A Mr Bean day?
Yesterday was day of surreal experiences. It really is the rainy season here and for the last two days it has started raining in the early hours and gone on until mid morning. It’s so heavy it wakes you up and so it was yesterday morning. I lay in bed with the rain drowning out the sound of the aircon. Eventually I decided to get up and headed for the bathroom. The blast of hot air hit me as usual when I opened the bedroom door but there was something different as I stepped into the hall, my feet were wet.
A quick look around revealed my towel, hanging on the banister looking like a piece of saturated blotting paper and water on the stairs, landing and banisters. Looking down the stairwell I could see all the way down to the kitchen and a pool of water on the floor. Looking up I got wet. At the top of the stairwell there’s an aluminium and glass pyramid with a rotating cowling on top. This provides natural light onto the stairs and allows the hot air in the house to escape to the outside. The rain had proved too much for it – it was leaking like a sieve.
Worse to come, Derek’s room and the shrine room above that both have slightly sloping floors so the water had run into both rooms and then gone through the floor of the shrine room into the ceiling of Derek’s bedroom where it was dripping on the furniture. One level down the lounge was also flooded. My room and Mike’s room had escaped. I could hear Derek’s dulcet tones already on the phone to the landlady. I decided to stay out of it and go up to the roof room to do a bit of yoga. Half an hour later, our maid having phoned in sick (what did she know?), the landlady’s maid arrived and began to clear up and we all set off for our destinations of the day, in my case to my prospective new employer to try and draft a contract and job description.
Lunchtime I went for a walk and stopped at a Vietnamese café for a bowl of Pho (fur) – the local rice noodle soup. It was a good soup and I paid up and stood on the pavement outside enjoying the coolness after the rain. The pavements were already dry, but the gutters were still running fast with water. Something caught my eye and I looked down. A large fish was going past, working hard to keep moving in the shallow water, its back and dorsal fin clearly showing it wriggled past me and disappeared into the drain and presumably freedom – or a worse fate, I don’t know. I walked back to the office wishing someone else had seen it.
I presume it had escaped from a vendor. They sell live fish here and keep them in water in metal washing up bowls. You pick your fish, they get it out, kill it and wrap it. You have to do the rest. Occasionally in the markets a fish will make a break for freedom, leap out of the bowl and flip flop off down the road pursued by the vendor. Very few actually escape, but I think I witnessed one that did.
Later, as I walked home, a small girl of about four or five ran headlong into me. She was focused on playing with her brother and taking no notice of the calls of her parents to be careful of the Tay (westerner) walking past. Nothing unusual there except that she had pigtails made with elastic bands and her hair between the band and her scalp caught on one of my shirt buttons. Before I could release it she tried to run off yanking my shirt up and pulling her up short. There followed a truly Mr Bean episode whilst She tried to escape, I tried to get her to come back so she could escape and her mother danced round trying to get between us and release my shirt. Eventually we got her to stand still long enough for me to release her and she shot off down an alley without a backward glance, probably traumatised and leaving her embarrassed parents trying to apologise. I was still trying to come to terms with this when a teenage boy cycled out of another alley and rode straight over my feet without a backward glance.
Back at the house, all evidence of floods gone and the cowling repaired, no one was in the mood for cooking so we decided to go out to the Bia Hoi, where our food ordering skills were worse than usual. Two out of six dishes turned out to be what we expected, but at least they were edible. Last time I went there we ordered Ca Long. We knew Ca was fish and assumed this was some variety of fish we hadn’t come across before. It was only later in the evening with the aid of a dictionary that we found out that Long was Vietnamese for intestines!
After the Bia Hoi we walked back the long way to find a cash point and Mike invited us to have coffee at a little café he knows which we were passing. As I stepped towards the door I felt something spongy under my foot, like a tennis ball except that it seemed to be trying to move of its own volition. I looked down to see that I was standing on a very large toad which was not impressed. I hastily removed my foot and the toad swaggered off indignantly. I needed that coffee.
A quick look around revealed my towel, hanging on the banister looking like a piece of saturated blotting paper and water on the stairs, landing and banisters. Looking down the stairwell I could see all the way down to the kitchen and a pool of water on the floor. Looking up I got wet. At the top of the stairwell there’s an aluminium and glass pyramid with a rotating cowling on top. This provides natural light onto the stairs and allows the hot air in the house to escape to the outside. The rain had proved too much for it – it was leaking like a sieve.
Worse to come, Derek’s room and the shrine room above that both have slightly sloping floors so the water had run into both rooms and then gone through the floor of the shrine room into the ceiling of Derek’s bedroom where it was dripping on the furniture. One level down the lounge was also flooded. My room and Mike’s room had escaped. I could hear Derek’s dulcet tones already on the phone to the landlady. I decided to stay out of it and go up to the roof room to do a bit of yoga. Half an hour later, our maid having phoned in sick (what did she know?), the landlady’s maid arrived and began to clear up and we all set off for our destinations of the day, in my case to my prospective new employer to try and draft a contract and job description.
Lunchtime I went for a walk and stopped at a Vietnamese café for a bowl of Pho (fur) – the local rice noodle soup. It was a good soup and I paid up and stood on the pavement outside enjoying the coolness after the rain. The pavements were already dry, but the gutters were still running fast with water. Something caught my eye and I looked down. A large fish was going past, working hard to keep moving in the shallow water, its back and dorsal fin clearly showing it wriggled past me and disappeared into the drain and presumably freedom – or a worse fate, I don’t know. I walked back to the office wishing someone else had seen it.
I presume it had escaped from a vendor. They sell live fish here and keep them in water in metal washing up bowls. You pick your fish, they get it out, kill it and wrap it. You have to do the rest. Occasionally in the markets a fish will make a break for freedom, leap out of the bowl and flip flop off down the road pursued by the vendor. Very few actually escape, but I think I witnessed one that did.
Later, as I walked home, a small girl of about four or five ran headlong into me. She was focused on playing with her brother and taking no notice of the calls of her parents to be careful of the Tay (westerner) walking past. Nothing unusual there except that she had pigtails made with elastic bands and her hair between the band and her scalp caught on one of my shirt buttons. Before I could release it she tried to run off yanking my shirt up and pulling her up short. There followed a truly Mr Bean episode whilst She tried to escape, I tried to get her to come back so she could escape and her mother danced round trying to get between us and release my shirt. Eventually we got her to stand still long enough for me to release her and she shot off down an alley without a backward glance, probably traumatised and leaving her embarrassed parents trying to apologise. I was still trying to come to terms with this when a teenage boy cycled out of another alley and rode straight over my feet without a backward glance.
Back at the house, all evidence of floods gone and the cowling repaired, no one was in the mood for cooking so we decided to go out to the Bia Hoi, where our food ordering skills were worse than usual. Two out of six dishes turned out to be what we expected, but at least they were edible. Last time I went there we ordered Ca Long. We knew Ca was fish and assumed this was some variety of fish we hadn’t come across before. It was only later in the evening with the aid of a dictionary that we found out that Long was Vietnamese for intestines!
After the Bia Hoi we walked back the long way to find a cash point and Mike invited us to have coffee at a little café he knows which we were passing. As I stepped towards the door I felt something spongy under my foot, like a tennis ball except that it seemed to be trying to move of its own volition. I looked down to see that I was standing on a very large toad which was not impressed. I hastily removed my foot and the toad swaggered off indignantly. I needed that coffee.
posted by Marvin.. at Friday, August 18, 2006
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