Good Morning Vietnam! Grab a Visa and Travel Vietnam Airlines to Vietnam (Country in Southeast Asia) [Capital: Hanoi; Largest City: Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon; Currency: Vietnam Dong] - Land of Rich History & Culture from Colonialism to Communism through The Vietnam War to a Modern and Emerging World Economy. From September 2015 to June 2016 I taught English in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. This blog is for a record of those times for me and anyone who's interested.
I know it's a bit late now, but there are a couple of songs I can't believe I forgot. The first is Paul Simon, from another seasonal album I think my dad got a few years ago. Needless to say, it was on the stereo for our Christmas drive.
From early in November 'til the last week in December...
The next is from '90s pop sensations Right Said Fred of 'I'm Too Sexy' fame, who collaborated with YouTube animator Mr Weebl to make this fun and festive song and video. I think it crams in more references to a classic British Christmas than any other song I've heard!
There's still New Year to look forward to, and Christmas doesn't 'really' end until the 6th January. At least, that's what I tell myself. But I'm back at work this week, and the immediate festivities seem kind of over.
Come on, we've got 50 more to go...
Then Facebook reminded me about Christmas 2011... So recent and yet so long ago. Those were the days! Hard drives and Kenwood Mixers abound, Kate Bush's '50 Words for Snow' on the stereo on the way to my aunt's for Christmas Day. We had a right festive British knees up singing along to Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da on the ol' Joanna and drank too much Baileys, and I can't fit into those trousers any more. La-la, how the life goes on...
BOOOM! data storage = Sorted
I think she's in love...
Someone's had too much Bailey's. Hint: It's all of us!
La-la, how the life goes on...
Here's the video of that wonderful day, as well as clips from 2013.
Happy Boxing Day! The post-Christmas day celebrated the day after Christmas in the UK and other parts of the Commonwealth, such as Canada. It's a kind of second Christmas for those working on the big day itself. Traditionally, it was when the masters of a house would give presents (in boxes!) to their servants, after the servants had been doing all the grunt work for the Christmas feast. Master tradesmen would also give a 'Christmas Box' to their apprentices and employees.
It's also the feast of St. Stephen, which is what Good King Wenceslas was looking out on in the carol. Wenceslas was actually a Duke of Bohemia, in modern Czech Republic. The main city square in Prague still bears his name. I managed to visit Prague last October. It's a beautiful city.
In my family, we continue the festivities, have a casserole or something for lunch, and see those family members who didn't join us on Christmas for whatever reason. We play more games, drink more wine and open more presents and all is well.
Not a bad place to spend Boxing Day.
What did I get up to this year? A few of us got out of the city and went somewhere down the coast to a beach house we'd rented. I'm not sure exactly where we were; I didn't organise it and we stayed in and around the house and the beach, but it was a very nice little Christmas getaway. It was a great sport, and I'd have dearly loved to have stayed for a few days, or even a week, but we all had to be back at work on Monday.
Merry Christmas Everyone! The advent calendar only went up to Christmas Eve so don't get too excited!
A soul cake, a soul cake...
I started the day alone, but I put on Sting's Winter Songbook, the 2009 live concert from Durham Cathedral, to ease me intro the day. I had a simple breakfast and opened the present that mum and dad had sent me from home.
It contained a new card for the collection, a little lamp in a winter snowscape. It felt a little metaphorical, like I was that little lamb, lost out in the big wide world so far from home.
It'll be lonely this Christmas...
The present itself was a collection of sheet music from The Beatles and themes from the recent James Bond films. Something to work in in the coming year. Mum and dad, I can't thank you enough. I love you loads and you're the best family a guy could ask for.
When the sky falls...
But I had some consolation on my first Christmas away from home, because my Christmas Dinner was in a fancy hotel, the Pullman (somewhere I haven't been before, but it's one of a number of fairly upmarket hotels in the city). There, I enjoyed the Christmas buffet with some great friends and colleagues.
Christmas Dinner
There was a carvery, lobster, cheese board, dessert, unlimited wine and champagne for about £45!
Here it is! The zenith, the last day of advent, the twenty-fourth, Christmas Eve! The conclusion of a host of detailed elaborate and intricate tiny drawings, the nativity! Merry Christmas Everyone!
..and to all a good night!
It's the last chance for this as well - my other Christmas song!
The stable dwelling animals are getting ready... There's only one day left (as this is a German calendar and they celebrate the big family meal on the evening of the 24th).
Any bets on what might be behind the last door?
There's also nothing like watching the best Christmas film ever, "It's a Wonderful Life" to tug at the heartstrings year after year and fill us all with festive cheer.
Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives. When he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?
Remember, George: no man is a failure who has friends.
Once again, here's a final plug for my Christmas song. Soon it will cease to be relevant for another year, so in the meantime, get those plays in!
A very Christmas decoration-looking star hangs above our festive scene tonight. Reminds me of when we would get chocolate Christmas tree decorations and my brother would eat them all way before Christmas Day. They'd be gone by now. It's getting close now! Hey, Santa, pass us that bottle would you?
