Plagiarism in all its forms

One of the most frustrating aspects of my daily travails at the newspaper involves plagiarism. And I’m not just talking about press releases copied out word-for-word on the page with a reporter’s name slapped across the top. I mean those instances in which I'm toiling away through a lengthy story on, say, the importance of vaccinations for measles, reworking every sentence and adding an ‘s’ on every plural and an article before every noun, when all of a sudden, I reach a paragraph that fairly glitters with perfection, so good I wish I had written it myself.

Me: Where does this come from?
Reporter: (feigning puzzled look)
Me (droning): Remember to always attribute a quote or a piece of information.
Reporter: I wrote it!
Me: No, you didn’t.
Reporter: Yes.
Me: No. There are no mistakes in it, so I know you didn’t write it.
Reporter (defeated): My friend helped me.
Me: Which friend?
Reporter: My friend.

At this point, there’s no point in going on.
The worst is when I get a whole story that has clearly been copied, or written by someone else, and it’s almost always the daftest reporters who try to pull this trick on me.
The problem is that the Lao language isn’t subtle enough to allow for many differences in style. There doesn’t seem to be a separate writing style for, say, government reports as opposed to entertainment stories, and it’s only the most dedicated reporters who have been able to pick this up when writing in English.
It means they can’t understand why ‘moreover’, ‘furthermore’, ‘thus’ and ‘hence’ are unsuitable for newspapers. Also, they are always shocked when I can instantly see when they have lifted material from somewhere else.
“The style is different!” I will say, begging them to just fucking get it.
They don’t, and possibly never will.

Travel snobs
I’ve been having conversations with old friends back in Aus lately, and thinking vaguely about what it will be like when I finally go home.
It sounds shallow, but I know the biggest adjustment issue I will face will be daily expenses.
I lived a comparatively extravagant life in Melbourne, given that I worked part-time and was a full-time student, but I still always had to think about whatever I spent. I rarely bought things on impulse, and never went on big-time shopping sprees. I occasionally had to add up items in my head at the supermarket to decide whether to purchase, and frequently stocked up on cosmetics when I saw they were on sale. And I mostly lived from paycheck to paycheck, with an empty bank account at the end of the fortnight.
Here, despite my (relatively) small living allowance from Ausaid, I almost never have to worry about such petty things. I can afford to eat out every night (which I do), and hardly ever say no to a trip away. Drawbacks include excessive drinking and getting fat, but that’s by the by.
Not to mention the fact that I am supporting a whole other person, an adult that is, and not a child.
I’d like to think that, given my chosen career, I’ll always be good at getting by on not much with only the occasional freakout, but the fact remains that this little jaunt I’m having in South East Asia will have damaged my attitude to money, possibly for years to come.
And this brings me to my main point. To all my friends at home who I know would never even dream of visiting me in a place like this, I have just one thing to say: you’re missing out.
It’s nice and warm and pretty here, and if gourmet food and posh hotels are your thing, you can do it here at a fraction of the price! You can eat and drink extensively without dinting your budget, and in some places (Bangkok, Hanoi) the shopping is fabulous. All I’m saying is you should just give it a go.
And I’m also pretty much saying that I don’t know how I’ll cope when I’m back in Australia and back on a strict eating and drinking budget and no longer able to buy anything I damn well want…

