james.lostintransit.net

My leg is still broken.  How long do these things take to heal?  My initial shock and trauma has given rise to a new sense of pride, at being the first person in my family to break a major bone.  It’s good to know I have special talents.  Unfortunately this anti-blood-clotting medication I’m on means that when somebody looks at me too hard, I get a bruise.  I have a lovely big purple one on my right arm and my toes are bright purple and yellow.  If I cut myself while shaving (I’m reliably informed) it’s goodnight Charlie.  So every step, every trip to the bathroom or down the stairs, is fraught with peril. I have to inject this stuff straight into my belly once a day, so I try to do it when there’s a minimum of three horrified onlookers.

I have a four-inch metal plate in my leg with seven screws, so there’ll be no more sneaking through metal detectors for the next year or two.  That’s why I’m on the anti-clotting meds.  I’ve weaned myself off the painkillers (apart from herbal remedies), and my elephantine foot is slowly dwindling back to human size.  I’m a demon on crutches but only for about 200 metres, then I collapse against the nearest wall.

In other interesting news, the poor girl who I hit turned out to be a deaf-mute, which explains why she didn’t hear the huge mechanical beast growling towards her down the road, but doesn’t explain why she didn’t #$%!ing use her eyes. In one of life’s little ironies she didn’t have a scratch on her, and I’m still dealing with the insurance company to get my US$6,200 hospital bill cleared up.  Not to mention planning a road trip to retrieve Steve’s bike from the Hoa Binh police station…for which I need the registration papers…which assumes that Steve does in fact have papers…

To pass the time, I’ve been watching lots of DVDs (Frost/Nixon, anyone? stunning) and making long lists of the pros and cons of my current situation and life in general.

Pro: Edith’s back!  Edith is the wireless network coming from one of the surrounding houses, whose signal we have gleefully sucked for the last six months.  Her disappearance two weeks ago left everybody devastated.  Then, all of a sudden, she returned after Tet!  Even wireless networks celebrate the New Year it seems.

Con: My leg is still broken.

Pro: My physiotherapist is cute.

Con: Arsenal are playing badly at the moment, and our cricket team is, for the first time in about 15 years, genuinely pretty poor.

Pro: I was wearing a helmet.  It all could have been a lot worse.

Con: I broke my leg.

Pro: The girl I hit was absolutely fine

Con: I broke etc etc.

Immediately after it happened I turned my head and saw my pink Minsk with a wheel still spinning in the air and petrol glugging onto the road.  My bag had fallen off the back of the bike. The girl who had turned her bicycle 90 degrees into my path was two metres away, moaning.  In true Vietnamese style a crowd of onlookers had gathered, and the traffic slowed as it passed to get a good look.

When I pulled my foot from beneath the minsk I felt several different sensations at once.  My lower right leg was numb, hot, and heavy, although there was no blood.  When it came out, it twisted in a way it shouldn’t be able to.  My first thought was that despite the lack of blood, the ankle or leg had snapped.

I half crawled / half dragged myself over to the side of the road.  My manly stoicism was starting to fade around this point, replaced by whimpers of pain and expletives directed towards the poor girl, the crowd of onlookers, and fate in general.  I  have a dim memory of screaming “Why?!” in an interesting variety of ways.  My thoughts became totally pragmatic and selfish: I was solely concerned with getting to a hospital.

A taxi had pulled up on the other side of the road and I convinced him to take me to a hospital.  I wanted him to go to the French hospital in Hanoi but he refused - we were in Hoa Binh, about an hour away - and it was probably for the best.  I crawled into the back seat of the taxi and threw my bag beneath the driver’s seat, stretching my legs out straight. The shock was making my hands shake.  Every so often when the taxi turned a corner my foot would loll sickeningly to the right.

It was the last day of the Tet holiday (Lunar New Year) so there was only a skeleton staff at the Hoa Binh hospital.  They gave me a painkilling injection and strapped the leg between three planks of wood while a friendly policeman quizzed me.  The nurses were very cheery. The painkiller slowly oozed through me as I rode to the French hospital in an ambulance.

