Domestic Life,.......

Hello everybody,

In this blog I thought I would concentrate on domestic life; that is to say our domestic life , and what goes on in our locality. It'll be my last blog for a few weeks as we are coming back to the UK for a well earned break.

Before I get to domestic life though, I'll just share some great news for me. As most of you know, I am an avid Brighton and Hove Albion supporter. When we came out here I subscribed to the club website (so that I can listen to match commentaries on the internet) and also a Brighton fans' message forum called North Stand Chat. So anyway there I was at work the other day, around lunchtime on North Stand Chat , when I noticed a posting from a member whose location was......wait for it......Hanoi. So I sent him a private message and the upshot is that we'll hold the inaugural meeting of the Brighton and Hove Albion Supporters Club Hanoi Branch in July (actually it'll just be several beers, but I'm not sure whether to wear my club shirt).

Anyway; we live up an alley (entrance pictured below), in a huge house (see below), with a beautiful swimming pool (also below) on the ground floor. Lounge and kitchen diner on the first floor, 2 floors of bedrooms, all with huge en-suites and walk in wardrobe areas, a fifth floor with a laundry room, a 'something' room (it's just a room with no purpose which we use to store stuff), and a magnificent lounge. And up again out onto the roof terrace with 360 degree views , 3/4 of which is Westlake, as our area is a kind of a peninsula into the lake. The lift is in the centre of the house, which is also where the wooden staircase is housed.

One aspect of houses here that needs understanding is the intensity of the heat that houses generate. We can air condition individual rooms , but the central stairwell starts off cool at the bottom , but by the time you reach the 5th floor it's simply roasting.And the issue we have is the 5th floor lounge which is the best room in the house , as it has views across Westlake , but no airconditioning ( and the landlord will not install it into this room). Our advice to him is that this will cause him problems in the future when he trying to rent to westerners,unless he markets the room as a sauna with magnificent views, but he is having none of it. So we managed to find a portable aircon unit , which vents out of a window ( not ideal , but it suffices). So with that purchase Karen decided to make this room her office . We set the room up as a stunning office, and then arranged for the 'computer man' we know to re-arrange the wireless routers in the house , to get the internet into the room. But no matter how he tried, the room is a complete internet blackspot. So Karen has converted a bedroom to an office , and we'll abandon the best room in the house for the rest of the summer.

Last week all our furniture arrived.....125 packing cases. For the last few weeks we have been really nervous about the 'lobby fee' we would have to pay to get it through customs. Estimates from reliable sources varied from $50 USD to $1500 USD, so really we had no idea. But the day it arrived in the docks we had an interesting email from our shipping company. The email had an attatchment which was a message from a Customs official which read as follows ' Re case 41 labelled 'Samsung 32' FlatScreen TV' we opened this case and there is nothing in it'. Oh well we thought that's life. But Karen wrote quite a straightforward email suggesting that as we have lost a prized possession, that presumably our 'lobby fee' will be quite small. Then when the furniture arrived two days later, there was our TV. You tell me what was going on as I've no clue.

We have a cook/housekeeper. We share her with a couple who work for the British Council , and her name is Chi. Actually her name is Phuc, but for some reason she asked us to call her Chi (I can't think why). She is wonderful and what a pleasure it is to have someone iron my shirts! Her cooking is amazing and she cooks for us 2 or 3 times a week. So to have real home cooked Vietnamese food is such a privilege (actually I am so lucky because Karen is a fabulous cook too). But Chi's cooking doesn't end with us. Oh no.....she cooks for Sally the dog as well: something different every day. When Sally goes to the kennels during our holiday she is going to be wondering if Chi has made her a couple of weeks worth of packed lunches. Pictured here is something Chi bought to turn into one of Sally's dinners. I'm sure these were very cheap , and I'll just let you look at the picture and say no more.

One of the incredible things here is that the poor and the rich seem to live 'side by side' perfectly happily. We have no back garden , and below (left) is a photo of our neighbouring house at the back. And just around the corner on a patch of scrub is a house (below right) inhabited by a family Karen calls 'the Borrowers'. It's a shack constructed from cast offs. But directly opposite the entrance to our alley is a small palace, which must be inhabited by a Government official or politician because the police arrive and close the road whenever a car arrives at or leaves the house. And if two local men stand side by side, most of the time you couldn't tell who lives in the mansion and who lives in the makeshift shack.

Rubbish collection is interesting. You just leave it outside your front door and at 5 o'clock a lady on a bicycle comes and takes it away. (The only element of reclycling I have seen are the ladies that pick up cardboard and strap it to the back of their bikes.) And all this rubbish seems to work its' way back to the local mobile rubbish carts, which are administered by the ladies who sweep the streets (all day) with their long handled palm leaf brushes. Karen took a beautiful photo of a number of  full rubbish carts at twilight by the lake.What we have established is that reclycling is a well honed cottage industry which takes place on a street by street basis by people who scrape a living by collecting and (I guess) selling on different types of rubbish.But there is no information at a residential level about recycling, and when I've mentioned it at work, I've just had a series of blank looks or vague smiles.  (I am very used to this look.....I had it yesterday when I mentioned at work that we are seeing Bruce Springsteen in concert in the UK. I then made the huge mistake of saying 'surely you've heard of the song ''Born in the USA''.....not the most sensible song to mention in Vietnam.)

My final photo below (which I include for no particularly good reason) is the biggest snail I have ever seen......and they are all this big here. And when you step on one by accident, it's a mixture of a crunch and a squelch.

In my next blog I'm going to tell you about retail. It's fascinating for so many reasons.......

Cheerio everybody.