Family in Ao Dai on Nguyen Hue for Tet

I was blithely going to post this as nothing more than a cute example of family doing the compulsory posed pictures for Tet then I happened to read the comments on a picture on Saigon Today blog which made me realise that to many my title would be meaningless at worst and confusing at best.

So first the cute picture.


Now my poor attempt at a translation and even poorer attempts at phonetics - my Vietnamese teacher despairs of me. Before I start I know there should be diacritics on most of the Vietnamese words, I even know what most of them should be but I also know that most people reading this just see them as boxes as in Nguyễn Huệ.

Ao Dai - pronounced Aow Zha or Aow Yha depending on where you come from because it's a "soft d" so doesn't sound like a "d" as I know it at all. The traditional dress of Vietnam usually only worn on special days or if you have to for your work or in some schools or probably for a hundred other reasons that I haven't discovered yet. Definition - long garment or tunic.

Nguyen Hue - is a road in central Saigon as well as in many other towns and cities, also a celebrated general of the 1700s. Pronounced very roughly Win Way. No, I can't work out that one either, I'll need to ask my Vietnamese teacher why Nguyen is Win because not all "ng's" are "w's".

Tet - Lunar New Year maybe more commonly known as Chinese New Year

So a cute family posing on a road called Nguyen Hue wearing traditional Vietnamese dress for Lunar New Year. My original title is snappier.

On a side note it looks like the girl in red has spotted the missing anatomy on the bull/ox/water buffalo.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Clearly it's an exhausting job.

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

Tet decorations

As we enter the year of the Ox or Bull I notice that unlike the pig and the mouse it's not the easiest animal to cute up.

I've also spotted that a lot of the blossoms are not all they seem to be.

It's a great time of year for taking pictures and rest assured, there will be lots more of them soon.

Suburban Saigon

What do you do when you get to build your own house and are limited only by the size of your plot?

Well this is an option:



Something a little more deco?


Fulfill your Barbie House fantasies?


Use up all the end of line paint in the shop?



Or go wild with stars, stripes and blocks of yellow:



Mine is a very restrained grey and white but maybe I could talk the landlord into a paint job. Tangerine and torquoise perhaps?

Strange Rains

The wet season should have stopped by now but it's making a return visit. We've had rain midafternoon almost every day since Christmas. On the upside it cools things down a bit and usually doesn't last long.

Mui Ne for Christmas

We escaped the city for a few days and couldn't get ourselves organised in time to go anywhere outside Vietnam so Mui Ne provided the perfect answer for a couple of days doing very little.

Saw a couple of sunrises:


Ate a couple of fish and fish friends:


Drank a couple of beers at the latest incarnation of Hoa Vien Brewhouse:



Found a couple of ruby slippers on a yellow brick road:



Good beach, good fish, good beer. The flip flops didn't fit.

Put Your Hands Up

I've been trying to capture this practice for ages and finally got it.



I award myself extra bonus points for there being two sheets of glass.

On the up

Avid readers will know that our house has four floors.



You can count them. Last night we went to the roof with a bottle of wine and plans for a chilled evening in and found this...





Obviously I waited for daylight to photograph it because flash, chrome and me are an untried combination and the camera was on the ground floor.

It leads to the flat space where the water pump and air conditioner units live. I don't know why it's there, I don't know when it got there and I don't know what's coming next.

I'm off on holiday for a few days and slightly fear returning.

The mother ship has landed

Our quiet neck of the woods has been attracting little businesses for a while now. Corner stores, noodle shops and recently a couple of nice little cafes have arrived but nothing prepared me for the completion of Mori Cafe. It's a neon wonderland complete with DJ and multiple floors dedicating to getting the local populace all sugared up and doing a pretty successful job of it based on my one visit so far.



I stayed on the ground floor watching the football and didn't stray up further but I'll be there soon.

Lotte mart and a big shiny cafe opening in the same week! How much excitement can I take?

Inside Lotte Mart, Saigon

It opened! 33,400 square meters of shopping in District 7 less than ten minutes from where I stay. Of course I had to visit but I couldn't shake off the feeling that it was wrong to be excited, still a little guilt seasons pleasure.

It's a supermarket and shopping complex over three floors with a cinema, bowling and food outlets. It sells just about anything you could want from motorbike tyres to flat screen TVs and I know I've been here for a while now because I got bloody excited about it and had an absolute ball.

Alas the pictures are limited because the staff kept catching me with my camera and telling me "No pictures". They were firm and even a plaintive "But I'm going to blog it" cut no ice.



I'll be back but next time I'll be a little more furtive with my photography.



Also on site is a branch of the Lotte franchised coffee outlet Angel-in-us. True to the company that brought us Lotteria "We Love Hamburger" we get a little splash of bad English with our drinks.