Helen's Going Places

Hoi An

After dinner with Chinese Eric the three of us went to sit by the river. After chatting for about 10 minutes a White Guy With Dreads™️ sat down beside us. The conversation was a one minute emotional rollercoaster.

“How’s it going guys?” asked WGWD with a lil smile.

“Pretty good. Just had dinner” one of us replied.

“WOow. You guys really don’t want me here, huh?” He looked suddenly hurt and indignant. The unfairness of this statement made me go quietly insane because was right, but only because he’d made himself instantly unputupwithable. Like if you went to a psychic and they told you there would be pain in your future and then they slapped you. It’s cheating.

“I’m a pretty nice guy you know.” He looked like he might cry. We agreed that he probably was, in fact, a great guy but we didn’t know him yet. He responded that he hoped we had a good night then turned to Eric and whispered “I have never been as rude to you as you have to me” before getting up to go. He said goodbye, walked two steps forward, turned around and said “and fuck you too!” Two more steps forward.

Goodbye.

Two steps.

Fuck you too!

Two steps.

Dalat

Today on a motorbike tour of Dalat we went so see one of the ethnic minority villages. The first thing I saw when I took off my helmet was a young boy barbecuing a dog.

Hostel dynamics are interesting. There’s always 1 guy who’s 15 decibels louder than everyone else.* This one is Canadian and looks both like a pirate and a barista (turns out he is a mixologist which is exactly the same thing). The last loud guy (Philippines) was also Canadian. I’m trying not to come to any unfair conclusions. Each time there has been a loud guy there has also been an Eastern European guy who says things like “shut the fuck up man you’re not funny” and “everyone thinks you’re a dick” but with a smile on his face. The loud one always laughs and says “I love this guy! Great sense of humour!” and then talks about what great banter they have.

After dinner the chatting around the table was interrupted by the manager yelling EXCUSE ME and banging the table. He then pointed at one of the Korean girls and said YOU MUST SING! SHE IS GOING TO SING FOR US! Understandably she wasn’t keen, so he decided to go first. He sang two songs in Vietnamese. His voice was fine but when there’s no backing music and people are still eating next to you it creates a weird atmosphere. During the next half hour we sat as one by one people were forced to sing acoustically. I didn’t know where to look. Everybody was trying to avoid eye contact with everybody else. If people’s eyes shot laser beams I reckon the room would have looked like the vault bit of a heist movie.

1. The people are incredibly nice - this is the only country where I have felt genuinely like no one was trying to scam me, which is RARE. Also I reckon there’s nowhere else in the world where I could sit on a chair outside someone’s house and have them be too polite to tell me it’s not a restaurant. One of the best meals I’ve ever had, which brings me to

2. The food is delayshus. Like. Disgustingly good. My favourite dish of the trip so far has been Mohinga. It’s something you typically get for breakfast and is outrageously tasty despite seeming pretty simple. It’s a fish soup with noodles and possibly egg and maybe some vegetables, only it doesn’t taste particularly fishy and it has a ramen-like quality to it. Anyway it costs about 20p and you can probably tell I was a big fan. You can also get giant delicious samosas for about the same price

3. It’s cheap. Eating and drinking especially. The aforementioned 20p breakfast aside, you can get a coffee for about 10p, and a nice meal out for a few quid easy. Beer is so cheap they may as well be paying you to drink it. Also sights-wise, a lot of the things to see in Bagan and Yangon were free and you just turn up and wander around (or, ebike which is its own adventure - I loved it, Selwyn felt very differently)

4. There’s so much to see! Even though we only went to two places - the capital city Yangon and the older smaller town of Bagan - it was really easy to get around and see loads of sights, without having to do anything boring and pretend it was a great cultural experience.

Highlight reel: Yangon

- The People’s Park

- The train! As the conductor we befriended informed us, these are 1960s donated Japanese trains. They are very retro and full of people hauling fruits and rice about, trying to sell you fresh juice, and jumping off between stations because it moves so slowly. All creatures welcome.

- Seeing my favourite meme in the wild

- KFC soup and mash (don’t judge me)

- Crossing the road without dying (a real achievement)

- Walking around downtown

- Going to rooftop bars and interrupting team building exercises involving 20+ people in the restaurant industry

- Watching Thor Ragnarok in a comfy cheap cinema. In English! No subtitles! Madness.

- Calling myself the Shwedagon Pagoda everytime I was schweddy until Selwyn was sick of the sight and sound of me

- NOICE breakfasts at Pickled Tea Hostel (free and different everyday although I never figured out what any of it was)

- Seeing unusual food products

- Becoming an instagram celebrity

First of all I bloody love Bangkok.

