They're Not All in Panama

Any of you who are disappointed that the Ponte Vecchio is no longer gracing the backdrop of this blog have Deborah to blame for that. All of you who are pleased at this development can thank her. All of you who have not noticed, well, pay attention.

You can all register your thanks, complaints, or indifference with Deborah at Coco Chocolates, in Toronto.  I recommend doing so in person, that way you can get some of her chocolate, which is the best in the city in my opinion, or perhaps pick up some ice cream, which is delicious, even on a chilly day in March, if I do say so myself.

And I do. It was delicious, and there's still some left in the freezer that'll I'll probably snack on as a reward for actually getting my ass back to this blog.

If you gather from that that I am now in Toronto then you are correct. I've been home just over a week, and in that time I've had the distinct pleasure of discovering how disbelief and cognitive dissonance manifest itself upon the face of many of my friends. I've also, having come down with a severe case of jetlag and a headcold, been floating around in somewhat of a surreal state, no doubt making an ass of myself.

Why should home be any different from the rest of the world.

Things have been moving at quite the clip since getting home, and I realized I really needed to get back to writing in the blog, lest it fade away and you all think that I took up a job as a lady-boy in Bangkok or something. I mean, there's nothing saying that that isn't actually the case and that the above is an entire ruse so that no one judges me for what might be considered a peculiar course correction in careers...

Right, perhaps this entry needs a bit of a course diretion.

Hoi An.

How did the sailor greet the HL7 specialist?

Few of you will get that. For those of who do, I apologize.

This is the Aussie bar in Hoi An where Muffin, Big Balls, Evil Bastard, Wallaby, Wallaby Jr (later Clippy), and Crusher (later Party Phil), all came into being.

And this is a rice field.

Do you notice any differences? Do you, like I do, wonder what sorts of nicknames we might have come up with for one another had they been born from this tranquil bicycle ride around the outskirts of Hoi An, as opposed to a place that runs metal shutters across it's doors at curfew, but keeps serving you until you don't know any better inside?

Big Balls might have been Sweet Pea.
Crusher may have been Farmer (it did anyway)
Evil Bastard might have been Miss Congeniality

But Muffin, I don't see how that one would have changed.

Fishing net.

Ngoc and I hoisted it out of the water which, incidently, weighs a lot.

This chair is perfectly positioned to sit and stare at the buffalo that I introduced you to previously.

Not that I can think of any particular reason that you would want to sit and stare at a buffalo for an extended period. Though I imagine there must be a Youtbe channel for that by now. So yes, why do it live when you can do it from the comfort of your own home, or on the bus, or sitting at the pub. Access to buffalos should not be restrained by geography. Free the buffalo! Free your soul!

Tour de France it was not.

It really was a pleasant ride about the countryside, and honestly, there's not much more I can say about it then that. My notes are pretty sparse, which may or may not be a result of having been riding a bicycle at the time. One little tidbit that I do not require my notes for was the moment when we had all stopped along one of the paths through the fields to look at something or another. We'd dismounted and pulled our bikes as best we could to one side of the path so as not to block traffic (they're actually surprisingly busy places), however this apparently was not sufficient as a lady pedals by and screams "This ain't a parking lot ya know!"

Gotta love ex-pats.

That's Caroline at the dock where the bike ride finished up, and conveniently had a boat at the end of it to bring us and our bikes back down the river.

I so so so so so so so, ever so wanted that fisherman to unfurl his net and cast it out over the water so that I could capture that classic pic for myself. And I'm sure he eventually did do precisely that. Just not with me around. They wouldn't let me stop the boat.

Back in Hoi An the next day Wendy and I, both being people who enjoyed taking pictures, and having been discussing different shots for a few days now, decided to do a bit of a photo walk-about for an afternoon. What you're about to suffer through is a result of that demonic pact.

As you can see, Hoi An is a lovely place, full of colour, friendly people, history, cool old buildings, lovely waterways, energetic markets... all the things that you might be looking for if you were wanting to take pictures. And that's all I know. I mean, I could look up more for you, but really, that's all that's coming to mind right now. I'm sorry. I suck. But truth is, my brain wasn't as engaged in remembering the stuff Ngoc told us about each place as it should have been.

I think my brain actually broke somewhere back in Delhi and still hasn't fully recovered.

The big thing I can tell you about Hoi An has nothing to do with the hundred-year-old eggs you see below.