A very Christmas decoration-looking star hangs above our festive scene tonight.
I did have the chance to create some festive chalk art on the board during break time today. The students seemed to like it, and whipped out their smartphones for a picture. Then I tried to teach them the Wassailing Song.
I'm getting that pining for home again. This is almost like my living room.
This evening, I went to Decibel, a popular western restaurant here which I hadn't yet got around to visiting. While waiting for my group to arrive, I indulged in a pot of tea and read a little of my book. I thought that after all, I'm lucky to be able to enjoy a moment like this, even if they're fleeting and infrequent. I've been trying to finish that book for over a month!
After yet another another long day... Finally a moment to relax.
I mentioned my brother earlier, so today's song is the only 'mainstream' Christmas song I think he could bear to tolerate. Well, maybe he'd sit through a chunk of the Jethro Tull album. So relax and enjoy the folk-prog stylings of Mr. Greg Lake.
So now it's the solstice, getting colder for some, and a deer hides behind a tree on day twenty-one.
Yes, it's the twenty-first of December, the time of bleak midwinter, frost on the ground, long nights and the shortest day of the year. At least in the UK! Although sadly home's been experiencing the wetter end of the spectrum this year.
Saigon has been getting in on the action however. The last few days have been on the chilly side, a mere 21°C or so. That's still a nice enough day in England, but it is something of a blessed relief to have a bit of balmier weather and a bit of a breeze, instead of sweating away day after day under the December sun...
So after a long weekend and a slightly dodgy stomach, I'm having a night in with a cup of hot chocolate, having broken into the special reserve, as I catch up with the advent calendar. In a sort of seasonal festive mug with snowflakes.
"Snow is falling, all around snow..." apparently.
Very happy too to have some Christmas cards to open from my aunts at home. They made it all the way here!
As it's the solstice, I've got to finish up with the only appropriate song, Jethro Tull's "Ring Out, Solstice Bells".
Oh, Aqualung!
Oh, go on, listen to the whole album. It's a cracker!
Hope everybody's ringing on their own bell, this fine morning, yeah.
Hope everyone's connected to that long distance phone...
As a host of angels descend from the heavens, I can feel Christmas really getting close!
So I got back from Cambodia a little the worse for wear, but I did manage to see the new Star Wars last night. Pretty exciting stuff! Shame my phone died before I could take any pictures with the stormtrooper statues.
I've got a good feeling about this...
This next one goes out to all our boys overseas who can't be home for Christmas this year.
The nineteenth, and what's in the manger? A certain famous baby? Not yet, it's a rabbit making himself at home and eating the place up! Slow down, tex, or there'll be none left for li'l Jesus to lay his head on.
In the meantime, have a traditional British wassail with Kate Rusby's Folky Christmas album, making me yearn for sweet old England at this festive time...
So, I had to go to Cambodia for a visa run this weekend, to change my tourist visa to a business one, which apparently has to be done out of the country.
I probably wouldn't have chosen to go the weekend before Christmas, but I didn't have a lot of choice with my visa expiring on Christmas eve. So I decided to go 'just' over the border (more like 7 hours) to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, the nearest embassy-bearing foreign capital.
What with the visa costing some £120 (not that much more than my initial single-entry tourist visa which cost £80 in London), I was trying to keep costs down by going to Cambodia on the bus rather than flying to Thailand or somewhere.
I'm not sure if I made the right decision, because it ended up being an expensive weekend. They use the US Dollar informally in Cambodia, and nobody wants to charge you less than a dollar for anything, so it mounts up.
Sadly, although the visa was sorted out on the first day, and I met some great people to have a pint with in the hostel my first night, I fell victim of a surprise illness, which I think I can pinpoint to a curry I had on Friday night. Sadly, it wrote off most of the weekend, so I barely scratched the surface of the city.
I saw the Royal Palace, and wandered around a few boulevards, national monuments and the riverside area, so I saw a little, but I'll have to come back again to really make the most of it.
It's a bit late but I've been away for the weekend, so there's some catching up to do. Looks like someone's done some of the work already, the table's laid and my mouth is watering.
Oh, and the Christmas music suggestion is to get down to Bob Dylan's Christmas party this festive evening. It's Christmas in the Heart.
A warm bed beckons on a cold and weary winter's night. Or it would if it wasn't pushing 30ºC every day in Vietnam.
Your Christmas treat for today is Sting's Winter Songbook, a performance of his seasonal 'If on a Winter's Night...' album recorded live in Durham Cathedral, where I went to university. Sting's version of the traditional 'Soul Cake' (the fourth track) was what I performed with my dad and brother for my extended family two Christmases ago.
Ah, of course, it's about time the traditional festive mermaids showed up!
Today, I've been listening to Christmas music and feeling simultaneously 'a bit festive' and 'sad that I'm not going to be at home for Christmas'... So on that note, here's my other Christmas song.
Excuse me, your majesty! I appear to have rumbled the king on his throne. Happy 14th December.