We only had a few days there but arriving on a Friday night meant starting strong. We went to a market but there were so many of us in the rickshaw Iain had to sit on the engine next to the driver. Don’t worry, he was given a thin towel to protect himself from the heat. Meanwhile in the back seat I was inadvertently filling my bra with a neon smirnoff drink as I poorly attempted to time my sips with patches of good road. After doing all the markety things (eating/ drinking/ trying not to buy tat) we ended up at Khao San Road (LOL) where we found plenty of Australians getting off with each other, drinks in buckets and fried insects (Selwyn does not remember being such a fan of this). Drunken us decided stealing a bucket to finish at home was a great idea. Sober us would have preferred not to see the colour of the drink the next morning. Demoralising.

The next day we went to a really cool arty park market thing called (chim chimmeny chim chimmeny chim-) Chang Chui, where again I resisted buying a load of tat, although I am currently living with the regret of not purchasing a GREAT t-shirt with a rabbit coming out of the breast pocket. I did, however, buy a silicon purse in the shape of a crab which is excellent and I am very proud of myself. There was a band playing who had some absolute bangers but the only lyrics I remember are “ya oh” so googling has been quite difficult. 

Chang Chui is also home to a fancy restaurant called “Insects In the Backyard” where they sell meals made out of the worst examples of life on planet earth. Selwyn went straight in for some cricket pasta, which I assumed would be made from cricket flour like some new environmentalish healthy trend, but was actually just a plate of nice pesto pasta with a shitload of whole fried bugs in it. Somehow after looking at the menu I wasn’t that hungry, so I ordered the insect nachos, thinking naively that anything gross looking would be covered in cheese and I would be able to eat it. I’m resilient like that. I also figured nachos were a good sharing food so I could make everyone else eat what I couldn’t. Wrong on both counts. What I got was an artistically-arranged ring of what I can only describe as “deconstructed hell-nachos”. Very light on cheese, light on torilla chips, and heavy on bug (high variety, high quantity). This made me a sad man. I managed to poke a beetle with the corner of a chip and get a bit of leg on it, which I ate, completing my transformation into Bear Grylls, before giving up and eating all the non-bug bits of everyone else’s food. Iain played it quite well, getting an invisibly insected dish of water beetle ravioli, which was delicious for the few moments I convinced myself that it was just normal pasta. 

I’ve got to say, the insect part of the evening turned things a little creepy. After my first ever meal in a restaurant where I didn’t eat anything, we wandered around to find some noodles, mammals ‘n’ veg-type food I’m so fond of. On the way we wandered through a building with rows and rows of the saddest most broken old children’s toys I ever did see and their moth-eaten weather beaten faces still haunt me to this day.

We’re in the cab on the way to Gatwick. Already an eventful morning. Mum is already sick of me because I tried to brush my hair instead of putting my shoes on. “OH do you HAVE to do that NOW? Helen!!!!” I had to gently explain that since the mere sight of me performing a task was enough to distress her, there was no way around it. Not sure this helped but my hair does look nice.

At the airport we got breakfast: inevitably overpriced but nice. Two minutes after ordering, mum panicked that it hadn’t arrived and went to be soothed by our waitress. We had about 20 mins til the gate opened, which i mention because it’s just enough time to eat breakfast without having to inhale whole chunks of omelette, but not enough time to savour every bite and chew everything an officially correct number of times. Now that the food is actually here mum has wandered off to make a phonecall. She’s been gone 10 minutes so far.

By the time she came back I was almost done eating and she slowly poked at her food while making another call. By this time, the gate was closing. When I told her this, she stood up and sat down a couple of times, patted her pockets and the table, inhaled a final bit of omelette and told me to hurry up. I had already finished and paid by this point. 

Long story short we made it to the plane. We’ve taken off now. Mum is watching a film starring one of those Superhero-Chris actors. The film is about him raising a young girl who is a genius. Mum seems to be enjoying it, nodding at the screen whenever a character does a good bit of parenting. 

[Thursday 21st September 2017]

I slept over at my friend’s flat last night so I could guarantee waking up at 6am for today’s festivities. He’s the Deputy Head and lives right near school, shaving over an hour off my potential commute. Anyone who has ever interacted with me before 10am knows this is not overkill. Also I don’t think i’ve woken up before noon in about 10 days now. SAD! DEPLORABLE! etc.

Some might find it strange for a person to quit teaching, hire someone else to take over their job, say a tearful goodbye to everyone in July, and then show up in the first week of school to go on a rewards trip. To them I say “YOU’RE PROBABLY RIGHT??” but also Thorpe Park mid-week is amazing.