Joseph and Mary
Since we were recently on the subject of food, I just want to give a quick nod to that Vientiane institution that is Joma.
Joma is a café - a chain, almost, with one here and one in Luang Prabang - modelled on slick, urban chains like Starbucks, that serves up coffees in different sizes, cakes and bland, failsafe food, like bagels, salads and sandwiches. It’s always spick and span, the staff are so highly trained that they rarely make mistakes, and get your order to you so fast you wonder whether they knew you were coming.
It’s like a well-oiled machine, with uniformed baristas rarely standing still but never looking stressed. It’s always packed and never seems to run out of anything. The place has a distinctive smell, the food always tastes the same, and if you go there often enough, the staff will remember your usual order. And somewhere, unseen, someone is pulling the strings and keeping it moving smoothly.
I struggle to get my head around it. My feelings are sometimes ambiguous: I like the reliability of it, but resent the American-ness of it. There’s a rumour going round that it’s run by a Christian couple (and a more extreme version that they force the staff to convert, although I doubt that’s true), and all the coffee served is fair trade and organic. I get irritated by the prices – 15,000 kip is too much to pay for a fruitshake, which is 5,000 kip anywhere else, and they make you pay for WiFi – but there are (occasional) times when all I crave is muesli with yoghurt, really.
But above all, I think I tend towards loving it to death, if only because it’s one of those places that’s designed to linger in, with smooth, clean tables and benches big enough to park your laptop and spread out all your stuff, read the newspaper, or have a work meeting over coffee paid for on someone else’s expense account.
I’ve been going there a lot lately, comfortable with the subdued clatter, the drone of people discussing budget strategies, and the tapping of other people’s laptops. I like it. I’m out of the house, and not cooped up in my room, but I feel like I’m at home.
I never thought I’d admit it, given all the great local-style places around. But there you have it. I’m a laptop in a café kinda gal, I guess. Maybe I always have been…

Kanom saep
Oh, are we still on food? I’ll finish this post with a dedication to Mr Pom, our business reporter who writes exactly one meticulously written and mind-numbingly boring story each day. He also, on occasion, deposits a delicious Lao kanom, or dessert, on my desk in the morning - the kind that’s wrapped in a banana leaf and offered up in temples. Indeed, his wife cooks up a batch every couple of days to give to the monks on their morning alms rounds, and sometimes she makes too many. Mr Pom is always amused and faintly surprised by my excitement and pleasure at finding this little gift on my keyboard, but how can I fail to get excited about sweet sticky rice all mixed up with custardy banana and sometimes jam?
It’s like heaven, all wrapped up in a banana leaf. Those are some lucky monks.

Me and my life, continued...

Do you want to know what a typical weekend in Vientiane is like? Here goes.
I worked until 5.30 on Friday and went home feeling entirely frazzled. I changed my clothes and made plans to meet up with Sophie and others at Sunset Bar.
But then I realised I was so hungry that I wouldn’t be able to focus on anything until I ate. So I poured us some strong gin & tonics and got some pad thai from the V-shop. Suddenly I realised life was complete and there was no need whatsoever to go out, so I stayed at home and watched Hal Hartley’s Fay Grim starring Parker Posey, which I had bought months ago and never got around to watching. I can’t think why- it was so fantastic, and inspiring. I thought back to my days as a wanky film student, writing about Hal Hartley movies with love and adoration.
I slept in on Saturday (until 9am!) and bought breakfast for me and the Island. Read the papers on the Internet, settled down with my book for a while, got a massage (the first in several weeks), and went to the supermarket.
Later, I went to a party, and later still, had dinner on the river and a couple of cocktails at Jazzy Brick, before riding home in the pouring rain and catching the end of Walk the Line on HBO - the sad/happy bit where Johnny proposes to June on stage.
On Sunday morning, I got up early and ate French toast with Mel at Kung’s, and then did some washing. Went to work (grrrr) to finish off Monday’s paper- had my usual tantrums about the fact that nobody had done enough work on Friday. Ate custard éclairs that someone had , bizarrely, brought in to the office. Left. Bought a new sarong at the Kouadin Market, the kind that all Lao women wear around the house, and a new gym bag to replace my old one that stinks. Went home and finished reading Half of a Yellow Sun, which ended badly and was indescribably sad.
I had dinner with the Island’s family, and came home feeling slightly hysterical the way I always do when I ride home during a downpour. His sisters were in paroxysms of hilarity over the eldest brother’s new girlfriend who, according to them, is 21 years old (the brother is 32), snooty and ugly as sin, with a big fat face. They went on and on about it. We ate barbequed fish and chicken soup with sticky rice.