Morphine, x-rays, Dr Obrey wants to operate as soon as possible (snapped fibula, leg needs to be realigned over ankle, tibia also broken, insert metal plate with screws, possible ligament damage), friends are arriving, when did I last eat or drink? should I go to Bangkok to get this done? where is my jacket? Insurance company’s closed over the Tet holiday so please sign here, credit card for deposit please (more morphine please).  Had the choice of spinal block or general anaesthetic.  Surgery was at 7:30pm. All conversations were a mix of French, English and Vietnamese in that order.

Lanh qua, lanh qua - bientot tes jambes seront tres lourdes.  Then very quiet.

Inertia, that’s what it is.  That’s what I call my lack of blogging recently.  Maybe it’s because I’m so buried in work.  Maybe it’s moving into a new house.  Or it could be the weather.  Yeah, that’s definitely got something to do with it.  By turns muggy, steamy, and damp.  Not good writing weather.  Better beer weather.  Perhaps it’s sport, though.  With Arsenal and the Oz cricket team coming off the boil simultaneously I have this slightly awkward, sinking feeling, like a long winter of discontent is approaching.  Or it could just be the general unease of my current reading material, No Country for Old Men, seeping off the page and into my waking hours like a stain.  The only thing I can say for sure, really really certainly emphatically definitely, is that it’s not laziness.  Nope.  Not that.

Why is writing so much about momentum?  One minutes you’re burning down the literary highway, cramp in your fingers from gripping the pen too tightly, words gushing onto the page / screen / roll of toilet paper, and the next thing you know two months have passed and you’re staring at a thin-looking object with blue stuff inside it and a removable lid and you’re not quite sure what to do with it but you have a vague recollection some part of it should be gently sucked.

So there you have it: a piece of writing about the difficulties of writing.  Ironically, the only way out of this little quagmire is to start bloody writing.   So that’s what this is.  I do apologise to anyone reading this who expected something thoughtful or insightful, but there you have it.  I have to go and play tennis now.

Two hours and one beer later

I just got soundly thrashed by two of my flatmates, Katherina and Kerstin.  They’re German, which doesn’t help.  But two things were more interesting than the actual game.  One was that the air was absolutely thick with billions of tiny flying ants, which stick to the skin if there’s enough sweat. By the end of the game I had a thin layer of ant all over my body and in my eyes.  The highlight of the evening’s entertainment was when the two Vietnamese men playing on the other court stopped at 10:30, while we were still going, and took out a small helicopter.  It was yellow and about 70 centimetres long.  One man took out a big remote control.  He started the engine - a high pitched whine - and slowly this tiny, painfully noisy helicopter flew about the court, hovering in the midge-infested gloom.  Eventually he burnt the motor out.  They went home and we played on, through the dust and flying insects.

Returning to Hanoi has been curious. It’s as if I’ve been carrying around one of those transparencies people use with overhead projectors, a shimmering memory of Hanoi and its people, and then held it up to reality only to discover that people have changed and the outlines no longer match. It begs the question: how much have they changed, and how much have I? Memory is so strange, static yet malleable, a mental prism refracting the past and the anticipated future into the colours we wish to see the world in.

Enough metaphysical wanderings. Back on solid ground, I’ve been back in ‘Nam for ten days, enough to get plastered several times, rent a new bike from Blue Dragon’s train-streetkids-as-motorbike-mechanics program, return to several favourite cafes, watch Arsenal demolish Blackburn, and complete week one of my four-week intensive CELTA teacher-training course. There is something odd about being trained as an ESL teacher after having worked for a year as one. Even weirder, there is a very real possibility that for one of my observations of ‘real’ teachers, I will be observing someone who observed me when they were doing their CELTA a year ago. And stranger still is that I’ll be the Young Learner Co-ordinator only a few days after the course finishes. All of which is contributing to my slightly bemused state. On the plus side, the course is much easier for me than for most of the other students, but it’s also a frustrating jump-through-the-hoops exercise which reminds me more of the limitations of high school than the freedoms of university. And the paperwork - oh, the paperwork!

So if there’s no blogging for the next three weeks, it’s because a) I’m lazy, b) I’m buried beneath a small Brazilian rainforest’s worth of lesson plans, c) I don’t want to bore you with the words ‘elicit’, ’student-centred learning’ or ‘peer correction’, and d) I’m lazy. Right, I’m off to spend four hours planning a 40-minute class. Ciao.

