Dogs ,Diplomats,and an Aeroplane in a Lake..................

Hello everyone,

Well its been 2 months since my last update. I can't believe where the time has gone. Anyway , can I just ask one favour of somebody? Is there anyone on my distribution list who is going away for a couple of weeks over Xmas and needs a house-sitter? Last Xmas we rented an apartment in Salford Quays which was a bit soul-less, and whilst we've signed up with a website called Trusted Housesitters.com, someone we know would be a real plus.

I'm writing this on Phu Quoc island, just off the south coast of Vietnam where we've come for a 4 day break. It's beautiful here , except that we've picked the rainy season to come so it's er ....raining outside......that annoying hard rain. I dare say we'll manage to venture out soon though.

Coming to Phu Quoc is a bit of a co-incidence as we have just tried ( unsuccessfully) to have a second dog; a Phu Quoc Ridgeback to be precise. Sally and the new dog ( see picture) did not hit it off ( that's quite an understatement actually) and she had to go. Not her fault at all. She was a cutie, but Sally showed that she isn't just a laid back couch-hound; after two real scraps one of which ended with me at the clinic, we had to end the hostilities. But wow , Phu Quoc Ridgebacks; the only dog in the world with webbed feet. I kid you not........

And the other news is that we are moving house. Yes we are moving from our palatial , 6 storey townhouse, to a much more sensible 2 storey house in a pretty much exclusively Vietnamese area which is very near the Red River. So why are we doing that? 3 reasons.......

• It's cheaper......ever the accountant
• Next door (to our current house) is being demolished and rebuilt and they start construction every day at 5-30AM , 7 days a week, including public holidays. And the law in Vietnam is that the normal construction day begins with drilling and hammering and then when all the neighbours have buggered off to work, you spend the rest of the day on a tea break playing cards.
• The Red River is fabulous for Sally the dog. She loves it there, and we are 5 minutes walk away. So yes we are leaving the safety of our nice little Expat area, with all the 'western' restaurants and bars, and foraging into the unknown. Actually I have dramatised that a litttle, but it is certainly an area with very little social cache.

Pictured below is Chi , our Housekeeper with whom we are completely in love. Here she is cooking up our evening treat......Beef in Betel leaf.

Changing the subject , one aspect of this life is the chance to be part of the ambassadorial merry-go-round. So I get invited to the British Embassy to celebrate the Queens Birthday, play tennis with the Mexican Ambassador, sit next to the Canadian ambassador at breakfast the other day, have dinner with the Lord Mayor of the City of London ....and so on. Once again its something  I have never experienced before but it's a real privilege and you learn so much. One chap I met the other day , from the British Embassy has just moved here from the Sudan. If I think Hanoi is hot, well I certainly won't be rushing to move to the Mazars office in Sudan .

I'm not really one for visting temples and cathedrals. I'm much more into historical stuff. So during the last few months we have seen;

• Changi museum on Singapore where the Japanese incarcerated the locals
• The Bangkok to Rangoon railway using forced British Labour in WW2. ( Bridge over the River Kwai etc etc)
• The prison here on Phu Quoc where the Americans kept the North Vietmamese prisoner. This was in operation all the way up to 1973.
• A B52 Bomber in a lake in Hanoi, which crashed in a bombing raid in 1972 and the Vietnamese government have just left it there

I've got nothing to say about any of it except that it makes you stop and think and realize that no matter how hard we think our lives are, that my generation has not been really tested. And I'm not posting any pictuers.

Here are some snaps from our trip to Bangkok, where we played with an elephant and fed tiger cubs........

So that's all for now and I won't leave it so long  next time......

cheers all

kevin