Rainy season! Duck season! Rainy season!

Cripes, it's been a month. A month since I rolled out of the pub and onto a train and out of the country and into this ridiculous sentence. Cripes indeed.

While it's nice not to be in a country that could elect Boris Johnson to high office (you morons) it'd be nice not to live in constant fear of whatever bacteria it is that've given my digestive system a quick once over this week. That, however, has been but a blot on the (no longer literally) sunny skies of life here in 'nam. Did I slip a quick 'no longer literally' in there? Did I do so because it's rainy season? Do I ask too many rehtoric questions? Do my students assume all my questions are rhetorical or are they just slow? Will I ever get to the point?

So my sweet little guesthouse is down a scrappy little alley (home to late night cockfights and a guy chasing off spirits with incessant clacking throughout the night. Being slightly off from the main road means we don't enjoy the privilege of huge open drains. Initially I thought these were disgusting and smelly and while these things remain true, I can in fact see the genius of their design. Much like the slanted curbs on pavements allow bikes to hop on and off the pavement easily (boon or bane? depends on where I'm walking) the huge open drains allow the copious amounts of rainwater to pour off the roads. Without them one finds oneself up to one's ankles in a very dark murky liquid that cotains almost as much rat shit and dirt as it does rainwater. This sludge first sloshed into my life over a couple of days off, so not leaving the hotel was OK. I consumed all my supplies (a few coconut cakes, some smints and six litres of water) and was feeling a lot like Noah (I have two lizards now!) when the rains receded and I could repopulate the Earth with my sons. Oh, the Bible, how may ways can I make you sound weird? So I goes out, I stocks up and I comes back. All is well.

Friday started with a very wet bang when after a shower, a shave, and a third sh sound I had to roll up my stylish trousers, remove my stylish shoes and slosh my way to a motorbike taxi through the potentially toxic breakwaters of the back alley I call home. It was pretty awful, but what you can't see can't hurt you and that water was far too murky for me to see any dirty needles or sea witches. The plumes of filth flying behind the bike, even at low speeds, were reward enough for this ordeal. Oh to have seen the faces we surely soaked as we sped swiftly schoolwards! Oh to gaze on their glares, glances and gawps as we (sort of) gallop away. Oh yeah!

To a western pig devil, the rain is about as predictable as a woman is to a man. To a loyal Vietnamese comrade the rain is as easy to read as a man is to a woman. They get this twinge or something and every bike in the city pulls in to the side of the road to put on a plastic sheet. Every street vendor ducks into a doorway and emerges with their wares magically changed into a variety of anoraks ponchos and umbrellas. Every westerner smiles obliviously, ensconsed in a fortress of blissful ignorance. Then they morph instantly into the drowned rats, scurrying for cover. See how they cower in fear! Bwahahaha!! I'm not excluding myself at all here, I just like to be all omniscient and third persony sometimes.

So that's about it for the rain. It comes twice a day or so and like the scene in Forrest Gump taught us all there is no limit to the number of forms it will take. I've yet to see it hit sideways because any kind of wind is rare here. This is where I'd put a tasteless Burma joke, but I think I know my friends (and Dad) well enough to let them do it themselves. On that ill-advised note...

One Week In...

It's been a whole entire week (and a day) since I arrived, and I'm still no closer to having my stuff. This is beginning to grate.

That said, I might almost be getting a hang f the city. I'm now entirely capable of ordering food (and not just menu pointing. I also mime a mean chicken.) and getting my taxi to take me home. OK, that last part is a half-truth. I got on the back of the bike, and told the bucktoothed driver the street name. He asked me something in Vietnamese, I repeated the street name and name of my guest house and he scooted off. In what was clearly the wrong direction. Rush hour traffic and terrible driving combined to glue my hands to my seat, and my English moans were dismissed as we scooted over a river of some kind into a decidedly seedy part of Saigon. Decidedly Seedy. So I managed to stop him (after we were well over the river since the riverbanks are crime-tastic) and then managed to spend a whole ten minutes looking for another cab to get home in. You know you've left the civilized part of this place when you can't find a barefooted old man to ferry you about. Those bastards are everywhere...

Right, so that little adventure aside I've managed to get my feet well and truly under the table. I even know which of my 100 channels are in English (I found Cartoon Network in the late 50s, just after ESPN). I learned that my toilet paper will destroy the very fabric of the universe or something, and so it should be put in the bin rather than down the toilet. This means that toilet cubicles smell worse than you'd want them to. In this heat a poop session of five or more minutes is presumably deadly. Good job I'm getting pretty blocked up! Yeah, who'd have guessed that left to my own devices all the balance would leave my diet and be replaced by noodles and cookies. Wow. This was a matuuuure paragraph.

Oh, I totally started at school this week, and it makes me feel even more hoboish than usual. Quite the challenge. I get to wear a tie and nice shoes and do up my top button. I hate these things. I don't think I've had my top button buttoned since I was 10. Yikes. Oh, and you should see my two new shirts for work. I have a lovely blue one and a snappy pink number. Oh yeah, Liam's wearing a pink shirt. Fashionable trends of 2002 here I am. Once I get some money I'll be taking advantage of the fashion pirates and getting some knock off trainers. I reckon that getting a pair of sweatshop shoes for two dollars is more moral than paying around eighty, right? Right? Oh well I don't care. Also on the list are a watch that'll look like it cost less than a quid and actually cost even less and a pair of sunglasses. I'll have to take off my beloved communist\emo looking cap, but apparently I should do that anyway.

Ooh, and my neighbours have a pet chicken!