a 5 star Christmas

I'm having a five star Christmas, Vietnam style along with affluent locals and Westerners in two fancy hotels.  I was invited for lunch and dinner and, as I'm greedy, I accepted both offers. They both involved eating from the buffet as the waitresses come round constantly filling my glass with more wine.

My day started with me listening to a few carols form King's College Cambridge before switching to my favourite Christmas song, 'A Fairytale of New York'.  I caught the 11am bus into town and headed for lunch at the 'Intercontinental' where I carefully selected only high value low carb food, oysters, giant prawns and rare beef all washed down with the contents of my ever refilling wine glass.  There were even sprouts!

The hotel had a choir and a Santa to entertain us between 12 noon and 2:30 as we tucked in.  The food was impressive and I ate loads, including my first ever go on a chocolate fountain.

After lunch I made my way to the Botanical Gardens and Zoo for a snooze in the shade by a lake with a monkey island in the middle. The monkeys were running along their scaffolding poles and flinging themselves into netting whilst I rested and digested ready for the 6pm start at the 'New World' hotel.

By 9pm I was stuffed and couldn't eat or drink another thing so I headed out into the mayhem of the town centre traffic, into a taxi and home.  Christmas over for me for another year.

Christmas

Christmas is coming even here in Vietnam and there is no escaping snow, tinsel and Santa and his eves.  Even if the snow isn't real Santa and his elves can surely make it this far from the North Pole.

A quick wander around town last weekend revealed these photos. There are many more I could have taken of Christmas trees, reindeer and sleighs but restrained myself.  I particularly liked the snow storm in a window, polystyrene is about as close as I'm going to get to snow this year thankfully.


There will be parties around here and I have a full day of eating and drinking in fancy hotels lined up for the big day and various Christmas Eve social events too.  We have Friday off and I think I really need a rest after quite a lot of work over the last few months and more to come before a proper break during the new year celebrations of Tet.

The snowman outside an HSBC bank is may favourite.  Their banks all over the world look the same. Same logo, same colour scheme, same furniture only this one has a Santa and I don't think the one in Muswell Hill Broadway has.

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.