Danang 'Nam it!

OK, so it's a pretty lame pun. And it doesn't really relate to anything, apart from, perhaps, to the general frustrations of travelling, and the whole living-in-a-country-where-precious-few-people-speak-your-language thing. Plus, it's a pretty good pun.

I was thinking how fortunate it would be if I made a friend out here and if they were to die. Because then of course I could lead with 'Good Mourning, Vietnam!'. Come to think of it, that would have been a pretty decent headline to run soon after Robin Williams' death. Maybe it's not too late for that? Or maybe it's still too soon? Is it distasteful? I really don't know.

Anyhow, if that had been the title of this blog post, I'd have led with this picture, which I took from our hotel bedroom a few weeks ago.

However the whole "having a friend" thing might take a while longer. I wish I had some pictures to show you all of Jen and me with new friends, chatting and laughing. Cor dear how we'd laugh, if we had some friends. But unfortunately trying to get a picture with me and a new friend is much like that Simpsons episode where Mr Burns has to get a picture with a smiling child. And I'm pretty sure I must be pulling this face when I meet new people at the moment:

But, you know. Da Nang's a weird place. And one of its best and more challenging aspects is that it has fewer expats than many bigger cities. So while the locals don't hate us (genuinely, it's all big waves and smiles anywhere you go, and they don't even try to rip you off!!), there aren't a great deal of people for us to meet, so it's gonna take a little longer than p'raps we'd anticipated.

So, it's been a crazy few weeks. The initial adjustment has been, and is continuing to be gargantuan. Going from being a cock-sure journo to terrified teacher has been a bit of a transition. Suddenly, I'm no longer the 'king of vermiculite'. I'm just a regular guy again. Imagine that?! How the mighty fall!

Teaching kids is hard. There's no two ways about it. You need enormous energy, and enormous patience. I seem to have adopted a very austere and slightly awkward style with the kids, which for now seems to be doing me just fine. I can feel my Dad's own over-developed parent ego pouring out of me like water from a fire-hose, and for the best part it seems to be instilling a bungling and confused sense of fear into them which just about holds the classroom together. So thanks for that, Dad!!

Sure, there are the those moments on Saturday mornings when the little bastards are running around like mad men, and little fucking Vuong just won't get up off the fucking floor. And you're all there to the class like: "Is Vuong doing a good job or a bad job?" And the kids all hysterically cry out: "good job!!" and then the kids laugh and the teaching assistant laughs, and you're all I'M GONNA FUCKING KILL THE LOT OF YOU  YA LITTLE WEE SHYTIES!

But then, is that really any worse than sitting at your desk on a Monday afternoon, as you struggle to digest a starchy overpriced lunch from fucking EAT, with its fucking NO NONSENSE marketing. And you're sitting there making calls to fucking gas companies about how much gas they produce. And they're all 'oh I'm sorry sir we can't tell you how much gas we produce, even we don't care', and you're all WHO THE FUCK IS EVEN READING THIS SHIT?! you know? I mean can it be worse than that? I mean Vuong did get off the floor eventually.

Anyway, I better put another picture in here:

So today we went to Hoi An, and honestly, it was one of the best day trips I'd ever taken. After a bit of a morning snooze, we got our bikes and set off along the beach for about an hour to arrive at one of the world's most beautiful and ancient towns.

It seemed to take forever to find the old town, and we were starting to get pretty ratty with each other for a while. Until we stumbled upon this old temple, which was pretty damn cool:

After that. We got absolutely dicked by the rain. Remember Forest Gump, and the big ol' fat rain? Well that's what we got done by:

Riding the bike in rain like that was absolutely insane. But awesomely exhilarating, and we got to tear up some truly Vietnamese countryside while we did it. The scariest bit was riding through the knee-deep flashfloods, feeling like Jesus on a motorike, knowing that if we stopped we sure as hell weren't starting again. However, we enjoyed some much more pleasant riding a week ago, as we head in the other direction  towards Danang's neighbouring mountains:

Given its relative proximity to Danang (about 30km), Hoi An couldn't be more different. For starters, the punters are out in droves. You can't move for white folk. And consequently Jen and I were far less interesting to the locals there. Apart from of course the ones who wanted to rip us off - and there were those aplenty.

See these old dears? And see us? We're having such a nice and authentic gap-yar experience holding the surprisingly heavy fruit bowls and all that. And I was completely ready to start thinking about how tough it would be to cart those fucking things around all day. And to get all contemplative and everything, like I'm supposed to. Until the scurrilous little rat bags started shovelling suspect-looking fruit into a bag, before forcing it into our hands and
demanding the equivalent of nine pounds from us, which could buy you a pretty decent-sized house in Vietnam. With my cunning, I negotiated them down to about three pounds, but they'll still be laughing all the way to the bank. Cheeky bastards.