And now I’m going to talk about food…
Without a doubt, one of the best things about Laos is the food. This has been a source of argument between my friends and me- there is enough variety here for people to be able to disguise their dislike for local fodder, or reject it altogether.
I think it rocks- the barbequed fish - which comes with a huge plate of cold noodles, cabbage, peanuts, mint and dill – laap, or papaya salad, which makes my mouth tingle. I love eating fried crickets or pork knuckles as bar snacks. I even love the chewy dried up fish.
Mind you, I never really get sick, apart from the odd bout of giardia, and last year’s sick-on-the-plane fiasco. I can get right into it without worrying.
But not a day goes by when I’m not grateful for not being a vegetarian, and that I like almost all foods as a general rule. No disrespect to the numerous vegos here, or to my lovely vegan friends back home. None at all- I’m just happy that this is an aspect of life I don’t have to forgo here.
I’ve mentioned before that I dislike sharing food, but that’s more to do with ordering a dish from a standard, western-style menu and having to endure plates being passed back and forth while people ‘try’ each other’s meals, rather than just making their choices and sticking with them…
Anyway, it’s completely different for Asian-style meals, obviously. Perhaps it’s just that it almost always hits the spot for me. Eating dinner at work every night is easily the highlight of my day. A typical Lao spread usually includes a meat-based curry, fish, chicken or shredded beef, a couple of vegetable and mushroom dishes, a sauce or two - usually eggplant or tomato - a soup, and sticky rice. There’s almost always a weird western-style dish as well, like potato salad with mayonnaise, or macaroni. But the variety of tastes- and I’ve always tended towards savoury rather than sweet- is just perfect to me, and best of all, there’s no need for decorum. I’m often derided for eating too fast- something to do with an unfounded paranoia about all the food in the world disappearing before I've had my fun. But at any given dinner time here in Laos, I just get right in and sample a dozen tastes all at once, and all I get is congratulations! It’s polite to gobble! And after a year and a half of this, I never ever feel ill after eating Lao food- I always feel completely satisfied.

Romance in the air
A couple of weeks ago, I met by chance the parents of an old school acquaintance, strangely enough, a guy called Hugo who I went to college with in Canberra, and who joined the army for a while, before coming out to do J-school at RMIT like me. He was in the undergrad class. Anyway, his parents, Mary and Peter, explained to us that they had met each other for the first time in Vientiane in 1973. He was at the Aus embassy and she had been teaching in Borneo, when a friend convinced her to come here for a visit.
They took me out for dinner, and told me about how little Vientiane has changed. The sunsets are the same. The streets are still sleepy. The textile shop on Samesentahi where they first met is still there. But back then, before the liberation, when the war was still going, the place was crawling with CIA agents, and no one could leave the city without a military escort.
Obviously a great story, and Mary agreed to come into the paper the next day to do an interview. This was my chance to finally see Ekaphone, my star reporter and thorn in my side, in action.
Together, we cobbled together a couple of questions, and he got hold of a tape recorder, and sat Mary down.
Ekaphone started by introducing himself, and explaining what he does. “I am the features writer,” he said. “I write political reports, profiles and…” he waved a hand in the air, “life stories.”

“Now,” he went on, “tell me about the day you met.” He sat back and pressed his hands together. “Was it raining that day?”

“Um, well, not so much, now that I come to think of it,” she said.

He looked slightly impatient. “Describe the scene,” he commanded. “Was there, how can I say, romance in the air?”

And so it went on. He had clearly half written the story in his head before he had even pressed record. This is something I will have to keep an eye on, when he comes to actually writing the thing. Stay tuned.

Natural disasters

It has rained pretty much every day since I last wrote, and those little lover-frogs have taken up residence just inside the veranda doors.

It has brought the river right up the banks, and it sure is good for the farmers up north; in a country like this, rains that come two weeks late constitute a natural disaster. Farmers, unable to contemplate predictable variables such as late rains, fail to account for this when planting their rice at the time the rain usually comes. By the time the rain arrives, the seedlings are dried up and expired, and the crop is destroyed, leaving the family with nothing. It’s a drought.

Meanwhile, in the past weeks, there has been significant flooding, leading other crops to become waterlogged, and also destroyed. There is also a small flood in the far corner of our yard, and I’ve been sleeping like a baby for the past week, because there’s no washing on the line and nights are cool.

