A brief interruption to our regular scheduling

I realise my posts have been a bit domestic lately. In fact, I think my kitchen has been my hottest topic of discussion for a while now. That's a bit sad.

But fear not gentle reader, I am breaking out of the domestic rut and will be heading to Cambodia next week. This time we will be going to Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat and Tonle Sap. We will be travelling with my parents, who we will meet in HCMC this weekend. So that should be exciting. It will however, also mean that I won't be posting for a week or two. My apologies if you start to suffer withdrawal symptoms. A nice cup of tea and a good lie-down should cure it.

You may also notice that I have changed the lay-out of my blog a bit. I'm still learning about this whole blogging business so don't be surprised if I make more changes, I'll alter things as I found out what new and exciting things I can add.

So enjoy the next few weeks whatever you are doing and wherever you may be.

Tam biet!

A story (not for bedtime though - it's too scary)

I just remembered a story that I'm sure you will all appreciate.

In order for this story to make sense, I have to explain the layout of our kitchen sink. The sink is suspended above a sunken tiled area. The sink drains into this tiled area. The tiled area has a drain which leads to out the back of our house. The drain cover is plastic and partly broken. At the back of our house is an overgrown vacant lot.

Ok, so now I've set the scene... Yesterday I did the dishes. When I finished them I took the plug out of the sink to let the water drain out into the tiled area (as you would). I looked down to make sure the water was draining properly. There was something covering the drain. The light in the kitchen is pretty bad so I couldn't tell what it was. I bent down to get a closer look. What was that thing? A rock? Why would there be a rock there? Hang on, is that... a... tail....?!?

Gaaaarrrgh! It's a dead rat!!!

While I was busy screeching Dan picked up the rat (with a plastic scoop thing) and threw it outside. It's not the first rat we've had (there was one in our lounge room the other night, eeew!), they live in the overgrown bushes and get into our house through the drains. So now Dan has another home renovation job - fixing the drain covers so they are rat-proof.

The sensible side of my brain is telling me that, the rat I saw was dead, better a dead rat than a live one right? To which the hysterical side of my brain screams back: 'But why was it dead?!? Why did a rat come into our house and die right near the kitchen drain? What killed it?!?!' The night before I am sure I was woken up by a terrible screeching noise, did the rat encounter something far worse than it? What hideous rat-killing creature is living in our kitchen?

Our kitchen scares me. I cannot go in there without making a banging noise beforehand to hopefully scare away the critters within. I definitely cannot go in there at night time unless there are a whole heap of lights on.

Who would have thought that our kitchen would be the scariest thing in Vietnam?

Unrelated photos + one related picture

I initially called this entry 'Unrelated photos' because that's all this entry contained. But then I included a picture that relates to one of the photos. So my title didn't make sense. I had to change it. My poor tired brain couldn't come up with anything other than '+ one related picture' (it is Friday after all). So this is it. An entry that only contains photos + one related picture, a title that is pretty bad and a long-winded explanation about said bad title...

Enjoy!

Our friend's nephew playing on a motorbike.

Heaps of these boxes were stacked outside our work offices earlier this week. If you look closely you can kind of see what they contain... crocodiles! The Fisheries Department (same building as us) caught someone transporting them without a permit. Definitely the strangest thing I have seen at my workplace.

We bought a foam double bed mattress the other day. This guy is delivering it to our house. The mattress isn't strapped onto the motorbike, the driver is just holding it on with one hand while steering with the other.

Proving the formula that monsoon wind + monsoon rain + curly hair = afro frizz.

Further proof of the above formula.

A not-so-fun fact

Vietnam is in the middle of a draught. Which is terrible news for the agricultural industries here. It is also terrible news for the country's electricity supply. Apparently there has not been enough rain to supply water for the hydropower plants. So we need to conserve electricity. How? By turning off the electricity supply!

For the past month or so Soc Trang's power supply has been shut off every second day. Different parts of the city have their power shut off on alternating days. We are kind of lucky because, when there is no power at work, there is power at home. When there is no power at home, there is power at work. Usually the power is shut off around 7.30am and turned back on at 5.30-6.00pm.

We're used to the power-on/power-off situation now, which shows just how much we have adapted to life in Vietnam. Except for yesterday. Yesterday there was no power at home and I missed the first half of the finale of Australia's Next Top Model. Not happy Jan!!!

Edited to add:
I just Googled Australia's Next Top Model. The season I was watching was shot way back in 2005. I really am a bit behind the times here! So I spent a productive few minutes Googling all the contestants to see who had made it in the modelling industry. Very sad, I know. What's even worse is that Dan was doing it too...haha!

