Darren and Jo on the Road (sometimes)

A visit to Nha Trang seemed like a good idea. Unfortunately, our dreams of lying on the beach, reading a book, dipping our toes in the sea, were shattered by by the stormy weather.

Fortunately, drizzle is better than baking sun when exploring the temples. And they put on a show with music and traditional Cham dancers who bring a whole new meaning to pothead…

Jo decided to try the Vietnamese technique of hair removal using a cotton thread and getting pummeled by an over-enthusiastic masseur. But what I really wanted was a mud bath with 3 women.

More pictures of Nha Trang here…

You may know that when we were in Moscow, I knocked on the doors of the Kremlin and asked: “Is Len in?”

In Hanoi, they also didn’t understand when I asked: “Is Ho Chi M… in?” Since our last visit to his mausoleum six years ago, they’ve added lots of video screens with songs and stories about Ho Chi Minh, including a Vietnamese version of
Ewan McCall’s “Ballad of Ho Chi Minh”.

It was a weekend, so the usual long line of people waiting to see him was extra-long. The other thing we hadn’t seen before was a display labelled “Garage of Ho Chi Minh’s Used Cars”. Apparently people kept giving him cars. And it seems he may have taken the chance to sell them. And it fits the song perfectly: “Ho Chi Minh was a used car salesman…”

When our Russian friends – Natasha and Katya – visited, it was a good excuse to take a week off work and do something we hadn’t done for quite a while in Hanoi… be tourists.

In between bouts of shopping, we took them on a whirlwind tour of the sights.
The Temple of Literature, Hoan Kiem and the turtle, the vast expanse of West Lake, the hussle and bussle of the Old Quarter, the US B-52 bomber shot down in 1972, sampling street food, bargaining at the markets, the busy narrow alleyways, the motorbike taxis, the water puppet show…

But the strangest moment was the last taxi journey we took. The driver was new to Hanoi, but suddenly realised that half his passengers were Russian. Turned out that he’d worked in Tyumen in Russia as a dancer (!) and spoke better Russian than English. So, we ended up with a British guy telling a Vietnamese driver in Russian how to get around his own capital city…

More pictures of Hanoi here…

On Sunday night I had another award duty to perform – this time to collect a “Golden Dragon” award for Apollo at the Hanoi Opera House. I was quite excited by the fact that I received a flower garland to wear on stage.

I found out shortly after I came off stage that it was all being beamed live across the country, when a friend texted me to say she’d just seen me on TV. I might have been more nervous if I’d known that Vietnam was watching.

Catching a taxi later, I kept the garland on. Well, it was the best way to carry it home to Jo. The taxi driver was ever so happy for me, greeting me with a smile and the exclamation “Winner!”

For the past few weeks, Vietnamese have been crowding round their TVs on a Saturday night for one reason only – to see if Mai Huong or Uyen Linh will come out on top of this year’s Vietnam Idol. While previous years have been a little lacklustre, this year proved to be a real knife-edge competition with several high-calibre singers battling it out.

Some thought that Mai Huong’s version of the Katy Perry song “Hot and Cold”, complete with wig and glasses, might have just won it for the 16-year-old. In the end, Uyen Linh just pipped her.

Our school decided it would be a good idea to award the two finalists a scholarship. Uyen Linh received her prize in Ho Chi Minh City – from the chairman, and Mai Huong in Hanoi – from me, part of my role as Operations Manager. I’m not sure if meeting me was any consolation to her.

On Sunday, I thought I’d look at this blog. Nothing published for a bit, but I like to check.

And there it was… GONE!

Nothing there, couldn’t even log on to my ISP host – passwords all changed. Hostroute were good enough to sort it all out and restore it, but warned me that it had probably been hacked. I changed some passwords, checked the blog, everything seemed fine.

Until it disappeared AGAIN!

Didn’t change enough passwords… I think I installed some dodgy software on my computer and it hacked the passwords from my FTP client… All passwords changed, rewrote the blog from scratch (almost), restored all the blog entries and pictures….

So far so good. Hack free. And actually, I like the new updated look! So, in the end, I’m glad we were hacked… (I think…)

Summertime is here already in Hanoi. For me and Jo, summer brings many things.

For a start, our school doubles the number of hours teaching kids, so everything gets really manic for about 10 weeks with extra teachers, extra hours and more workload.

Coupled with that, the temperatures soar. Yesterday it got to 39 C (102 F), but the “feels like” factor (due to humidity) was 51 C (124 F).

And because of the extra demand when everyone switches on the aircon in desperation, the system is given rests (or maybe overloads…) and you get the powercuts with periods of no power (yes, no aircon) in the day and, worse, night.

And then you just have to hope for a thunderstorm to bring the nighttime temperature back down to a manageable 28 C (82 F)…