Six-finger discount
Tom and Sophie had a gathering at their house on Friday, and after having been reprimanded for being a crap (read ‘non-existent’) host, and considering I fully intended to drink a large portion of their gin, I thought some flowers were in order.

I’ve always loved giving people flowers, and here, of course, fresh-cut flowers are cheap as chips. The florist near our house is run by a girl who has six fingers, and I like to joke that she can arrange the bouquets extra fast, giving me a ‘six-finger discount’ in the process. Lame. In fact, it’s just an extra limb, splayed and without muscles, which sort of flops just under her thumb, but I can’t stop looking at it.

With child
Ms Noy, who works in the layout room at the paper, is due to give birth next month (she's pictured above, from behind, in red, in the afternoon snack-time photo). Her husband is the features editor and also one of the sports writers, and it makes me laugh the way she orders him around. She’s one of the most serene pregnant ladies I’ve ever seen, and the only one here who has continued wearing her usual sinhs, without resorting to those awful smock-like dresses a la Diana in the 80s that most ladies here rush into by their second month. I would have thought that the sinh would be the most comfortable and practical garment to wear when pregnant, with enough fabric to merely adjust and take out at the waist as the months roll by.

I quizzed her this afternoon about whether she’ll do the hot coals thing - the whole lying over the fire business still fascinates me - and she just shrugged (serenely) and said ‘tamadaa’, which means ‘as usual’. I asked her about what kinds of food she had to eat, and whether it was uncomfortable in the hot season. A slow smile crept over her face then, and she asked me whether I planned to lie over the fire when I had a baby.

My face, on the other hand, darkened. Since when did the concept of me and pregnancy come up in the same conversation? Since I began working in a big, gossipy Lao newsroom, that’s when.

Fashion hypnosis
I’ve been doing some freelance editing for UNDP, reworking a report by the National Statistics Centre written by Lao researchers.

It’s killing me, really it is. My neck is sore, my eyes are filled with statistics and my brain with dodgy and questionable scientific data. The authors are educated Lao people, but as we all know, education here only goes so far when it comes to hardcore statistical analysis:

Surveyed enterprises reported that 75 percent of businessmen have to pay very high taxes and duties. Of these, 13.4 percent indicated that this is a very serious problem while 38.2 percent considered it a big problem. The remaining reported this is just normal problem.

I love the concept of a ‘normal’ problem in Laos, really I do, almost as much as I love the notion of someone finally getting annoyed enough to classify something, anything, as a ‘serious’ problem.

Anyway, I’m over this 90-page report and everything that goes with it, except of course the cash.

Last night, I bought a British Vogue on my way home (something I’ve done when stressed out with work or study for as long as I can remember), and saved it until I’d finished last night’s quota of pages. I don’t know what I’d do without the world of high fashion, without the pages and pages of faces (almost of all which I can put a name to), without the gentle suggestions that it’s time for a new handbag (something ‘vivid’ this time). By the same token, nothing makes me happier when I get home from a late night than turning on Fashion TV and growing mesmerised by the endless catwalk shows. Endless! Guaranteed to put me in a trance.

Related is that I haven’t watched a movie in ages- I keep buying new films and can’t get around to watching them. It’s because I am still, as always, trapped in that all-important institution of pre-adulthood known as Group House Living. My tolerance has all but run out; I can’t be bothered to try to ignore the comings and goings, the ‘What are you watching?’ and ‘What’s happened so far?’ etc. Can’t deal with it. Next time I have the house to myself, I’m holing up with the DVD player for a night.

Boites de Nuits
Riding home from dinner at Tom and Soph’s on Saturday night, we went past the Meuang Lao Hotel, a big nightclub that was recently ordered to close because of licensing issues. Saturday was its last night, and the grounds were swarming with teenagers and Young Adults, absolutely swarming. I dislike nightclubs- they’re another thing I forced myself to enjoy until a couple of years ago, when I finally decided to let go of all my pretenses and actively hate all the things I’d always secretly hated (see previous entries re karaoke, camping, board games etc), but I don’t quite hate them with the same furore reserved for all those other things that I hate to make up for lost time pretending to like.

