Musings after the fact

Here I am sitting in the "Highlands Coffee house" opposite the Allez Boo Bar in the Pham Ngu Lao area on my first full day in country. It is hot and the roads outside are frantic with the sounds and sites of cars, bikes and all kinds of vehicles and people in a riverlike embrace. Outside on the corner there are about a dozen blokes who look like they are a chapter from the Saigon mafia. They are waiting for someone like me to hire them to ride them around town on thier bikes. One of these bikes lovingly polished and faited looks like a sports bike, it even has a sports fairing and a Yamaha badge (an R1 clone?). The only thing is it is a 125cc scooter! A step thru with motorcycle wheels - total crap.

The hotel I have, The Hong Hoa is right in the middle of the noisyest most frenetic part of the PhamNgu Lao dsitrict. Yet it is wonderfully quiet and peaceful. It even has a pool with turtles lazily swimming around like some strange shelled bhudda. It is hidden away from the rat race behind a convenience store where you can purchase all your incidental needs from soap to tothpaste to a Viettel sim card. A virtual one stop shop. The staff are very kind and try to be helpful despite my dreadful vietnamese ( I really must start to learn the langauge. Every time I try I am lost in a gabble of sounds and words that swamp me into my own personal image of an imbecile - very good for the ego chaps). 

So far today I have walked down to the Bhin Thanh Markets as it was just opening. I had a seafood Pho in a street stall for breakfast (the Pho 2000 shop was not open yet). Very nice if a bit expensive.. It cost 65,000 dong (about $6:00). It was too early to complain and it was my first time at a street stall so I was a bit nervous.

The park between my hotel and the markets was full of some kind of exposition with stalls everywhere. Not speaking the longo meant that I did not know what it was about. Some stalls seemed to be advertising housing developments??? Interspersed between these partially dismantled stalls the locals were all out exercising. I had visions of Australians panting away in stinky gyms flogging thier sweaty bodies away at some machine. Here the locals were doing Tai Chi to music, physical jerks to different music and a few lucky ones thrashing away at what looked like kids play equipment which in actual fact was a non electical exercise equipment. At the end of the park were the badminton freaks who seemed a little demented in thier concentration. The whole thing was great and they had all dissapeared when I returned.

I have bought my ticket to Dalat and have organised my flight home ( I am now going to be fed on the trip home). I am going to get my sim card and try to book my train ticket from Danang to Hanoi. This means I am going to have to negotiate with the mafia outside for a ride to the train station. Cop youse later chaps