Well, I’m still going.  Yep.  Trundling along, bag on back, drinking coffee in the mornings and beer in the evenings, and carrying cheese and ham and bread for sandwiches during the day.  Life could be worse.  Arsenal won their first game of the season last week (good), the Brits are going to win more gold medals than us (bad), and England are playing South Africa in a one-day cricket match (pray for a cataclysmic meteorological event).  Apparently that McCain fella doesn’t know how many houses he owns, and that Obama guy has chosen a VP but he doesn’t want to tell us who it is.  So the world keeps on turning.

I walked into Laredo this morning at 11am.  A typically Spanish juxtaposition - wonderful old town with cobbled streets and men with berets, jutting up against garish modern apartments, all red brick and weather stained concrete.  A gorgeous / hideous stretch of beach.  I’ve decided to cheat a little today, and take the bus to Santander.  This may or may not be to do with the fact that a) my back’s sore, b) Santander apparently has nicer beaches, and c) Arsenal are playing Fulham in a few hours if I can find a tourist pub with the right TV station.  Oh god, I can feel the disapproving stares already.  Stop that now - I’m on holiday, ok?

PS I love chorizo.

Vamos pelegrinos!  I’ve been on the pilgrim’s trail to Santiago de Compostella for a week now, starting in San Sebastien and following the camino norte which hugs the atlantic coastline.  It’s not as well known as the famous (and massively overcrowded) camino frances, so while thousands of morons pilgrims are scorching in the desert further south, this route traces the coastline, winding through little fishing villages with vast stone cathedrals, then over green hills decorated with blackberry bushes.  When it’s cold, the mist rolls in off the waves, a carpet of soft white covering the world. 

I’ve been travelling with a Czech, three Spaniards, two French, and an Italian nutter, and consequently speaking a bewildering blend of French, Spanish and English.  It’s a very equitable way of communicating: everybody muddles through changing languages as required, aided by good will and red wine.  The walking’s been fine except that the little toe on my right foot developed airbag-like blisters before exploding spectacularly, leaving me with what a kindly pharmacist referred to as ‘raw meat’.  So I’m holed up in Bilbao, an industrial town near the sea, an honest and unpretentious city with little to see for the average tourist (apart from a certain stunning, stunning! museum), taking a couple of days to relax.

A day in the life of a pilgrim Rise at 7-8am from your free bed in one of the albergue de pelegrinos.  Stuff belongings into rucksack, bandage bleeding feet, and try to find a cafe which is open before 9am (this is Spain remember).  Coffee or hot chocolate and something from the bakery, then hit the road.  Follow the yellow arrows scrawled on trees, walls, or the back of roadsigns.  Arrive at a village for lunch, have a good menu for 9-10 euros and wash it down with excellent cheap wine.  Keep walking until you finally stagger into a monastery or albergue at 5pm, show them your pilgrim’s credenciales, and collapse on a bed.  Wash filthy socks and t-shirt in the sink.  Go out for seafood and beer, followed by fiesta.  Get back by 11pm before they lock the doors of the albergue.  Giggle in the dark dormitory like a school camp before realising you’re delirious from exhaustion.  Sleep.  Repeat.

Nobody throws a party like the Basques. For five days each year, Bayonne, the administrative and cultural capital of French Basque country, is transformed into a sea of red and white. Colossal amounts of beer, wine, spirits, and ricard (an aniseed apéritif) are consumed. I stayed in a tent with a friend a few miles out of town, and every day we would traipse into the town, past the groups of revellers in their once-white-but-now-murky-yellow clothes and red bandannas, through the crowded streets, eating basque chicken and ham, and inhaling beer, sometimes involuntarily. Three days was enough; we only got there on Friday, and by the time Sunday night arrived everyone was decidedly worse for wear.