This is because I spent such a large part of my teens and early-to-mid 20s in clubs, and I can still remember the promise they once held. Heaven, Lot 33 and Academy in Canberra, Unity in Montreal. I put up with them because of the inherent possibilities of a particular someone, or a particular anyone, walking through the doors, just at the moment when I hoped I was looking my finest. Nothing compares to that feeling when the person in question walks through the door, you know?

And I could see it all playing out as I passed the hoards of Lao kids on Thadeua road, carefully not-too-dressed in a way that makes you certain they put a lot of thought into their outfits. They were milling, dancing, preening, hanging off the backs of motorbikes, tossing their hair, popping their shirt collars. It was all so familiar.

And yet, does anyone really get in to clubs, really? I often find it hard to believe. They make me so bored and tired nowadays (and by nowadays, I include the couple of years well before I met my current love, so none of that eye-rolling, thanks). I mean, they’re so loud you have to shout, so dark it hides all the icky stains on the walls and floors, so mundane that you just want to go home to bed. Don’t you? Don’t you?

See, there I go again, willing everyone to agree with me on everything. But then aha, because this morning I was vindicated, yes, vindicated once again by Guardian writer Charlie Brooker, who I’m certain is my soulmate, my brother-in-arms in the war against crap. He published a diatribe this morning about how much nightclubs suck, and how he’s only glad that now that he’s in his 30s, he doesn’t have to pretend to like them any more.

He also did one about Glastonbury last month- he hates music festivals, but the Guardian challenged him to camp out there for two nights, surrounded by mud and hippies. He lasted one night, and then had to go and stay in a serviced cottage where he could get a massage, drink tea and watch TV to fortify himself before he went back in.

Amen to that- did you know I hate music festivals too??? It’s true, that’s another one I haven’t mentioned, at least not on this blog! I did write a column about it, back in my Canberra Times days when I had my own column, complete with a photo of me looking grumpy at the top.

But I’m not going to go into that. Read Charlie to find out how I feel (almost). My point was that those obnoxious Lao kids made me feel nostalgic for the days when I was fraught with anxiety over things that were never going to end up mattering.

Everything seems to matter nowadays. Things have changed.

Language freak

Surprise! It's me again! I told you I was going to post more, and I meant it, even if it means vaguely uninteresting and perhaps even self-indulgent posts like the one below!

So, how surreal do you think it is that on the sports page I edited the other night was a story about the Lao Badminton Federation (and how shit it is), with a story about Andy Roddick directly underneath? Or a story about some woman who sings traditional Lao songs for the army, right under a story about Britney and Federline finally getting a divorce?
News is news, I guess, even in Laos. And what I love most about the local sports pages is the tone of constant, unending disappointment:

"Football fans were once again let down last night, when the Lao team was thrashed by Indonesia 11-0 in the ASEAN Cup. But this time, they won't be content with promises to try harder, because now, fans are simply demanding an explanation."

Or:

"The Lao Karatedo Federation is holding out little hope for a gold, or even a silver, in the SEA Games in Thailand this December.
'Our team is weak, and unskilled,' the president of the federation explained. 'We may have to be content with a bronze, and not much more.'"

I've never enjoyed sports writing as much as I do at the Vientiane Times.

I'm a language freak, and everybody knows it. When it comes to English, that is. I just can't understand how people, English speakers that is, are incapable of grasping basic grammar and punctuation , wilfully, knowingly, constantly. It's not so much a love of language, I guess, as an obsession with bad grammar.

But then, on the same night as that usual bizarre selection of stories I just mentioned, the editor-in-chief, a suave Party man with ministry aspirations, who generally regards me with bemused surprise at the fact that never get sick and never stop running around, surprised me by suddenly speaking to me in Lao. He’s never done that before- he speaks fluent English and adores the sound of his own voice. But he kind of appraised me quite hard on that evening and started babbling away, purposely too fast, almost a kind of test.
A test that I failed, miserably. And I could tell everyone resented me for it, me who has about 20 mini-tantrums a day at their inability to distinguish between nouns and adjectives, and the difference between ‘law’ and ‘raw’, etc, but unable to answer inane questions like “Did you bring a raincoat with you?” and “When will you get married?” But hey, these guys are paid to write in English all day every day! I, on the other hand, have…been in this country for 18 months and should be able to answer non-difficult questions by now.
So now I’m home, after finishing at 8.30 this evening, poring over what I learnt in my last Lao lesson.