It was a truly brilliant day, and Hoi An is a truly beautiful place, and it was a genuine and wonderful privilege for us to be there today. That we're only a forty minute drive from it is a tantalising thought, and we'll be doing a good deal more exploring.

It's been an exhausting day, and I could go on and on. But one of the best things that happened was that I found out how to use the black and white feature on my camera. So, after taking a couple of moody shots of myself which I'll maintain were done purely for the sake of irony, I managed to snap a nice picture of me and Jen to share:

When all was said and done, we sat down to some delicious food. A Vietnamese speciality! I suggest you guys at home try and cook some up yourselves!

Day two in Da Nang - 29 August 2014: Shits and giggles

Two days in, and I’ve already managed to freak out, have a cry, and get diarrhoea. Not a bad haul -  I thought it would take a least a week to rack up those three travel classics.

As for the freak out, here’s some good advice: If you already have a pretty well entrenched fear of flying, don’t take it upon yourself to watch every single episode of Air Crash Investigation (excellent show though it may be) in the build up to the longest flight of your life. What it will leave you with is a pretty vivid idea of what could go wrong on each stage of the flight. While most people are tuning into some classical music and closing their eyes for a relaxed snooze shortly before take off, you’ll be sitting there thinking about how the plane’s tyres haven’t been pumped properly due to criminal negligence on behalf of a depressed engineer, the inevitable upshot being a puncture during take-off which fires rubber shrapnel into the engines, causing a rather impressive explosion 1,000ft in the air.

While others are tucking into the surprisingly edible mid-flight chicken schezwan, you’ll be agonising over the idea of essential mechanical parts of the plane failing to thaw after being subjected to minus 50C temperatures, leading to the hydraulics failing and the engines unable to receive fuel.

As you come into land, instead of looking forward to sandy beaches and exotic cocktails, you’ll be bracing yourself for a fatal brake failure, which will see the plane careen into a hanger, killing everybody on board, along with a good deal of ground crew.

I say I had a freakout - it mainly consisted of staring at the flight clock for nine hours straight, counting the minutes as they passed. Entire weeks have passed more quickly.

However, I managed to get my shit together for long enough to sit through Her, a truly excellent film, I thought.

As for the cry, well that’s rather more embarrassing. But as I started to try and switch off for a night’s sleep, the enormity of the life decision I’d made really swept over me. I was seeing a highlight reel of all the friends and family I’d spent time with over the last year, all their smiles and the wonderful conversations we’d had. And I was missing hugs like this:

Cliched as it sounds, it's only when you're away from the people your friends and family sometimes that you realise how precious they are to you. I've been so singularly minded in getting this whole trip together, that I've had to stamp out any anxieties about loneliness, or being away from those special, un-recreatable bonds. Fortunately, having Jen here to comfort me was a great help, and then sticking on a podcast with Louis Theroux unleashed plenty of Britishness to comfortably cajole me into a peaceful slumber. (Need to thank James Dyer for the tip on listening to podcasts - an amazing way to hear life stories of people you'd otherwise have no real exposure to).

It's good to cry sometimes. Odysseus - one of the bravest and most impressive of the fictional Greeks - cried about 600 times on his travels:

"Odysseus wept when he heard the poet sing of his great deeds abroad because, once sung, they were no longer his alone"

"Demodacus started to sing about troy again, and Odysseus wept some more"

“Yet Odysseus felt a longing for his wife and wept, sitting on a rock"

So you know, as far as the Greeks are concerned, my crying was very noble indeed. Still, so was being aggressively intimate with 6-year-old boys, so maybe it's a dangerous school of thought for me to start following...

In regards to Da Nang, it's a perfect combination of bustling chaos, with a few western comforts thrown in.The locals are lovely and curious, and that curiosity is no doubt further piqued by Jen's red hair and my 2 meter stature.  

We've eaten some delicious food, including one of the most succulent steak baguettes I've ever had - the crunchy bread which melts in your mouth a legacy of the French occupation here. And it cost 60p (although I later saw one advertised for the equivalent of about 20p) We also drank a couple of delicious smoothies, although I fear they might have been the route cause of the loss of integrity in my bowel movements. You can sort of see that I've realised it even as I'm drinking it:

There are some awesome sights in the city, including some extremely ostentatious bridges, one of which has a multicoloured dragon running along it, you can see a terrible picture of the tail here (I'll get better at taking pictures as time goes on, I promise):

It's been a hectic but exhilarating start to the adventure,  and following some initial sadness I'm starting to feel the excitement settle in. We've found the flat we want to stay in. Lovely modern furnishings and just a stone's throw to the beach. Tomorrow, we'll be going to observe lessons, while next week we'll start teaching ourselves. For now, we're dead happy.