New Year's Eve Comes Early

I'm 7 hours ahead of the UK so I get to celebrate early except that enforced jollity it not really my thing.  Also I'm English and we don't really do New Year.  Putting those things aside for a moment, I am about to go out to meet some friends and see in the New Year but quite gently as I'm off to a fancy beach resort tomorrow for a long weekend of eating fish, swimming in the sea and swinging in a hammock.

New Year is supposed to be at time of reflection as well as getting drunk and for me there's a lot to look back on and think about.  The last decade has seen huge changes for me. It started with a move to Spain, then back to England and then China. That was followed by a year at the university of Westminster where I met some truly  inspiring people and now in Vietnam.  I just hope the next ten years will be some stimulating and demanding and different from the last.

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.

Fit

I'm no stranger to the gym. I enjoy pounding the treadmill and feebly pushing up the odd weight so wherever I work I try to find a gym that fits with my daily routine. It probably helps to stay active. I'm fighting against the slippery slope of middle age valiantly by going twice a week, more if I can find the time.

The RMIT gym is small but well equipped and frequented by largely the same group of stringy young guys. They're never going to be Arnold Schwarzenegger and neither am I but we look like we are enjoying ourselves. Apart from exercising I like to watch the other people doing their stuff. In one corner there's usually a group of boys laughing and shouting raucously at each other and Vietnamese is a very raucous language indeed. At the other end I often see a smaller group in quiet conversation with each other whilst gently bouncing on the large rubber exercise balls. These balls are there to be used in all sorts of fiendish ways to make muscles stronger and more supple but this little group use them as improvised stools. The other major piece of equipment getting the most use is the floor to ceiling mirror that they all take a moment or two to pose in front of as they move from one social group to the next.

I'm somewhere between the two groups, either on the running machine or the weight machines isolating myself from the noise with my ipod and hoping that the ball bouncers have finished their conversations before I need a ball for my sit-ups.

But the more interesting exercise sights are to be seen not in the gym but outside my window in Sky Gardens. In the opposite block, on floor 3, there's an apartment occupied by a local family who have a cramped terrace that they fill with potted plants and plastic furniture. It has a low fence around the outside and a corrugated plastic roof to keep off the rain. Each morning the lady of the house emerges in her floral pyjamas with her hair in rollers to begin her morning workout. She starts with a bit of running on the spot followed by some arm swinging and finishes with some hip twirling. She has a bouncing, half-hearted run that's never going to get her very far and her hips are somewhat stiff. She's not fat just thick set and the hip twirling looks painful. The arm swinging consists of her throwing both arms forward cross her stout body and then jerking them backwards finishing with a sharp jerk of her shoulders. I hope she's OK because some of her routine looks like it may result in a sporting injury.

Also out of my window I often see an middle aged guy doing the arm throwing and hip twirling although he is slimmer and can get his hips moving around quiet fluidly. His arm movements are more flappy. He flings his limp arms around his body slapping himself alternately on his chest and back. He looks very pleased with himself most mornings as he takes prime position in full view of anyone who cares to watch him. Perhaps he and the running on the spot woman should get together sometime for a bit of one-on-one exercise activity.

We also have power-walking people, usually older Korean men, who march along in a very determined manner pumping their arms high across their bodies whilst clenching their fists and sticking their chins forward in a determined and quite proud way. But mainly we have slow wandering families or nannies minding babies. They sit around on benches and gossip which must be healthier than all that jerking, jogging and twisting.

The Tavern

Some years ago I lived in Spain and would travel back to England from time to time through Alicante airport. The airport there caters mainly for holiday makers and their tour buses but also had a small but loyal customer base of ex-pats flying from home to home or eking out their pensions in the sun.

The airport operated a long queue policy to annoy their customers by having 40 or so check-in desks all closed with all the passengers waiting anxiously at the few that were open. We would shuffle slowly along dragging our bags whilst jealously eyeing up the other queue to see if it was shuffling faster than ours. We were all getting on the same plane but somehow it was still frustrating to see other people getting on it first.

Once through the formalities and in the departure lounge I would head for the John Bull pub – an ersatz English, counterfeit home counties pub area partitioned off from the expanse of the departures hall. There I would drink overpriced Guinness sitting on a heavily upholstered chair next to a circular mahogany pub table. It was a decompression chamber letting me readjust from the depths of Spain and its claustrophobic spanishness and re-enter the English world again. A sort of half way house/pub to help me adjust. Anyway, The Tavern is a bit like that, England or maybe Australia reimagined in Phu My Hung.

Going to the Tavern serves the same purpose as the John Bull if you miss England but, as I don't, I rarely go there. Last night it played host to the school's irregular quiz night, eight teams of raucous and eager teachers trying to guess the answers to impenetrable questions that even the wildest guess couldn't provide an answer for. We occupied the third floor leaving the ground floor and outdoor terrace to the normal customers. The organisers shouted out the questions, the teams argued about the answers and the staff gamely ran about getting people drinks.

We came a close third losing out to the previous winners who clearly had pub quiz form. Next time maybe we'll be luckier. If only my team mates had listened to my right answers and ignored my wrong ones we could have won. But I liked the Tavern. It may be full of ex-pats and it may show football constantly but I might go again.

Wildlife

It's hot here and sticky and there's lots to eat so it comes as no surprise that there's a lot of wildlife too. Phu My Hung isn't exactly the countryside, although that isn't far away but there's a lot creeping and crawling about. We are also surrounded by water, some flowing and some stagnant. There's a ditch alongside Sky Gardens which I can see from my living room window and on the the other side of that there's a patch of undrained and as yet unused ground which I refer to as 'the swamp'. Over by the university there's a couple of wide channels flowing with a mixture of organic debris and plastic bags. The water is milk chocolate brown with suspended mud and whatever effluent the city discharges into it. We are not far from the sea so there's the occasional tidal backwash to contend with too which adds a salty tang to the mix. Even in my little area, which is still being developed, there are overgrown vacant plots between some of the buildings covered in a low lying but dense hatch of undergrowth.

All this make for a great habitat for wildlife. Snakes are supposed to be common but timid so the only ones I've seen have been for sale alongside the road towards the university. The woman who sells them keeps them in mesh sacks next to a set of kitchen scales all set up on the kerbside. I can't imagine a snake coiling quietly on the scales whilst being weighed and have yet to see anyone buy one.

The vacant plots between the buildings are mainly home to rats which scurry about at night dodging between the buildings. When you get near one they shoot off into the weed patches unlike London rats which I swear give you a sullen look and almost say 'wot-evah' at you. The local cats look no match for them as they are too small and boney. In a fight between cat and rat my money would definitely be on rat. After a bit of rain, and that's most days, you might find a giant snail slowly making it's way long the road. Frogs are common too given the amount of water around. They're quiet most nights but from time to time they let rip with their froggy croaking and they often hop along the road next to the snails.

My apartment is also home to the odd creature or two. I have minute ants that come out from nowhere when I eat fruit. I bought sugar last week and they found that too, where I hid it from them, in one of my many kitchen cupboards. I think they found it quicker than I did. I have so many cupboards to search through I sometimes lose food. But today a saw a tiny gecko in the kitchen when I came home from the shops. I was pleased to see it and told it to set to work on the ants but I don't think it heard me as it shot off rather quickly underneath a cupboard. Hopefully it'll be out when I'm asleep and be tucking into an ant supper.

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.