It’s confidence, really. I’m still at the stage where people get all amused when I break into Lao, so I find myself doing it not as much as I should. But I’ve really got to break through this stage.
Another resolution: almost everyone foreigner I know here has one answer to the question “How’s your Lao?” and that’s “Crap, how’s yours?”, as though that’s acceptable.
I don’t want to be one of those people anymore…

Last week, apart from having a Lao lesson, being run off my feet and tacitly getting into trouble from the editor, I also kept a long-held promise and took the crew from the KPL office out for lunch, to the place we always used to go for special occasions, where they serve barbecued fish, fish laap and great fish soup. I dragged the Island along with me, against his will – he used to work there too, after all – and it was all fine and jolly. But I struggle to come to grips with the fact that they are all still there, all still plugging along on minimum-to-non-existent wages in that crappy bloody room – and for what?

Weather update:
I’m sitting up in my room listening to one of the albums I picked up in Hanoi - Lunatica by the Gotan Project- and leafing through a months-old copy of the New Yorker, left behind for me by Sandy Forbes, another journalist who came to work at the VT, doing short-term training. The rain has cooled the weather right down, but it’s hot up here – the fan is spinning and I’ve got the curtains and door to the veranda open.

I read two awesome books while I was in Vietnam - The Brooklyn Chronicles by Paul Auster (so good it was like eating icecream- I felt guilty at how much I enjoyed it!) and Mother’s Milk by Edward St Aubyn, which was nominated for last year’s Booker, but of which I’d never heard. Absolutely hilarious. I laughed out loud all the way to Hoi An, and on the plane on the way back to Vientiane.
Now I’m deep into Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It's giving me nightmares. It won the Orange Prize this year, and the author is my age! I can’t see how it’s done.

The animal kingdom
Yesterday morning, I opened the front doors in our living room and a tiny pair of green-and-black frogs sprang apart from each other, guiltily, as though they’d been having a tryst, and hopped away. I’m still at the stage where I’m fascinated by frogs, and there are plenty of them around! Big serene toads, especially, and snakes. I’ve seen a few when walking in the morning. The most recent was a black one with white stripes. It was dead on the road.

One of the photos I've put up is of the Ladies in my office 'cutting loose', as it were. We had a baci for Sandy's farewell, and then they cranked up the music and really let their hair down. Yes, I joined in. Rock on, ladies!

The others are more cool pics of cool houses in my now-beloved Hanoi.

Alright, I've had enough now.

Mixed Blessings

Yesterday was the first day of Buddhist Lent (again), and we went to a temple in the evening for the candlelit procession. After the monks chant and people have prayed, they light candles and stroll slowly around the temple holding flowers and incense- a striking site in the early evening darkness, with not much sound except the shuffle of feet and some happy sighing.
I had come more or less straight from work, and wasn’t wearing a sinh because Sundays- especially in the office – are strictly casual. But you know what? It didn’t matter, because I felt quite peaceful, for the first time in the past week, as I strolled with the hundreds of other people, holding my candle and lotus flowers as offerings to all those dead relatives up there, somewhere. I made a few resolutions that really won’t be that hard to stick to, and went home feeling quite happy.