The nights were chaos embodied. Drunken men urinated with gleeful abandon on any available surface (and some unavailable ones). Drinks were thrown in the air for no discernible reason. Conga lines of dancers roamed the streets in packs, and there was constant singing from drunken crowds who lurched from outdoor bar to outdoor bar, leaving mud and empty plastic cups in their wake. Everyone was soaked in various liquids. Drunken men were hoisted halfway up wooden telegraph poles by their mates, and everyone stood around in a circle hurling empty bottles at them. The unfortunate one would try desperately to shimmy up the pole, to achieve eternal glory at the top, while everyone aimed for the killer blow that would send him crashing to earth. Once fallen, a new bunch of drunks would hurl their friend skyward. It was all great fun.

I went to my first corrida a cheval - a bullfight on horseback. I’ve always loved bullfights, despite the sheer barbarism: sitting in an arena flooded with red and white, hearing the ole! of the crowd, watching the flashing eyes and naked ferocity of the bull, the overwhelming arrogance of the bullfighter, and the ritualistic dance, somewhere between performance art and gladiatorial combat, is incomparable. I also completely understand the revulsion of those who believe it is an atrocity. On horseback it’s quite a different experience, because the horse is just as much the star of the show as the rejonéador (the rider). I had the priviledge of seeing the world’s most famous rejonéador, Pablo Hermoso de Mendoza, who was breathtaking. His horses (they use three per bull) were constantly millimetres away from the bull’s horns; he put his hat on the bull, leant on him while riding, teased him while playing to the crowd, and finally killed him in a single blow - a much harder feat on horseback than on foot.

And on Monday it was teary goodbyes and off, off, off on the train, to Pau, and then a quick drive to Louvie-Juzon, the tiny village where I buried a piece of myself, like a time capsule waiting to be unearthed, all those years ago…

Right then. First things first: I’ve skipped town from Montpellier - did I mention I was there? - to Toulouse. Montpellier is a lovely seaside town of tall white buildings and churches, and I stayed in a friend’s apartment. While I was staying there I found myself curiously drawn to all things domestic, like doing the dishes and sweeping floors. I think being on the road for this long is starting to affect me in strange ways, quite apart from talking to myself, which is something I’ve always done. The city was bathed in permanent sunlight, with pleasant temperatures up to 30 degrees. It had wonderful murals which fooled the eye and looked like cafes or barber shops, thus causing small children to hurtle into them at great speeds.

The TGV or train de grande vitesse which transported me here to Toulouse is a fabulous thing. It connects all the major French cities and is comfortable, super-fast, and lets you soak up the dreamy colours of the countryside. It’s also amazingly quiet (apart from the small, fat child who sat next to me playing obnoxiously loud music and scoffing biscuits; I looked around for a mural for him to run into, but alas there were none). Within three hours I was nesting in a nearby youth hostel which doubles as a residence for underpriviledged youths, sharing a bottle of white wine with three intimidatingly big black guys from La Reunion.

And now I have to get something off my chest. If you see a greeny-black substance start to ooze from your screen as you read this, don’t worry, it’s just vitriol. (Wipe it off with a damp cloth, but take care to avoid any skin contact).

I officially hate French waiters. Apart from one nice guy, who turned out to be Belgian, I haven’t had a single good experience with them. I’m starting to loathe my every interaction with them. They are arrogant and aloof, seemingly unable or unwilling to smile. They flirt incessantly with the single women and charm the families while sneering at me and every other single male customer. They are disdainful of my fairly decent French and apparently completely unappreciative of my attempts to communicate with them in their own language. They look like they’ve either been doing this job for decades or are settling in for the long haul, and thus become twisted in their youth long before the lemon-tree of bitterness thrusts its roots into their soul. Their attempts at politeness stink of insincerity. They’re slow as shit and I often have to repeat a request for a glass of water several times before getting anything. In short, everything that is despicable and horrible about the French national character can be found, distilled and concentrated, in your average moustache-sporting-nose-in-the-air-holier-than-thou-sack-of-shit- scum-of-the-earth French waiter.

I feel better now.

Paris; a place; a time, which has always been; a golden beer awaiting a trip to my stomach; a girl sitting next to me with a teeny-tiny rat-dog named Lola; children’s dreams drifting on the breeze from a nearby park; a painted rose staring at me from the tabletop; men waiting for women, and trees waiting for autumn, and people waiting for old age; and everyone waiting for buses coffees flowers sunlight love. A story waiting to be told.

