Back again!

CYCLING BY THE MEKONG 
(Alfred: to the tune of 'Driving Home for Christmas by Chris Rea.  If you really don't know this song, listen to it here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsqGlVooIJQ)

I’m cycling by the Mekong

On my way home from my class.

I’m cycling by the Mekong, yea,

While mosquitoes bite my ass.

And the road is long

But I will be there

Soon, I hope

And open a cold beer,

Cycling on my bike

Cycling by the Mekong.

It's gonna take some time
But I'll get there.

Cars that have no headlights

And drivers that are drunk.

Mosquitoes in my glasses

Hope I don’t run down a monk.

So I sing out loud

So he will hear me

When I come

And I can swerve around

And not run him down

Avoiding the bad karma.

Cycling by the Mekong

With a thousand little friends.

SUMMARY
Apologies for the hiatus, but life has been quite busy (Alfred: Not THAT busy, you've just been lazy) but here I am with an update on what has been going on.

So, we are now living in Ban Wat Nak to the south of the city centre, a lovely house with a huge tree-filled garden, about a twenty-minute cycle from the centre of town. We have a street market and shops beside us and a number of excellent restaurants (Lao and Thai) as well as a pizza place (Alfred: Rarely used but it's comforting to know it's there). Sad to report, we now have only one cat as Astérix disappeared one night and we hope she has decided to move in with a different family somewhere else. Obélix is thriving and getting really big and spends most of her free time torturing lizards in the garden (Alfred: though she usually gets bored and then they run away. Sometimes.). And the neighbours' cats keep her company, whether she likes it or not.

Both of us are now working a lot more. Martine is teaching two mornings and four evenings a week in the Institut Français (Alfred: teaching English, that is. ENGLISH! In the Institut Français! What is la Francophonie coming to! Zut alors!) and also has a number of private pupils. I have now accumulated a bewildering variety of jobs: I teach English twice a week to employees of AVIS Rent-a-Car, I teach one private pupil for two hours three times a week and I work for the Revolution Translation Agency where I edit and proofread a wide variety of materials that have been translated from Lao or Chinese into English. And yesterday I landed a new job:

Media and Communications Consultant to the Embassy of Japan in the Lao PDR!

(Alfred: It should be an ampersand rather than 'and' but, as I noticed in the last blog, ampersands don't work in this blog - cf. Mills & Boon!) Sounds very grand, doesn't it!! In reality it is only eight hours per month - they will email me stuff that they are sending out in English and I edit and proofread it - but it will be good fun, I expect!

We are now awaiting (with anticipation) the arrival of our dear friend Marion and we are also awaiting (with a slight degree of trepidation) the Lao New Year, or Pii Mai as it is called here, three days of craziness where people throw water over each other to celebrate the New Year or whatever. They do lots of other things with sand and flowers and setting animals free and so on but it is the throwing of water that seems to be paramount, with falang (foreigners) being the most tempting targets! Last year the police actually set down rules to try and govern some of the more unruly aspects of Pii Mai but it will be interesting to see how it pans out. I do know that a large number of falang we know are clearing out of the country for the occasion!! (Alfred: and what does that tell you? I figure on staying at home, I don't dry out fast and they do like to colour the water they throw!).

HEAT
It's now the hottest time of the year with temperatures hovering around 40 degrees every day, fine if you can stay in the shade (Alfred: Preferably with air conditioning) but cycling across town in this heat is difficult. Mind you, once the rainy season starts I suspect we will look back fondly on this period! One positive side effect is that if you buy a bottle of cold tea and leave it in your bike, in a few hours it tastes like real tea (Alfred: about the temperature of the water they bring you in a French café with your tea-bag when you ask for tea. You know what I mean. Not Irish tea ....). On the downside, it doesn't go below 25 degrees at night and is far more humid so neither of us are getting as much sleep as we would like (Alfred: 'neither' refers to him and Martine, I am sleeping just fine, thank you.).