Resolutions
One of the stories we had in the international pages last week was about a Korean (I think) actress who had received a world record number of hits on her blog – a ‘daily diary of musings on life in general’, how dull! But still, I felt a bit ashamed.
The thing is, every single person I know, except for my old housemate Tom, is currently obsessed with Facebook – how I loathe it! – and, to paraphrase my friend Grant, if I had a kip for every ‘invitation’ I’ve received to be someone’s ‘Facebook friend’ or somesuch, I’d be able to buy a bowl of noodles by now.
I don’t get it- I’ve never been all that curmudgeonly, at least not when it comes to technology, but really, Facebook? For grown people? Summing up your personality in a series of retardo questions? Posting on each other’s ‘walls?’ ‘Sharing photos’? What’s wrong with email, I ask you? Why do people get so bored so easily with something that’s really just entirely functional and works just fine?
Then someone pointed out to me that I already had a blog, so what’s the difference, and I was momentarily chastened, mid-anti-Facebook tirade. And didn’t post for ages.
But now I’ve thought no. The blog is in my own chosen format, I don’t answer arbitrary questions on some list, and I’ve tried to find my own voice instead.
And some Korean actress has been disciplined enough to post every day? I’ve got to get my act together. Resolution: I need to post more often so as to keep my voice going, and not degenerate into a foul-mouthed whinger.

And in fact, that’s another of my Lent resolutions- to stop wanting everyone to agree with me on everything. My heart almost skipped a beat a few months ago when I was reading The Golden Notebook, and came across this passage in the first few pages:

“But now, sitting with Molly talking, as they had so many hundreds of times before, Anna was saying to herself: Why do I always have this awful need to make other people see things as I do? It’s childish, why should they? What it amounts to is that I’m scared of being alone in what I feel.”

I think of it now whenever I find myself feeling perplexed when someone disagrees with me. I like certain bands, don’t understand ‘other’ types of music, I hate karaoke to the max, I like green mangoes, I think Orlando Bloom looks like a 12-year-old gay boy, I hate Radiohead, I think vitamin supplements are a rort, and so what?? Who cares if others might not agree? Honestly.

Daily diary
This should, in theory, be the beginning of my efforts to document my days on a more regular basis, get a bit of a conversation happening.
From when I was 10 to when I turned 21, I kept a diary religiously. I stopped cold when I went to Montreal, and haven’t written a serious diary-style word since. I just don’t see the point of writing something that no one will read. I need to be kept on my toes. I’m supposed to be a journalist, after all. And even when I did keep a diary, I always half-imagined that one day, someone would come across them. Eventually, that thought mortified me so much that I just stopped.
But people do read this, I know, even if they’re just being polite. So here goes.

I applied for a job with UNDP a few weeks ago and actually got an interview. It was basically down to three people, and I sort of thought I was in with a chance. It would have been a big deal, based in Luang Prabang. It would have meant leaving my current project early, moving away from the Island for a bit, finding a new place to live in a new town, etc etc. I waited and waited to hear something until finally, late on Friday night at Sticky Fingers, a girl I know who works on the project stumbled up to me, completely off her face, and said “as soon as you walked in I knew I would have to tell you that you didn’t get the job but you were a close second I’m so sorry the girl who got it was already working on the project so we had to choose her etc etc etc…”
So now that I know, I’m interested in exactly how long UNDP will take to let me know, you know, officially, that I’ve been rejected.

In the meantime, here’re some things that make me feel better:

- The fact that I don’t have to part from the Island just yet.
- The fact that I don’t have to betray everyone at work by pissing off early…just yet.
- The big stack of excellent new music I bought in Vietnam (more about that later), which has just renewed my faith in the beauty of the world – the music world! I’d been feeling so deprived of new music, and then my bestie Brookie arrived brandishing a brand-new album (23 by Blonde Redhead) and a $50 itunes voucher. Yay for her! And then I found a whole lot of great stuff in Nam, and feel like everything is ok again and it wasn’t even bad before! Such is the mystical power of music…
-My new black sinh – all black, with a black band - which is the envy of all my friends (all-black ones are quite rare), so much so that I may even buy another, similar one, just to spite everyone.
-Most of the clothes I picked up at the tailor in Hoi An.

