Weather

I've been reading the Guardian on the internet these days as usual and have been doggedly following the news from back home. Luckily I don't have to worry about the education cuts or Irish sovereign debt crisis that I've been reading about right now. Asian economies are apparently continuing to grow at a stupid rate, if you believe the government figures that is.

The thing that has attracted my attention, admittedly at a very superficial level, is the weather. I hear that it is really cold right now in England. Charlotte, my daughter and grass jelly recipient, emailed me today to say that she had to remove snow from the windscreen of her car. I've sneaked past the internet censors here and peeked at the BBC homepage and seen this  to confirm her report. I'm imagining Londoners having to stay in bed instead of trudging towards the tube in an inch of slush and motorways scattered with abandoned vehicles given up to the elements. 

Call me shallow but one of the reasons I've come to Vietnam is to escape the cold. I'm a hard core warmth lover, I don't even put the air conditioning on in the apartment so I don't ever feel cold. It's still in the 30's here, dropping to a cooling mid 20's at night sometimes. And it's still raining each day, usually in the late afternoon, but the mornings are often sunny and a good time to hit the pool. I can't unfortunately as I work, but there's always the weekend.

But I think the local bar owners have been watching the UK weather forecasts too as they have been bringing out lumps of cotton wool and draping them over the tropical plants surrounding their terraces. I think that they may have been doing this to make us feel more at home, thinking that perhaps that we have been missing the cold.

Then I realised, they are getting ready for Christmas. They are festooning their premises with fake snow and maybe tomorrow I'll see fake holly and fairy lights and maybe even the odd Santa or two. No matter where you go in the world you cannot escape Christmas. Maybe in North Korea or Saudi Arabia its been banned but here in Phu My Hung it looks like we are in for a white one.