They're actually only a few weeks old, but they've been in a hole in the ground for all that time, and have fermented, and are pretty much black on the inside I am told, so they get to be century eggs. I didn't try them in Cambodia or Thailand either.

Lanterns.

We visted Hoi An just before Tet, the Lunar New Year. You may recall me writing about how big a deal this is. Well, the people in Hoi An, like the rest of Vietnam I imagine, were all very busy making everything nice and clean and new again. New Year. New Beginning. Makes a good kinda sense.

Beyond the usual spring cleaning this included freshly painted buildings, and new lanterns. Lots and lots of new lanterns. Lovely paper lanterns of every colour (okay, not every) everywhere. Made and sold in shops, strung across the streets, along the eaves of buildings. Lanterns everywhere.

But that's not the thing I was going to tell you.

Nor is it about fruit that inspired medieval weaponry designs.

Nor is it about this talented young man producing these lovely paintings, one of which Wendy purchased.

See? Lanterns. They're pretty.

These few are from the next day of wandering around Hoi An that I did with the Martin Family.

Now, why all this time in Hoi An?

Well, it totally deserves that much time and a whole lot more as it's a lovely place with plenty to see and do. That said, we spent two-and-a-half days there because what Hoi An is really well known for is it's tailors. Here's where you go to get your fancy duds. Interesting how duds can mean clothes or munitions that fail to explode.

Did I just suggest there could be exploding clothing? Help me with the punctuation. I think I needed another comma.

Anyway, yes, "dud" can mean clothes, and it can also mean "faulty munitions". The clothes one seems to have come first, so how that reused is beyond me. Perhaps duds were clothes that actually weren't very good and we've just lost that aspect of the word over time.

Ah well, something I can spend lots of time sorting out once I'm back at work next week.

Actually, let's do it now.

It looks like duds meant clothes in the 16th century, and then in the 17th century it meant "old clothes" or "rags". Well, if you'd had the same suit for a hundred years I guess it would be looking rather tatty. But from here I can see how we get to munitions that won't explode. Don't ask why, I just can. Let me know if you have any problem with the leap.

Right, tailors. Looking for some lovely new threads at a fraction of the cost. Come to Hoi An. It's what they do. They do it well, they do it fast, and like I've already said, they do it inexpensively. I don't think it's "Tom's" inexpensively, but it's also bespoke.

No, I didn't get anything made for myself in Hoi An. That's another story.

But, with practically everyone else dudded out, it was time to hop a bus to nearby Da Nang (I always hear Robin Williams singing when I think of Da Nang  - the irony of that one sucks) and board the night train to Nha Trang. Which is precisely what we did.

This time without the vodka.

A Little More to the Left

After a night in Halong Bay we headed back to Hanoi, to enjoy part of the day, and more importantly, to collect the rest of our luggage (we'd only taken day packs), and catch the night train to Hue. Now, yes, I did take pictures of Hanoi during this time, but not of anything new (unless you count Beer Street and a bunch of us sitting at a table trying to live up to the name - wait you've seen that picture), so I'll just skip to the train, other than to say that police cars in Hanoi sound like ice cream trucks in Toronto, which, I can inform you from first hand experience, is very, very, disappointing.

So on to the night train, and the "party cabin". Yes, I've already told you about this too. Just providing a little more photographic evidence.

Now, I forget who it was, though I think it was Heather, put a comment on FB a while back regarding the number of pics of beer bottles I kept posting. In my defense I was:

a) just giving the audience what I think it wanted, and if you look at the "likes" on those posts you'll see I was pretty on;

b) wanting to introduce my fellow beer lovers back home to some potential new options, so providing a public service one might say; and,

c) trying to catalog new beers for future reference.

Not to mention these were the only shots taken on my phone that weren't coming out blurry. Go figure.

I say all of that because I don't want anyone getting the wrong impression about what we all got up to for three weeks in Indochina. So let's be clear. There was beer. There were towers of beer. Heck, there were enough towers of beer to make Neuschwanstein feel like a split-level in Burlington. And to compound that there were Australians, lots of Australians. And Brits. I had a responsibility to represent Canada in this meeting of the Commonwealth.

So don't judge.

There was also lots of cultural and historical stuff. And Hue was packed full of them. But not until we got off the train the next morning.

Our first destination was a Buddhist Nunnery for lunch, which is something they do to help support the Pagoda, it's school, and activities. Hue is pretty much the centre for Buddhism in Vietnam. Incidently in northern Vietnam the Buddhism that is practiced is a combination of Buddist, Tao, and Confucian teachings, while in the south it is straight up Buddhism.

