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Showing posts with label nguyen hue. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nguyen hue. Show all posts

Friday, 4 February 2011

Cat Time

It's The Year of the Cat, rabbit elsewhere but cats rule in Vietnam! Nguyen Hue in District 1 is turned into Flower Street for a week and there are always representations of appropriate animals. Here are a few of them:

Welcome cats

Three blue cats

Snooty cat

silver cats 2

Dulux cat

Dog?

Yes, it is a dog.

So why do we have the Year of the Cat while the rest of the world hop along happily in the Year of the Rabbit. One theory goes thus: "The Chinese word for rabbit is 'mao', which sounds like 'meo' in Vietnamese, where it means cat. As the sound of the word changed, so did its meaning,". You can read the full article here .

I'll finish with one set of animals which seem to bridge the gap between cats and rabbits quite well.

Bridging the gap between cats and rabbits

Happy Meo Year


Monday, 26 January 2009

Happy New Year

Last night we climbed onto our roof via the chrome spiral staircase mentioned in earlier posts to watch the firework displays along the river. Very spectacular, and today we ventured uptown to take advantage of quiet, by Saigon standards, roads and join the promenade up and down Nguyen Hue.


Nguyen Hue Tet flower display


The entire four lane road has been blocked off and planting extends from the central reservations right out onto the roads.

As always the main attraction is posing in front of displays for photo opportunities and as always I sneak up and take pictures of other people taking pictures. This trio is outside the Kinh Do Conference Centre. Kinh Do is the confectionary king of HCMC.


Three photographees


Of course it's year of the Ox so we have lots of bulls to see, these ones are cunningly formed in concrete and lack certain features only noticeable from behind. You're getting the front view as it's more attractive.


Year of the Ox Statue

More posing, but this time look carefully. You see the security person in the background? He has two jobs; to make sure people keep to the one way system - very successfully done and to stop people sitting on the temporary walls. The latter is not so well enforced, they tend to give people enough time to snap the all important picture before very politely requesting them to move on.

Breaking the law

Clearly it's an exhausting job.

Security resting

All this was played out to a background of recorded birdsong and latin classics. I like Tet!