WILDLIFE
No snakes so far but an assortment of ants and termites with whom we fight an ongoing battle in the kitchen (the garden is considered more-or-less their territory), a battle that we are, so far, winning. Occasional invasions of flying ants, the ever-present mosquitoes to whom we actually seem to be becoming more resistant, the very occasional cockroach that Obélix usually deals with and other occasional visitors - beetles, bees, wasps and unidentified big buzzing things (Alfred: or ingens robigo to give them their Latin title). And a rather charming frog has taken up residence in our outhouse where is seems to live on the tap and isn't bothered when we turn it on and off to fill the washing machine.

But there are butterflies, so many butterflies, usually single or dancing in pairs, an incredible variety and some of them really big, one bigger than my entire hand (Alfred: We can be sure because this one was, unfortunately, dead). And some birds, though not as many as we would like - that is, that we can see. There are a number of birds that make the most incredible noises, one that always starts to call just as we go to sleep, others with amazingly complicated calls, some with insanely monotonous, repetitive calls that go on forever. But all invisible!!!

And we are getting ready for our first crop of fruit!! Our mango trees are producing madly, though every day brings its casualties so we hope enough of them will survive. We have already feasted on pomelos that fall from our neighbour's tree (Alfred: it's like a giant grapefruit but nicer-tasting and a skin so thick you could use it to armour a battleship) and made a drink from some of our starfruit (Alfred: starfruit are hard work to make edible) but the prospect of eating mangoes from our own trees is really tempting!! (Alfred: Hmm ... why is it 'mangoes' but 'pomelos'? Just wondering, seeing as it is your job to know this kind of thing.)

ST. PATRICK'S DAY
The Irish Embassy in Ha Noi organised a lunch for all Irish citizens able to attend a few days before St. Patrick's Day - a small enough group but Chiara from the Embassy told me they estimate there are only about thirty Irish people in the whole country. On Sunday 16th there was a St. Patrick's Day party in a restaurant very near us, so I met a few more Irish people - one woman who lives in Luang Prabang, Miriam Donnelly, was in class with a girl in Dromcolliher whose brother I shared a house with in Dublin many years ago and is a long-standing friend of my cousin, Niamh Cotter. But it's always like that when Irish people get together!

One thing I notice here is that people don't really know much about Ireland - they often think I come from Iceland. ICELAND? I know we Irish often seem to feel that everyone in the world not only knows about us but secretly wants to be us but why Iceland? The answer seems to be that when Lao people learn English, they find it hard not to pronounce the 's' in the word 'island', so their English teacher will explain to them that Iceland is an actual country, whereas the word with a silent 's' is the geographical term (Alfred: Oh, for goodness' sake, why can't you just accept that Ireland is a tiny little country and it is completely natural that people in a place like Laos have never heard of it?  I mean, how many Irish people knew where Laos was when you told them you were going there? They thought you were talking about Laois!!)

I tried to make up for this by devoting five minutes of my English class to the topic of St. Patrick's Day. They got the idea of a National Day easily enough but then they asked me what a 'saint' was? I got absolutely nowhere with the explanation, even trying to compare St. Patrick to an especially revered monk from a temple whose memory people might treasure. Ah well, live and learn (Alfred: after almost fifty-five years you had better get a move on!).

CYCLING
And the cycling is still going well, though I am thinking of getting a bigger bike as I can't really stretch my legs properly and my back is not happy with the situation. One piece of good news is that I finally got a big-enough helmet, ordered from Taiwan via eBay, a really good one. The downside is that it doesn't give the protection against the sun my favourite Tilly hat did so I am using copious amounts of Australian skin protector to stop myself burning to a crisp!!

MEDIA WORK
If anyone is interested, I am doing occasional radio pieces for a programme called Cruinneog on Radio na Gaeltachta, one last month (Alfred: Actually it was February) and am recording another one at the moment. I also hope to start writing for COMHAR again, an Irish-language monthly for which I wrote when I was working in Rwanda. Will keep you posted! (Alfred: I hope people don't die of anticipation!!! But if you are really interested, here is the link to the first one
 http://www.rte.ie/rnag/cruinneog/programmes/2014/0215/504560-cruinneog-d-sathairn-15-feabhra-2014/)