This was lunch.

And this one is a window of a building near the ancient Tiger Arena that we visited.

Now, it's not actually ancient as that apparently means "belonging to the very distant past, no longer existing" and that isn't the case here.  But it's older than old, and saying just "old" makes it sound lame, when it's actually really cool.

Huh, Ho Quyen, the name of this particular Tiger Arena, was built in 1830. Guess it's just old, and not really that even. You'd just figure a place called "Tiger Arena" would be super old.

Anyway, it's near the banks of the Perfume river, and not too far from the Citadel (which by the way wasn't to hard to be given how big it originally was), so it was a perfect place for the royal family and Mandarin's to go once a year and watch elephants and tigers brawl in the name of high entertainment. The last one was in 1904.

I could show you more pictures but it's a big grassy circular space enclosed by a wall with a gate or two in it, so this kinda says it all.

You know, it wasn't till I took this picture that I noticed how neat the shadows from the tree looked on the wall.

This is the Citadel in Hue. Perhaps calling it the Royal Citadel or Imperial City would be better, as it's those too. Within it's walls was the Forbidden City. Built in 1804 it was, I believe, in use as a residence until the early-mid 1900's, so up until the last emperor of Vietnam. When I said it was big what I meant is that it's 2km by 2km square and is surrounded by a fortified wall and a moat, and was home to only the Imperial family and a few high-ranking dignitaries.

But as you can see they'll let any rabble in nowadays.

This wasn't when she said it, but it's fun to repeat so I'll say it here. 

Linda commented one time that Wendy made every picture she was in look better... as she made everything look that much bigger. She's always smiling too, which helps. But in truth, Linda was spot on. This door for example wouldn't have looked out of place on the split-level in Burlington I mentioned.

These are hungry fish.

While not looking incredibly happy, the music they were playing did sound that way.

On our first full day with Ngoc he gave us all a shoulder bag, and a little book about each of our destinations. I still have the bag (Jake fixed the zipper on it a couple of days ago); the book I promptly left on the bus. But not before I hadn't flipped through it a few times. The above is the full-page pic that introduced Hue in the book. Actually, it's my version of the pic, because it was such a great shot (the books, not mine) that, upon actually coming across it, I had to take it for myself.

As did every. Single. One of us.

Feng Shui is a very big deal in Vietnam, and Gia Long, the emperor who had the Imperial Palace built, consulted with geomancers as to it's location, and then it's layout. I mention that here because I got thinking about something when looking at the above picture. 

It's the gateway into the area of the citadel that was the Queen Mother's. Out of this picture is a wall, about 20 feet long, just kinda standing there in the middle of the garden, between this gate and the entrance to the Queen Mum's residence. The wall exists to block bad energy from flowing from outside the gate, onto the property, and directly into the house. It also does an excellent job of thwarting 19th century peeping toms.

Which reminds me of something else.

Phil is into role-playing games that are reinactments of actual battles throughout history. He and a few of his friends have been doing this for over 40 years. Super cool in my opinion. Anyway, Phil and I got into this conversation about the role feng shui could play in warfare. 

I'm hoping he'll test it out. And Jef, if you're reading this, perhaps consider it for one of your gaming systems. Just sayin' if it's good for where to build your home and put your furniture, then it should be good for world domination too.

This is Thien Mu pagoda. It was built in 1601, and at seven stories, is the tallest religious building in Vietnam.

It sits on top of the Ha Khe hill, which is on the north bank of the Perfume River, (I think the French might have had something to do with that name) which is what we then cruised along next in the lovely boat you see below.

Upon entering the boat the first thing I noted to my left was a display case of all the things they were going to try and sell us during this trip. I stepped outside and enjoyed the air for the duration.

The boat dropped us awhile later and we were picked up by our bus and driven to here, which at first we all thought was the Royal Tombs Ngoc had said we were going to visit, but then turned out to be just a forest that reminded me of Miller's Crossing and had me start to wonder about Ngoc's "job" as a "guide".

Turns out it provided a great view of the river.

Pam always did that.

We then however did make our way to the Royal Tombs.

These tombs are the resting place of the Nguyen Dynasty, who ruled from 1802-1945, and, if you've been keeping track of dates you'll already have figured out, are responsible for pretty much everything else we saw this day minus the 17th-century pagoda.

And no, Wendy is really little. I'm just slouching.