I arrived in Vietnam on a Thursday. The 1st of October to be precise. So this weekend just gone marks something of a record for me; whether you want to measure it from the Thursday or from the new week, the feeling has been the same. After eleven or so weeks in Vietnam, it's the longest I've ever been away from home.
It might be a surprising thing to say as a twenty-four year old who has been teaching English abroad for over two years, but when I was in Austria, I had all the regular school holidays, plus odd weeks here and there where there was no work, and the wonderful English in Action (the company that I worked for) would fly me home after every contract and out again for the start of the next. The flight took all of two hours, if that. Sure, there were a few early morning Ryanair flights to Bratislava, but in retrospect it was unbelievably cushy.
So I never went very long at all without at least a week back in my sleepy old home town of Birchington-on-sea, and to be away for so long, and especially over Christmas, my first away from home and family, has been hard. Harder than I expected, despite having always considered myself fairly self-sufficient and happy enough with my own company.
I've met some great people here, and they've been fantastically supportive, but it's still quite a big thing to have to go through, especially on some of the most demanding weeks of the year, what with tests, marking and reports, as well as covering the lessons of those teachers who have been lucky enough to wrangle some time off to go home.
I haven't been here long enough for such frivolities, and I'm without a proper Christmas holiday at all. The closest I've got is a visa run to Cambodia this weekend. So on that rather melancholy note, I think my feelings are best summed up by this clip from The Lord of the Rings, one of the most most beloved films of my childhood (I was ten years old when this came out).
Sure, they're talking about distance rather than time - I probably crossed the distance barrier at 30 000 feet flying over Pakistan back on the 1st of October, but the sentiment is the same. I have to believe that this new record is nothing more or less than the start of the next great adventure.Sure, there'll be some good times and there'll be some bad times, but I'm bound to come out the other side a better person.
If I take one more step, it'll be the farthest away from home I've ever been.
Bizarrely, I've also been analysing the minutiae of the cultural celebrations that surround Christmas in Britain in a way that I would never bother to at home. I started looking into the advent season, and the idea of lighting the candle each Sunday.
Today, I was researching 'wassailing' an Anglo-Saxon custom where people would go from door to door singing and asking for food and drink, a kind of carol-singing/trick-or-treat which survives in the modern practise of carol singing, as well as classic carols such as "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" although the traditional wassail was held on the twelfth night, January 6th (or Januray 17th, 'old twelvey' if one wishes to keep to the pre-18th Century Julian calendar).
Folk would also carry a 'wassailing bowl' from which they would drink together after receiving mulled mead or cider from the houses visited.
The 'orchard wassail' is also still held in parts of the West Country and Wales, where the wassailers visit an orchard, the trees are blessed, and an offering of sop (bread soaked in cider) is made to represent the success of last year's crop. The blessing drives evil spirits are away and wakes the tree in anticipation of spring and growing the next year's crop.
A good modern version of the traditional 'Gloucestershire Wassail' was recorded by '90s Britpop sensations Blur.
Give me one wish, and I'd be wassailing in the orchard, my English rose...
Maybe it's a bit silly but I went and bought a little Christmas tree to brighten up my otherwise Spartan living room. Pre-decorated, sadly. One day I'll be home again and we'll all be able to decorate that full size tree together.
I don't know if it's better to try and avoid feeling Christmassy when you're so far from home, but even here you can't escape rampant commercialism and Jingle Bells in Vietnamese being blasted at top volume when you walk down the road! So there comes a point when you've got to surrender yourself to it.
A little bit of tinsel on the bannisters as well...
The Pike Family Christmas Band
Today, I was also reminded me of this video, filmed on recent Christmases when the three of us, my dad, my brother and I would learn a couple of songs to play on Christmas day. This is my aunt's house, where we go every other year. The rest of the family will be there again this year.
Perhaps he's about to go a-wassailing...
Here's the Advent Calendar update! So the thirteenth (unlucky for some!) is both just over halfway through the calendar and as Christmas Day is on a Friday, already the third Sunday of advent. Have you been lighting your candles? Here's a man and his dog wrapping themselves up against the cold before a Sunday afternoon walk.
Brett Domino's Ultimate Christmas Medley
Okay, I'll finish my Christmas themed ramblings for the time being with this video, the only Christmas song you'll ever need, a medley of 40 Christmas songs by Youtuber 'Brett Domino' all sung in a slightly Yorkshire accent for an extra splash of Englishness.
So what did I do this fine Advent Sunday? I went for a Sunday spin with Dale and Mary out to District 7, and swung by the ludicrously commercial Crescent Mall.
They'd really gone all the way with the commercial side of things by ringing in "gifting season". A highlight was the huge LEGO display in the centre, where lots of children were playing. There were even some LEGO local landmarks! Who recognises them?
The Cathedral, Notre Dame de Saigon
The Hotel de Ville (Town Hall)
Interestingly, all of the distinctive landmarks are the old French colonial buildings.
The Opera House
The Post Office
Of course, it was all ludicrously expensive, especially by Vietnamese standards. I doubt there are many parents who could afford to splash out on some of the higher end LEGO sets.
