Scotia Vietnam Fashion?

I'd seen the helmets, tried them on, not photographed them, I'll have to now for comparison. The helmets have a strip of tartan down the middle and the slogan "Scotland, every day is lovely". I hadn't seen the complimenting shirts though.

I'm suspecting, what with the wrong colours on the flags and all, that this is a local design but I'd be delighted to be informed otherwise. The Lovely Scotland helmet would go much better with this than the hibiscus strewn one.

Wiring solution?

In my previous post I showed pictures of power cables, mainly on Trang Hung Dau and mused about them being moved underground some day.


Co-incidentally Vietnam Daily News published an article about the same thing.Full article here

The main concern is that there are no standards in place and cables are being buried in a haphazard manner. On Tran Hung Dao they'll be in lined ditches with power and telecom wires kept apart. On Le Than Ton they'll be buried 75cm underground in plastic pipes with no concrete support.

Great, the era of the permanent roadworks is dawning.

Power talks

You know what it's like, you stop seeing things after a while then something happens and whatever it is is back in focus.

I'd been trying to take some pictures of buildings and bemoaning the power cables always getting in the way so, of course, soon I see nothing but power cables.

These are fairly well ordered, there's still a lot of them though.


The busier the road, the more houses and businesses there are, the greater the need for power and things start to get a bit more complex.



Then there's this, it reminds me of the last time I decorated a Christmas tree. Snagged, tangled and horribly confused.

I suppose one day they'll all be underground and what excuse will I have for not being able to take good pictures of buildings then?

A shoe with everything

Diamondesque jewels set on a giant multicoloured, multifacet jewel, surrounded by a ring of clear jewels sitting on more of the same on a gold trimmed and silver studded Be Be flip flop with a bit of wedgieness about it and silver studs teamed with flesh coloured, sun evading thong socks and, if you look very carefully, a flower painted on the big toenail. A winner on all fronts I'd say. 

Sometimes I am so glad my giant western feet don't fit into these things because I would, I know I would.

Franco Vietnamese Hospital Benches

I've been spending longer than I particularly want to FV hospital this week. I'm still in negotiations about whether I can blog the reason or not, meanwhile, here's a picture of the benches there that throw shadows shaped like sunglasses.

Yes, I was THAT bored.

Newspaper Headline

Newspaper suffers shortage of proof readers

Justice

There's been a lot of running about recently trying to comply with new visa regulations, some of my documents went missing a while back and it's not proving too easy to get them replaced. Thankfully I still have all my originals but this morning I made my second attempt to get my police check sorted. I was turned away last time because it was too busy so early Saturday morning I turned up at the Department of Justice:

I think I got it sorted, at least I got a slip telling me when to go back and pick it up but worryingly, I got it from the counter where they organise marriage licences.

I am a good citizen and did not take information from The Outsiders.

Polka Dot rainwear

The Saigon equivalent of a dreich day, it was overcast and cloudy all day with near constant drizzle gave me lots of time to mull over the rainwear solution.

I've more or less given up on working out how to get the plastic poncho to keep anything other than my shoulders slightly dry. They flap around and leak and whatever I'm wearing on my legs wicks up water to waist height. I put it on when I'm on the bike but it's more a case of fitting in that providing any practical wet weather protection. How two Vietnamese manage to stay snug and dry under one of them is beyond my comprehension.

I like the look of the clear plastic polka dot poncho draped over the blue and white Attila but know that on me It'd look like I've been shrink wrapped so mine is dark blue, anonymous and a waste of space in the boot box.

Clever camera tricks

Some people, not me, are very good with photo manipulation tools. Here's a photograph I took back in 2008 at Angkor Wat, Cambodia.

Below is something created using it by a Flickr member called Jeloid (click the name for the original work in a larger size)



Pretty impressive huh? I think I'll stick to the odd crop and fiddling about with lighting in photoshop when things turn out really bad, if only because I have neither the skills nor the time to develop them.

Praying Mantis

There are two insects I like here, the metalic green scarab looking ones that I don't have a picture of yet, and the Praying Mantis. Here's one that was hanging about outside the glass kitchen door.

Much nicer than cockroaches.