Mekong Delta

This is the beginnings of the new bridge in Can Tho, which will make the place a whole lot more convenient to get to, whenever it is done.
Swamp alley

Fish trap

Tourist trap

At the hủ tiếu factory - that is pasta, which will be cut into strips, drying in the sun

The best seat on the boat!

'Monkey Bridge' - oh, well, tourist bridge, actually

Floating Market at Can Tho

All the heavy boat traffic went by the market leaving the market bobbing around a bit more, but still floating.

This is the pop dispenser boat...

The laundry boat - or at least laundry day on the boat

I know you can't tell from the picture, but these guys were tossing watermelons from the mother ship into the rowboat two at a time at a pretty rapid pace. Fun to watch, but I didn't see any get smashed ... or even fall in the river.

A lot of the boats had these bamboo poles with samples of the produce they were selling tied up on them. Good advertising - assuming that pumpkin doesn't fall off and clock somebody!

The tourist boats were prime targets for all kinds of sellers.

The apprentice soft drink seller

Getting inside a pineapple boat

Boats - the only thing they weren't selling off of a boat.

And by the way ...

I have moved to Ho Chi Minh City. More rain, more people, more high rise buildings, more noise, more sweet food... Among the things occupying my mind since coming down here is the southern Vietnamese accent. I had the amusing experience the other day of someone telling me that my Vietnamese accent was very good, but that she still couldn't understand me! It goes back to the inherently arbitrary notion of a 'proper' accent. Today someone compared the northern and southern Vietnamese accents to someone speaking the Queen's English in, say, Alabama. I wouldn't want to push that comparison very far, but it is true that in southern Vietnamese the vowels tend to stretch out and mix together in surprising ways, and the remaining sounds are apparently optional!

Anyway, my first post from Saigon has nothing really to do with crowds or the local accent.

A few photos from Giac Lam Pagoda.

A tree looking at a reflection of a fish ..

And at the zoo they have the most common animal in Vietnam (trừ con chuột, con muỗi..) hands down - penguinular refuse-receptacalus!

As well as more typical zoo animals like tigers

and rhinos.

Along with lotus ponds to sit beside.

Creme de la Rue

Snapshot from the other day in Hanoi. At the Italian ice cream place on Ho Hoan Kiem, I am eating something delicious and practicing my Vietnamese by way of explaining the best methods to study English to the girls serving ice cream who know how to say, "How can I help you?" and not much more. A lady and her daughter come and buy some ice cream, tourists. An old woman walks by, begging. The daughter convinces her mother, in 4 seconds, to buy another ice cream and promptly delivers it to the beggar. The old lady sort of nods slightly and ambles down the street, the ice cream cone dangling nearly upside-down, while the little girl is frantic about the impending waste of a good ice cream cone. I think the old lady took one lick before the ice cream fell, and continued holding the cone. The donor recovered quickly (as little girls eating ice cream are prone to do) and moved on. Presumably the old lady did the same.



Ice cream is what you might call 'non-refundable aid', and the track record of distribution efficiency is slightly less than stellar - especially on hot days!

Rain in Hanoi

Archives Alert

Just a note to the curious out there - I have recently uploaded a great number of old photos onto my blog. Most are not particularly good quality photos, but perhaps amusing or at least representative of some places I've been and things I've done. They are backdated to roughly the time when they were taken, you can find them under the archives list on the bottom of the sidebar or in the labels section. You can find, say Shanghai or Xinjiang or Zanzibar or Zimbabwe or Morroco or Norway or Sinnemahoning or Colorado... you get the point. You can find whatever you want if you look hard enough!

Hà Giang

A few pictures from a weekend trip to Hà Giang Province.

VINASAT-1

Last weekend Vietnam’s first telecommunications satellite was launched. While not all that interested in space or telecommunications per se, I thought the international nature of the project was fascinating. To be operated by Vietnam Post and Telecommunications Corporation, the satellite was built by Lockheed Martin in Newton PA, and launched by Arianespace, the European space agency, from its Space Center in Kourou, French Guiana, South America. It will, of course, end up over Vietnam again, to be doing useful and important stuff, I suppose. Anyway, the launch poster is on a background of Vietnam’s version of tourist heaven, Halong Bay.

Hanoi Signage

A few signs I see around Hanoi which, whatever the message is, always exercise my Vietnamese.

"Traffic safety is happiness for everyone" - especially for these two particular children standing directly in front of a green light in the middle of an intersection...

The countdown sign for Hanoi's 1000 year anniversary celebration, which is, obviously, in 904 days.



This is a devilishly underhanded advertising slogan - especially with the transparent text which must be subliminal or something - "Shop some more" !

"Raising the population quality to build a capitol of increasing wealth, beauty and modern culture: Stop at two children to raise them well"

In very rough translation, this says "Emulate the founding achievements: Celebrating the anniversary of the Vietnam Communist Party". It caught my eye because the first word, I am told, can be translated 'emulation' or 'competition' and so I was trying to figure out what competition had to do with the CPV anniversary. Perhaps this, the idea that to emulate and to compete are the same thing, explains why Vietnamese businesses naturally seem to congregate in kind - so you get a single street lined with 120 shops selling exactly the same thing, displayed in the same way and at essentially the same price. It is the emulation side of competition.

Indira Ghandi Park - who knew!

"Conserve electricity, protect the environment"

Sponsored, incidentally, by a bank, which also has similar signs that are more fun to translate about turning off electric appliances and making the city green, clean and beautiful.