Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum

Style, a pig with pure style! These are a few pictures from the Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum. This next shot is a woodprint from the village of Dong Ho which is famous for ... woodprints. I like woodprints, the Dong Ho ones are cool even if rather formulaic. This one is of Hai Ba Trung, plus an elephant, so it's got to be high on my list!



Galleries with windows are nice, but they do make for surprising pictures sometimes! And this below, I have no recollection of exactly what that was but I'm pretty sure it didn't happen naturally.



Here we have the "Tall Four Seasons on Silks and Short Wooden People on Pedestal" Gallery:

Kenya Safari - Samburu

Nairobi to Samburu

This was the view from my porch immediately after I walked in to my room at the Serena Lodge

And these from the game drives in Samburu

This a Beisa Oryx, unique to Samburu Reserve

Gerenuk

Stripes

A cheetah sitting on a termite mound 'reading the menu'

Leopard posing very nicely

The Tale of Lion, Hairball and Buffalo

Buffalo, after all, is truly too ugly to be king, but he is big!

This rhino was at a "safari walk" at Nairobi National Park, not in the wild. And he wasn't very wild either, in fact he was sleeping soundly as far as I could tell.

The Rest...

Overlooking Samburu/Buffalo Springs

Festivale!

I have to interrupt this photo-stream for a little to talk about Hai Bà Trưng, the Trung sisters. The Trung sisters lived around the beginning of the 1st millennium, just outside present-day Hanoi, and were, like, seriously good at kung fu. One Trưng sister fell in love with a local dandy named Thi Sách. Mr. Thi Sách had a lot going for him; he had a shiny Japanese motorbike, one of those burnt-yellow Korean boy band hairstyles, and a mobile with 4893 ring tones. However, much to his dismay, the Chinese (who wore the big hats here, back then) caught up with him one day and he wasn’t wearing his helmet so they took him away to someplace for people who don’t wear helmets. Now, that left one Bà Trưng up the creek with no paddle, as it were. So she rounded up her sister, and all the intrepid women in the neighborhood, they made themselves an army and chased away the Chinese. The army included elephants – those are the elephants in the Hai Ba Trung Temple (picture, I’m talking about the picture of an elephant in the dark) who the Trưng sisters rode into battle, since Thi Sách’s motorbike had been impounded. That elephant told me that Bà Trưng was not particularly thrilled to be on one Vietnamese pachyderm express instead of one Japanese motorbike, but that is how the cookie crumbles. So, there are the roots of Vietnamese matriarchal society, or Vietnamese society’s matriarchal roots, or at very least a nice story which can be interpreted with a matriarchal cast. The rest of the story, well, Hai Bà Trưng were queens for something like 3 years, then the Chinese came back with a bigger madder army, and the elephants got rumbly tummies (the Chinese had left an ox-cart full of peanuts at the café down the road). The legend (this bit is actually the legend, not me, honest) says that the Chinese went into battle in 1st Century birthday suits, and the Hai Bà Trưng being honorable women, turned around and ran away, and so the battle was lost. In any case, along with a Hai Bà Trưng Street in every city, town, village, and berg in Vietnam, there is also the Hai Bà Trưng Temple here in Hanoi, with elephants and occasional festivals.

This picture reminded me of some photos from when I was in Tibet, inspiring me to post some of those photos in an archival sort of way (these are from January 2003), by clicking here you can find my essay on the bus journey out of Lhasa, and photos of the place.

Anyway, back to Hanoi, night on the lake.

Con Voi Vui Lam

Theoretically I am supposed to be ‘adding value’ here, saying something that could possibly be usefully or edifying for someone somewhere. However, there are times when things which could hardly be classified as ‘value’ simply need to be said. So you just say them.

Elephants destroy crops in Nghe An

A herd of elephants last week destroyed more than 2 ha of crops in Thanh Thuy Village... The elephants did not attack anyone (not even the reporter wandering the fields in a ganja haze dreaming up what kind of story to write next), but roamed the area, uprooting cassava and corn plants and then piling them up into several heaps. (So did they pile the corn and cassava in separate heaps? Which one did they eat first? Did they have ugali or boule on the menu?)

Local residents believed the elephants belonged to one family. (Let me guess, all four had the surname Nguyen and worked in the Elephantine Pedicure Boutique.) The elephants also entered the area late last year. (It’s officially a tradition now, next year they’ll invite the cousins.)

Thanh Chuong District authorities called on local people not to kill the elephants if they travel to the area again. Loud noises are sufficient to scare the elephants away. (I’d say try karaoke.)

And, finally, here’s what those elephants felt like, sitting around looking at their cassava stash!

I have a weakness for articles about elephants and pictures of nephews...

Photo credit to my sister, starring Joshua Nganga and Zachary Gicharu, and partial appendages of Moses...

Thursday Ramblings

Friday of last week, the last day of the term at my school, all the students went to watch the film Baraka. I had heard of this film before but hadn’t seen it, and I was impressed. It is made somewhat in the mold of Koyaanisqatsi, if that’s familiar to anyone. I’m not sure what exactly to say about it, but if you like simple but remarkable photography, and mesmerizing music, check it out. Here is a link to the associated website. The students thought most of it was too boring. Sometimes I think that my students are sadly sheltered and maddeningly immature. Sometimes I think that I am old and peculiar and staid. I’m probably right on both counts.

The terms at my school are only five weeks long, so they go by pretty quickly. My new class this term has seventeen students, which is rather larger than usual. I had one class last term which was fourteen or so, but remembering their names was a challenge. There were two Ngas - Thu Nga and Thanh Nga, three Trangs - Thu Trang, Quyen Trang and Huyen Trang, two Hungs - Manh Hung and Trong Hung, then a Huong and a Phuong and a Phong... I knew most of their names by the end of the term but it took most of the term to get that far! Anyway, my new class is a lower level than I have taught before. So far it is going pretty well, I have to amuse them a little more than the upper level students, but on the other hand I don't have to explain subordinating conjunctions!

Having been back in Vietnam now for almost six months, I have finally realized that my Vietnamese is not going to improve much by osmosis. Sad. So I am back in language class, at the same university I studied in the first time I was in Hanoi. I enjoy it, although that class is quite noticeably above my level in terms of vocabulary. To offset that I am also taking a sporadic Vietnamese language class at the school I teach in, which is free for teachers, but is noticeably below my level since the other teachers taking that class haven't studied Vietnamese at all, or not until two weeks ago. So I come back from one class confused, exhausted and thoroughly convinced of my monumental inability to accomplish much, and from the other class slightly amused by my colleagues (language professionals, all of them) who can't remember, much less pronounce, the Vietnamese tones... Maybe with the combination of both classes I can move forward!

Tonight I found, behind a very small door on a rather large street in the middle of town, a German restaurant. The Kaiser Kaffee is appealing, if for no other reason, simply because it is called The Kaiser Kaffee and it is in Hanoi! It actually looks sort of German - old fashioned low ceiling with (fake but tasteful) exposed beams and straight-backed wooden chairs like any proper PA Dutch restaurant would have at home. The lady who seemed to be in charge of the place is, well, an unusually German-sized Vietnamese lady who kept on speaking German to me... I guess my Vietnamese was bad enough she couldn't tell what language it was! Anyway, BRATWURST, they have bratwurst. How cool is that! I had bratwurst and Vietnamese fresh spring rolls... The silliest things make me happy!

And speaking of the silliest things, here are my favorite news stories recently:

Man Bites Panda - cute and NOT cuddly
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5364058.stm

The Ancient 26-year-old Terracotta Warrior
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/5355546.stm

Vendredi heureux a tout le monde :)

Thailand