of the vowel “a” and “o” and two each for “e” and “u”, they all have quite different sounds and depend on whether they have a hat ^ or tail (impossible to show here) attached. Oh, and did i mention that “s” and “x” at the beginning of a word sound very similar, that “t” sounds a little like an English “d”, that “th” sounds like an English “t” that “d” sounds like an English “y”. Sounds like an easy language to learn hey? And these are just small snowflakes on top of the tip of the linguistic iceberg. Below the waterline lies, regional accents, completely different regional words, personal pronouns that require you to guess the age of someone relative to you within a few seconds of meeting, a wide range of differing pronunciation of many consonants and last, but by no means least, the dreaded “NG” at the start of a word which is like some cruel linguistic joke played at the expense of every non-vietnamese. Learning the word for sleep “ngu” nearly caused a friendship to end such was the frustration my friend felt at my pronunciation of that word. So much so she stormed out of our lesson with the parting words “why can’t you control your tongue!” which is something I never thought I had a problem with before.  Something my year 7 music teacher once said keeps coming back and circling my brain, many a night at karaoke had given me some suspicions but last Monday night’s Vietnamese lesson was far more convincing, after years of deluding myself I’ve realised, i may in actual fact be tone deaf!

it's nice to see a few old friends dropping by the site. so the weekend saw me at a birthday party for my irish friend ciara at a mexican restaurant in the expat (expensive) area of dist.1. it was a fun night that ended late. it was followed on sunday by my first exeperience of a vietnamese tea house. up a few back alleys in dist.3 and myself and my local guide ended up at what looked like a small terrace house crossed with a parisian hotel. i was actually expecting some tea drinkers version of starbucks, so i was pleasantly surprised. after climbing a bamboo lined staircase we ended up at a small rooftop room lit softly by coloured lights. seating was of course on cushions at very low tables, and after looking over the menu i realised that they do in fact serve tea, and only tea, of many different varieties. so we polished off two different ones (jasmine then ginger) and just sat and talked in the nice subdued atmosphere. it was a world away from my saturday evening and i think i probably enjoyed it more. so next time anyone suggests i meet them at the pub i think i might just say "no, but how about a lemon/jasmine at Phuongbucks instead."