A tale bold and true...

I realised yesterday that I hadn’t updated you guys with the latest gecko/crocodile/monster lizard-living-in-our-house news. So here goes...

The situation was untenable. The monster lizard was holding our kitchen hostage. It wasn’t scared of us. Every time I went in there it would look down at me from the wall as if to say “this is my home and there is nothing you can do about it”. Then, just to assert its authority, it would wake us up every morning at about 5am with an incredibly loud battle cry. The battle cries were a warning. The monster lizard was saying “get out now humans! Leave while you still can. Because I am coming, I will find you. And then I will eat you.” This message was reinforced one night when the monster lizard made a huge, crashing noise. It had caught a gecko. It then ate the gecko. Geckos make the most pitiful noises when they are being eaten; a very sad-sounding ‘eeeeeh’ noise. “Why?”, it was saying, “why are you eating me? All I want to do is eat mosquitoes and poo everywhere.” If I wasn’t so scared of the monster lizard (and if I hadn’t just been woken up around midnight) I would have gone into the kitchen and saved the gecko.

The gecko-slaughter was the final straw. It was me or the monster lizard. One of us had to leave the house.

There was no way I was going to try and catch the monster lizard (that would involve actually going near it – no way!) so I had to scare it somehow. Vaguely waving a stick in its direction didn’t seem to work. But then I came up with a brilliant plan...stomping!

Every time I went into the kitchen I would stomp my feet. My first attempts weren’t very successful, probably because I was hiding behind Dan – he was blocking the sound. I had to be brave and face the lizard and stomp, stomp stomp. Success! The monster lizard ran away! When it returned I stomped again. It ran away again! This went on for three days. The monster lizard must have finally realised that the crazy human in the house was going to make a god-awful noise every time it saw it. The monster lizard never returned. I won the battle.

The battle, but not the war. Since the monster lizard left us, our house has become a menagerie for an assortment of animals. We have had slugs, toads and rats (which could have been mice) in our kitchen, geckos all through the house, and bats and not-quite-as-big monster lizards on our veranda. I am convinced this is an orchestrated effort by the monster lizard. It is using its furry, scaly and slimy friends to try and drive us out of its rightful home. It hasn’t been successful so far, all it has achieved so far is that I refuse to go into the kitchen at night time unless the light is already on in there. Dan and I will continue to fight the good fight. We will ensure that our house is our home, and ours alone! Definitely no monster lizards allowed. And no rats....eeeew!

This is how the gecko/crocodile/monster lizard saw me after three days of me stomping at it.

This is what I was actually like.

Vinh Chau pics

This is one of the bridges we passed on our way back from Vinh Chau - there are plenty like this out in the countryside.
Dan at breakfast. On the table you can see clams, fish hotpots, crab and, of course, beer.

The Mekong River and a whole heap of prawn ponds.

Stormin'

This is the storm we got caught in on the way back from Bac Lieu. It's not a great video and I'm not sure if it shows the huge amount of thunder and lightning. I wanted to post it in the entry below but the internet connection is a little slow.

Riding around the Mekong

The storm we got caught in on the way back to Soc Trang.

I took this video to show what it is like driving through small towns in the Mekong Delta. This is on the main road Bac Lieu and Soc Trang. The road on the over side of the bridge was pretty rough - that's my excuse for the shaky camera work and I'm sticking to it.

Bac Lieu pics

The restaurants over the ocean. It is the muddiest coastline I have ever seen.

The Khmer temple.

Paintings on the interior wall and ceiling of the temple.

Entrance to the temple, I had Jimmy Barnes' 'Flame Trees' stuck in my head all day after visiting the temple.

Cruising around Bac Lieu in the jeep.

Renovating, a bit of history and the environment...

It’s been a busy few weeks since I last updated this weblog (I hate the word ‘blog’, sounds like something that comes out of a little kid’s nose). I’ve been busy working on editing reports, designing a community centre (which now probably won’t get built til after I leave) and drawing diagrams for mangroves educational material. I also spent all of last week at home (where we don’t have internet access) watching Vietnamese workers come into the house to install a door, a toilet, a kitchen sink, a bathroom sink, fix the plumbing, paint the walls and fix the lights. The renovations are finished, now we just need some furniture.

Renovations aren’t very interesting so I won’t bore you with the details about them. Instead I’ll tell you about what we have been up to over the past two weekends.