Hanoi, Hoi An and Halong Bay
Vietnam was so great, and I did indeed find myself wondering, constantly, both to myself and out loud, why on earth I wasn’t living there.
Because it’s too damn hot! I thought, triumphantly. It really was consistently about 5 degrees hotter than here in Vientiane, almost unbearable really. But then I remembered that in fact, Hanoi gets really cold in the wintertime. Gosh that lake would be lovely with all those beautiful trees in the wintertime, I thought as I morosely purchased a painted sketch of Hanoi in autumn, with leaves on the ground, and almost stepped right in front of a boy on a devastatingly cool navy-blue Vespa…
Everywhere I looked my eyes were instantly pleased by all the quaint, haphazardly tall terraced houses, and the crowded cafes, and the never-ending stream of motorbikes.
But I will say this: Vietnamese people aren’t very nice, at least not in Hanoi. They were grumpy and unhelpful and uncooperative, basically, and I had a difficult time feeling any sort of warmth deep inside my heart for them the way I do for Lao people.
Hanoi is also kinda nuts- people sit all day long on the pavement outside their houses and just shoot the breeze for hours and you have to navigate over and around them, and meanwhile the traffic just never stops moving, and you have to learn to just step right into the open traffic and walk quite slowly and artfully so that people can just swerve around you. And they all beep their horns constantly, for no apparent reason except to let you know that they are, in fact, on a bike, with a horn, and quickly get out of the way, now!
But, surprisingly, or perhaps not surprisingly given the state of the Vietnamese government, the whole city stops bang on midnight, which I can’t help appreciating since I became such a nanna when it comes to going to bed at a reasonable hour.

We also spent a night on a fancy sort of boat in Ha Long Bay with a bunch of annoying tourists, and were also stunned to discover that all sleeper trains down to Danang were completely booked out.
And that’s although another resolution that Brooke, Niamh and I all made, during the 15 most miserable hours of our lives, that we would never, ever get a long distance train (unless it’s a first-class sleeper), ever again. We’re too old! The revelation! The relief! It was enough to make those 15 hours from Hanoi to Hue in a filthy, ‘soft-seat’ carriage filled with slightly menacing Vietnamese yobs, slightly more bearable…

Luckily, our hotel in Hoi An, when we finally arrived, was plush and lovely and be-rose-petalled enough to make us forget our worries and just focus instead on the matter at hand: getting right into the vast buffet breakfast to fortify ourselves for the relentless, pushy tailor women.

Brooke and Niamh went AWOL on boots and suits and coats and all the sort of stuff that makes me feel so grumpy about not being able to wear, ever. But I had seen an excellent tangerine bag at Nine West in Hanoi for US$100, and consoled myself by getting it semi-copied by the tailor for half the price, as well as a couple of Marni-style dresses, some ballerina shoes and other bits and pieces.

Hoi An was just like Luang Prabang but with a beach, a lovely beach within cycling distance where all the locals came to drink beer in the evenings.
See pics, I can’t be bothered going in to much more detail. The last one is of a pair of sisters discovered near the St Joseph’s Cathedral in the Old Quarter. We had spotted Albino Girl a few days before, but I was alone this time and seeing her made my heart stop with sudden fear.
Also, the face shots where our angles look strange are the result of a queer experiment, the 'look down, look up and click' technique. Supposed to make you look sexy. YOU decide!

We flew back to Hanoi. Yes we did. And when I got back to Vientiane, sad as I was for my holiday to be over, I breathed a sigh of relief and pushed my backpack into the cupboard way back where I can’t see it, I hate it that much. It hurts my shoulders and I can’t find anything in it!

Weather update:
Last night I awoke to an apocalyptic downpour, and couldn’t get back to sleep. In the house where I grew up, my bedroom was a walled-in veranda, and one of the windows always leaked when I rained. It gave me a life-long insecurity; even today, whenever it rains, my mind races to think of anything I might have left outside, or what on the windowsill might get soaked.
I did love that bedroom though.

Work Update:
My heart was in my shoes when went back to work last week, knowing that my newsroom mentor of all things calm, Liz, was still back in England and would be for some time.
I’ve been struggling to finish before 8pm each night, but you know what? IT’S NOT MY FAULT! It takes exactly four hours between the reporters finishing their stories, layout putting them on the page and the editors giving them a final check- a process that should really take an hour. Do you think I would allow this to happen if I had even a modicum of control in this place? No, I wouldn’t.
That said, things are definitely more organised with me in charge. The staff are slowly coming round to the usefulness of lists, and the sheer beauty of being able to cross things off each day. So I must be making some difference.