Resting Under My Net ...

It's a Friday morning and I'm resting under my mosquito net on a lazy morning when I don't have to teach, I didn't get up at 5am to go jogging, and Hong-Anh and Scuppy are snoring as a duet in different octaves. We haven't been taking many pictures the past few days as the students are now mostly on their own with the free three-day weekend and we're recuperating from a long workweek. A good friend of mine from Academia, Ed Miller, is coming in this afternoon for a weekend trip here so we'll probably do some nerdy sightseeing to some places like the Catholic cathedral designed by a famous 1960's architect close to Ngo Dinh Diem and his family. No visit to King Minh Mang's tomb is complete without a funny shot of his stome-carved retainers doing something silly.



Since its really the desire to catch a glimpse of this traveler that keeps our devoted blogwatchers coming back, no post would be complete without a new shot. I took this one while waiting in an interior courtyard of a shop in Hoi An at a table with complimentary tea and a sign that said "bored husbands table." Not all men may be bored in a shop, but probably most husbands will be as its clearly geared towards wives thinking about doing things like Christmas shopping early, things I admit I don't think about in July. Scuppy was worried about me and came out to bring me a book to read. I think this is one of her South African outfits, a kind of supercute gunnysack that affords maximum room to breathe.





This picture I took while somewhat husband-bored out of my gourd on the Monday trip to the Hue Food Cooking Class at the house of a real lady sheister. There's a type of woman I sometimes meet in Vietnam that I have very rarely met in other places who is about 60 years old and a one-woman, narcissistic show that typically involves shameless helpings of self promotion at the center of the operation. The cause is generally a good one, in this case a traditional Hue food restaurant, but what's always odd to me is that these ladies seem to have lost all perspective on their place and significance in such matters. The "chef" here greeted us not in an ao dai or regular cooking clothes but wearing a 3-ft-high French chef's hat and a white kitchen uniform she must have paid $200 for in a restaurant supply catalogue. The hat was ridiculous, as she herself like many such dynamos, was only about four feet tall. Everywhere she turned, this hat kept threatening to whack someone following behind her in the head. Beyond creating an intensively hot cooking environment for the 12 students and us, she didn't mention that she'd also arranged to have the local television station come and film us Americans making Hue food at her restaurant. Perhaps that is why she bought the hat? Somehow this picture really spoke to me. This flower pot sat empty on a windowsill, and inside it the devils are looking at a group of little frogs hanging out at the bottom. I know what those frogs felt like as I was paraded out in front of the camera to do my monkey-dance for the camera in Vietnamese. Fumbling for words, I made sure to say how "I love Vietnam" and how happy we are to be in Hue etc... I wasn't alone in my assesment of the chef. My colleague at Hue College was mortified by this lady's behaviour.