I've been playing with my video camera

The concert

Finally after all the waiting it happened.  RMIT’s big move into show business has finally reached it’s peak.  Bob Dylan was appearing in front of a decent sized crowd in the sports field where I work.

I got there early enough to see something of the support act, a woman belting out some jazz apparently influenced by ‘the Vietnamese Bob Dylan’.  Between acts I moved as close to the front as I could and squeezed into a gap left by other people in the crowd heading off for food or drink.  This left me about 6 rows from the front and with a great view.  Where else could I get this close?

Dylan came on wearing a wide brimmed white hat and took up his place behind a small keyboard surrounded by a 5 piece band, 1 drummer and 4 guitarists.  They played for just under two hours running through the vast back catalogue which included ‘A hard Rain’, ‘Highway 61’ and ‘All along the Watch Tower’ to name just a few. It looked like he was enjoying himself and I certainly was.  From time to time he strapped on a guitar and came out to the front of the stage to join the rest of the band and occasionally he rasped into a harmonica.

And still the stupid press reports from China criticised him for submitting a playlist to be authorised by the Ministry of Culture and endlessly repeating the ‘protest song’ narrative.  With a repertoire of over 800 hundred songs how many are in any way political?  10 maybe 15?  No wonder the guy gets fed up with being asked about it.  They are about women, just like almost every other pop song!!

It ended with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and  ‘Forever Young’, two of my personal favourites with the crowd joining in, shouting out the chorus ‘How does it feel/how does it feel/to be on your own/no direction home/a complete unknown/like a rolling stone/.  Well, to me it felt good all this way from home.

They say he’s lost his voice. They say he won’t engage with the crowd.  They say you can’t recognise the songs.  All true but to be there in the crowd taking part in rock history was a privilege. 

Grass Jelly Goes Global

Since discovering grass jelly just after I arrived in Vietnam and blogging slightly about it its popularity has increased. I might be the cause of a global taste sensation as people all around the world begin to clamour for the stuff. I'll admit for now that this groundswell of culinary excitement is so far limited to just one of my children but hey, trends normally start small before going viral. Perhaps I should have tweeted about grass jelly. Blogging is so last year.

I have been asked to post my grass jelly back to Northampton so one of my daughters can try it but the only way to do that is to visit HCMC's central post office which I did on Sunday. It's a pleasure to take the bus into town and exchange Phu My Hung's quiet streets and familiar bars and restaurants with the big city life of motorbike mayhem. I added a visit to the city's art gallery to the post office trip and grabbed a drink in the back packer ghetto too.

The ladies at the post office asked me to fill in a form saying what was in my envelop which I had carefully folded and taped so the jelly would survive the journey. This was a bit embarrassing as I didn't want them to think I was some sort of idiot would post grass jelly back to England? They were very sweet and polite about it so I dutifully completed the paperwork and handed the packet and form across the counter. Not happy with my packing or maybe the description on the form they proceeded to open the envelop and tip the contents out over their counter. They looked at the jelly, then at me and started to giggle at one another. Stuck for anything sensible to say to explain myself I told them them that grass jelly was very hard to come by in England, at least for the time being, and people there really wanted to eat it. Once Northampton gets to know about it who knows where it might spread to next. ( Milton Keynes perhaps!! )

I do have a worry however as I had to complete another form which was stuck on the newly re-wrapped envelop. My parcel is now clearly labelled 'grass jelly' and shows my address and my daughter's. When the UK customs sees it there is no way they'll let such a dangerous substance into the country. The jelly will be confiscated and will sit in a warehouse somewhere near Heathrow for years, or be subjected to rigourous drugs tests or maybe destroyed in a controlled explosion as a suspected terrorist device.

If grass jelly is to become the new, must have foody delight, as I'm sure it will, I'll have to find a more efficient and simpler way of getting it out there so the world can enjoy this new taste sensation.

Garden Centres

I'm going to a house warming party tonight hosted by two American ladies who started at the same time as me.  We call them 'The Ladies' and for some reason the name has stuck.  I've had my drinks party the other week and they are having theirs tonight.  Rather than just take booze ( although I probably will as well ) I went to one of the garden centres along the road from my building to buy a plant.  The Ladies have a fine roof terrace and they talked about filling it with plants.  There's a row of garden centres squeezed up against the main road that runs from Sky Gardens to the university and they are all busy with vans coming and going loading up with plants.

I picked out a pink lily but the woman made me put it back and pressed the one she selected on me.  They all looked the same to me. I like to play the discerning customer occasionally but thought it wise to defer to her expert knowledge.  I found a rounded, ochre coloured, ceramic pot for it and she gave everything to a boy to pot up and put stones around the rim, to help drainage I imagine.  I watched the boy doing a good job with the plant,  giving it a final spray and a wipe around the pot.

The whole thing came to 90,000 dong, about £3 for plant, pot and the service.  Quite a bargain, I hope the Ladies like it in their new home.

Work

It had to happen, I couldn't just sit around all the time drinking iced coffee and eating noodles, I had to go to work. It's a gentle start for me with three days of induction followed by a week of materials development and preparation before meeting the students and starting to teach them.