So, two weekends ago we went to visit some German friends who live and work in the next province over, Bac Lieu. Bac Lieu is smaller than Soc Trang and attracts about the same number of Western tourists, i.e. next to none. So a group of Westerners walking around town is quite a spectacle. Even more spectacular is when the group of Westerners pile into a 1969 American jeep which is then driven off by a woman! The jeep is a relic from the Vietnam War (or the American War, as they call it here) and it was the only car available to buy for one of the Germans who is working on a GTZ project on the coast of Bac Lieu. Being driven around the countryside in the jeep is a pretty unique experience!

There are basically only two things to do in Bac Lieu. One is to go to the Kitty Café (which has an incredibly loud nightclub downstairs – I spent about 10minutes in there once, I was deaf when we left) and order a tom yum noodle soup and a tuna sandwich. The other is to go out to the government-owned restaurant on a wharf over the ocean. We did both of these, just like we did last time we went to Bac Lieu. We did vary our routine a little this time though, and drove out to the coast to visit a Khmer temple. The temple was incredible; the interior walls of the main temple were covered in Indian-style paintings. It looked as though the paintings were representations of the life of Buddha, though I can’t be 100% sure about this – I’m no expert in painting interpretation and Buddhism!

We drove back to Bac Lieu along the coast and saw all the prawn farms that have been set up there. A lot of farmers have converted their rice paddies into prawn farms, this has caused a lot of environmental and social damage, with salt water intruding into the soil (meaning rice and other crops can’t grow), mangroves being cut down to make way for prawn ponds and farmers lacking the knowledge and expertise to farm prawns.

We left Bac Lieu for Soc Trang at about midday on Sunday and got caught in a massive storm enroute. We ended up spending about 2 hours sitting in a roadside café waiting for the storm to pass. It was a huge storm. There was almost continuous thunder and lightning, the rain was absolutely bucketing down and the wind was blowing the rain almost vertically into the café. The plastic chairs and tables in the café were being tossed around by the wind as though they were merely pieces of paper. It was very impressive and a little bit scary. What was even scarier than the storm though, was that people were still out on the roads driving their motorbikes. I can’t imagine how many accidents must occur during stormy conditions.

Since that weekend there have been storms and/or rain every afternoon. I’d say the wet season has definitely started. Sitting out on our front porch and watching the rain (as well as all the people caught out in the rain – ha!) has become a regular pastime for Dan and me. We have our folding chairs, now we just need a pitchfork and a shotgun. We have the fist-waving down pat.

And so onto last weekend. Dan, Boris and I were invited to attend the World Environment and World Ocean Day celebrations in Vinh Chau (about an hour drive away from Soc Trang). The celebrations started at 6.30am, which meant we had to leave Soc Trang at 5.30am. I’m definitely not used to the Vietnamese custom of getting up early and starting work early!

The celebrations consisted of a series of songs and speeches, all in Vietnamese. So we had no idea what was being said. The only bit I did understand was when Dan and I got mentioned as special guests. We had to sit right up the front with all the important officials. There were also a few cameras around so it is possible that Dan and I ended up on Vietnamese news. (Hopefully we didn’t look too tired.) The official part of the ceremony was followed by tree planting in the streets of Vinh Chau then breakfast at a local restaurant.

We got to the breakfast at about 7.30am. It was like no breakfast I have ever been to before. We were served fish, and beer, and clams, and beer, and more fish, and beer, and crabs, and beer, and prawns, and beer, and more fish, and beer, and beer, and beer. I managed to avoid the beer (unlike Dan and Boris, who had to drink with everyone there) and joined in the drinking rounds with a can of sarsaparilla (ewww – still better than drinking beer at 7.30am though) until one of the men decided that I had to drink something that at least looked like beer. My sarsaparilla got taken away and I had to drink a yellow energy drink, diluted with water to make it look beer-coloured. It was one of the strangest and opulent breakfasts I have ever been to. Who would have thought that I would one day celebrate World Environment and World Ocean Day by eating every edible creature from the sea.

One of Dan’s favourite sayings these days is “Every week is different in Soc Trang”, (he’s become a bit of a philosopher, I think it’s all that time spent sitting out on the porch, staring at the clouds. Except for when he’s shaking his fist at passing kids that is…). Although it pains me to admit it, he is right. So far this week has brought a power cut (again – for a while there it was every second day, then it improved to sporadic power cuts, now it seems to be every second day again) and the discovery that one of the workers at the bakery can speak English – so he can tell me what the cake fillings are, meaning I can avoid the durian flavoured ones. (Durian, ewww. The smell alone is awful and it’s so upsetting to eat something which turns out to have durian lurking inside of it.) Stay tuned and I’ll let you know what other exciting events occur in Soc Trang this week…