If London was a list, then Paris was a poem. The weather was better too. Having seen most of the sights before, I spent lots of time walking, simply breathing in the city, and meeting some great Parisiens (as well as some not-so-nice ones). As I wandered I couldn’t help but think that by capitulating meekly to Germany in WWII, the French may have gotten a better deal than the British in the long run when it comes to spectacular architecture.

Beneath l’Arc de Triomphe tourists strolled casually with their sunglasses and cameras, walking without thought over a small plaque inscribed: AUX COMBATANTS D’INDOCHINE LA NATION RECONNAISANTE. So much reduced to so little; a message, a monument, a memory.

The youth hostel I stayed at, Léo Lagrande near the Mairie de Clichy métro on the outskirts of the city, was awash with colourful characters: Canadian metalheads, timid stuttering Japanese, raunchy Brazilians and Americans who laughed at unfunny things all bumping shoulders. The price of accommodation was a shock to the system - €21 per night was cheap as chips - and the current exchange rate’s gruesome. But it’s no city to be a penny-pincher in, or you’d be miserable the whole time. So it was un pain au chocolat here and du vin rouge there. And the coffee, oh the coffee. How can two major cities be so close and yet so astronomically, gastronomically different?

A final thought for this post, written on my first evening at a café in La République.

Paris, vielle Paris, gay Paris

Chère Paris (both meanings)

I have parked myself before this world’s highway

Surrounded by the gas stations of fashion, the pit stops of arrogance and good taste

Watching glamour and confidence drive by.

This world is small, now, just a few streets.

Tomorrow it will swell, eating up alleys and cigarettes and museums and brunettes and shaven-headed men with glassy stares

Tomorrow it will gorge itself

In patisseries and restaurants

(with only single chairs)

Tomorrow it will suck the marrow from the bones of an empire which rages against the dying of the light

It will catch the (clean, efficient)

Métro

From contentment to tears

Self-confidence to fears

With coffees, wines, and beers

A world of one

In a city for two

Quéstion éternelle

What to do?

For those who’ve read the previous blog entry (if you haven’t, then what on earth d’you think you’re doing here? go back!), I survived. I can’t tell you how, but I did. If it weren’t for my immaculate grasp of the French language I might well be lying in a pool of blood on the floor of an internet cafe in the @rse end of Paris. So, where were we? Ah yes, Old London Town.

Things I did walked along the South bank and drank beer in the warm sunlight, tried to find a bin in central London (couldn’t), enjoyed England’s four-seasons-in-a-day weather, caught up with old friends, made some new ones at a great gig called London Liming, saw lots of black people on tubes and buses and talked to many of them and sometimes didn’t understand the words they used (like ‘gassing’), drank English beer and spent English pounds in English pubs, watched my mate fall head over heels for a South African girl (it’s OK - he doesn’t read this blog), discovered that only some of the English are miserable and it simply takes a while to establish trust with the rest of them because they think you want to mug them and eat their children, marveled at the number of signs saying ‘You are being watched by a CCTV camera’, goggled at all the CCTV cameras, enjoyed peeing on the grass in front of the CCTV cameras, discovered that ever since WWII the English seem to have (secretly) enjoyed being in a state-of-siege, missed my bus to the airport and leapt in a cab crying “Come Watson, the game’s afoot!”, was amazed by the ethnic diversity from Africa, was disappointed by the lack of good cheap Asian food, loved the English breakfasts, and finally understood why they like baked beans.

Things I didn’t do Go on a pilgrimage to Highbury (got halfway then stopped for ‘a quick pint’), go to see theatre at the Barbican, National or Globe, get arrested, rent out high-class strippers and ask them to bark Nazi insults at me and spank me, go to watch a soporific (yet enthralling!) draw at Lord’s, break into Buckingham Palace, meet a cabbie who didn’t like cricket (disclaimer: I only caught one cab), fall in love with an English girl, get mugged by a black man in a hoodie, explore Chelsea, steal a policeman’s bobby, overhear what was said at the Changing of the Guards (”South Africa still only two-fer, Monty trying hard to effect the breakthrough”), love Crystal Palace so much I want to live there forever, or learn why the Brits can’t seem to make a half-decent cup of coffee.