The university is 15 minutes walk from the Sky Gardens tower block complex of apartment buildings in the Phu My Hung residential district where I'm living. Its a collection of modern buildings surrounded by brown-watered, sludge-filled creeks that will eventually find their way into the Saigon River. The creeks fill and empty in tune with the daily cycle of heavy rain that falls at this time of year and maybe the tide, as we are not that far from the sea. The buildings are fronted by the busy Nguyen Van Linh toll road that brings traffic out of the narrow chaotic city streets towards the more open southern extension of the city. It's a six lane highway with four of them full of motorbikes.

I've joined a large group of American, Australian and English teaching staff administering to 3000 or so students studying English and Business and, in a slightly randomly twist on the usual subjects, a bit of Art and Design. The well healed of HCMC send their sons and daughters here to get the coveted English education that will hopefully one day give them access to the wide world of foreign business opportunities. The main building is 5 stories high with a pair of wide, sculptural looking external stairwells giving access to the floors. The English department has taken over the top floor and some of one of the two outlying buildings placed across an adjoining lawn. We all have a desk, there's a room full of books and photocopiers and stationary. Its clean, modern and open-plan all so very very different from the crappy London language school I was used to in my previous job.

Beyond these buildings is the new sports complex with gym, sports hall and, worryingly, the medical centre. Sport and illness are separate things and cannot be in the same building. I'll be joining the gym soon and be pounding the treadmill again during my non work hours, in the pointless pursuit of physical fitness. I've read in 'The Word', HCMC's glossy, expat advertising magazine, that a cricket club operates out of the university for us colonial types so I might give that a look too.

Because we are in Asia a large part of the complex is given over to food outlets where we can buy our breakfast and lunch and snacks in between. There's an indoor air conditioned area and an outdoor tent-like construction serving foods of the region and sandwiches too. Eating is a constant event, I can't detect any obvious meal times, you just have what you want when you want it and nearly all of it comes with chillies. There's little wheat or dairy so people don't get as fat as we do in Europe. Except the children who have developed a taste for KFC and burgers.

On my way home each day I've come across a woman sitting by the side of the road with a bag of snakes for sale and it brings me back to the reality of Asian life. They can build big roads and modern clean universities and apartments but the people here will still crouch down next to the traffic selling weird stuff to the passers-by if they can.

I've been shown an architects model of the completed campus, an array of neat glass blocks circled by blue water and miniature trees. It is small and perfectly formed, the Kylie Minogue of universities and a charmingly pleasant place to live and work.

The Vien Dong Hotel, Phu My Hung, District 7, HCMC

Finally a post to my new blog and the big news is things are looking good. I arrived last Friday after a long and tiresome journey from Heathrow. As the tube rumbled slowly towards the airport the knot in my stomach started to loosen its grip and I began to relax after a few tense weeks of organising and fixing my flat prior to leaving for a year in Vietnam. It is a long but uncomplicated ride from zone 3 at the Eastern end of the Piccadilly Line to the airport. After a while, as the commuters left the train I got a seat and, resting, willed the tension of the last weeks to dissolve. There's nothing like leaving for a long time to put petty domestic concerns into perspective.

The inevitable flight delays meant a free meal voucher given by the airline which I blew on a fancy seafood stall in terminal 3, wine and Guinness before finally leaving 4 hours later feeling relaxed and slightly mellow. The flight was full, the entertainment meagre but we passengers endured somehow and emerged 10 hours later in Bangkok and then onward to Saigon, or HCMC depending on your political preference. I'm inclined to the more modern HCMC. Uncle Ho didn't fight for the independence of his country and get a city named after him for us not call it by its new name. A very nice man picked me up from the airport, placed me in the front seat of his monster of a Toyota 4X4 and barrelled his way through the crazy city traffic towards our destination, The Vien Dong Hotel, Phu My Hung, District 7, HCMC.

If you've read my previous blog covering my holiday earlier in the year you'll know that I was impressed by HCMC's energy and I still am. There was constant noise, mad traffic, narrow cluttered streets and bright lights as we made our way through District 1 in the centre of the city. There was grubbiness, potholed roads and confusion in District 4 as we headed towards our more peaceful destination of the southern suburb.

The university is south of the city in District 7, modern, open and quieter than downtown but still distinctively Vietnamese this is where I will most probably end up living. I could go for the comfort and convenience of this suburb with the university a 15 minute walk or 5 minute motorbike ride from the hotel or I might opt for the more 'authentic' atmosphere of the city centre. Local opinion amongst teachers seems to be in favour of convenience over commuting and I'm tending that way myself. The local areas might be a little bland but it has bars, restaurants, a pool and what need do I have of excitement and nightlife? I've posted a video of the place which is here if you want to take a look. Its an attractive place with a grid of well laid out roads filling rapidly with apartment buildings, villas, hotels, restaurants and shops as the area grows. The Saigon river snakes greasily through the city and this area has a network of murky channels and canals draining into it. This was probably a swamp a few years ago but now its been taken over by the modern world and Vietnam's economic progress.

After catching up on my missing sleep I went out the following day and found 3 other teachers all living within a few streets of the hotel and we have been trying the local eateries and making tentative trips out and about getting ready for the next week when we turn up at the university and start work. I have a feeling that this will be a good place to be.