Sunday 19 December 2010

Frohliche Weinachten



We went to our local Christmas market and realised this was pretty different to our last four Christmases. Each time we went tropical with Yuletide it felt strange as though something was missing, as though something had been added. Heat, palm trees, alien counter culture, you name it. Of course there was the novelty of being sun drenched instead of snow stormed; the quirk of seeing sweating Santas on mopeds in 35 degree heat peddling crap made in China or the nascent acceptance of the commercial cachet of Christmas; trophied wives of fat Farang blinged with jewels that sparkled like the plastic ice on the wall of a Bangkok mall. The SE Asian take on Christmas follows familiar commercial lines; the Vietnamese version was more basic and like so many things in that environment, the rush to embrace the best of the West was diminishing the wonder, blurring the reason, of the original Christmas season. Fat cat leaders announced, dear workers, this must be celebrated. It is allowed, it is permitted. You may dress your children cutely as Santa but you must still work for a dollar while we lick our own cream. Like the Catholics in Hanoi who found their sacred ground forbidden to them; like Thich Nhat Hanh's followers who have been barred from their temple since Vietnam ascended like a Phoenix from Napalm fire to the WTO. Ho Chi Minh's Neo-Congs have dulled his legacy by lighting up their faithless Christmas lights while puffing on air choking cigars

This has been a world away. A Christmas market in Freiburg was thick with people, a throng of locals and tourists alike getting
spirited by seasonal Gluhwein, a mulled concoction that involved cries of Prost! and a zig zag approach to walking through the stalls. Here the chintz was local with hardly a made in China sticker in sight but I liked our local Christmas market more, felt at home on the banks of the close to frozen Birs ( see the photo below and the geezer above). I guess
I liked it too because I recognised some locals, a few characters who must be our neighbours. We had pumpkin soup and I bought a star chopped rough from local wood. A group of nervous children were singing off key to Silent Night while, knitted and mueslied, a woman urged them to seasonal resonance. In the corner a man began to play with his organ. This seems about right. Frohliche Weinachten !


Monday 15 November 2010

The Ghost of Storchen



It started with smoke. Or perhaps not. It started with an eerie feeling, like the shiver of a grave walker; tired and edgy from all that has been witnessed. Things have happened, time has passaged a dark route and a once flourishing business has suddenly turned sour or rotten or something. Whatever has happened there has been decline. Slow at first but then rushed; hurried, like rats standing by the ship and applauding its sinking. Ha Ha. Another one fights the dust. Or such earth. Overgrowing with weeds now, brittle-crisp already from the creeping cold. What had once been a flourishing business has now grown ivy on its menu; storks wre meant to be carriers of hope not soiled dreams.

The smoke was unexpected. No one lives there we have been told. The owners have sold or evacuated, no one is quite sure. But there is smoke with fire; not just speculation or ghoulish expectation, it is what it is. In the basement which we can see from our apartment we are intrigued by the flicker of flame and glancing upwards we can see the plumes of smoke, furrowing into the cold air. There is no one in the hotel. This is early, night barely cracked by day and there is not a light on in the 1930s building nor, can you believe, is there a sigh or a sound as we listen closely but surreptitiously, glancing furtively but no less acutely through the windows that show nothing but business shrouded; large white sheets slung over furniture, luminous in the septic embrace of darkness. When we step back, or rather retreat, we are sure there is no one there and on cue, the smoke stops, a disappearing cloud and the rippling flame in the basement has abruptly gone, like fingers snuffing out flame.

Hotel Storchen is not empty.

Monday 25 October 2010

Graubunden



A few photos from our trip to Graubunden, a region close to Italy with its own distinctive Romanisch, a language imported into the region by the Romans and it is used both in verbal and written form. Buna Saira indeed! It sounded great, full vowel crushes and lilting tones but had to use my minimal German in most situations as English wasn't widely understood.



We left Basel in Autumn and arrived, literally in Winter, as snow began to fall in Andermatt. Here we changed for a small train that ascended for half an hour to around 2000m to the Oberalp Pass, a desolate, whitened landscape. We stayed in a little apartment in Sedrun, went for a comical walk in foot deep snow up a mountain that would have Swiss regulars tutting at our lack of plan and had Rosti for an evening meal, shredded,potato comfort against the cold.





Thursday 14 October 2010

Fall:Not Now Saigon



I loved the Graham Greene line about dusk in Vietnam, how daylight would be doused like a candle and in the brief, febrile twilight that followed, darkness would then ' fall like a stone.' Here, twilight seems to gorge itself on the remaining light, filling up our valley with rays thin yet brilliant. And we have found seasons again and it all seems very efficient with nature shifting smoothly into another gear; weather as a clockwork mechanism sprung with expectation. Timing here is everything. The supermarkets are quickly selling off the last fruits of summer and piling displays high with pumpkins and wild mushrooms.

Another layer is needed now for cycling but the rush of cold air is certainly exhilarating!

Friends in Vietnam have described the deluge of 135mm of rain in one torrential evening, with floods in the old neighbourhood carrying startled rats into sodden living rooms.

The ' Ex-Rat' instalments set to return soon!

Off to Graubunden soon. Photos to follow

Monday 20 September 2010

The Phoenix Has Landed



When we opened our shipping, our once home packed up and made cardboard if not destitute, there was a cloud of memories ushered in by the quick scent of the tropics, its musky odour in everything. It wasn't mildew exactly, more captured humidity caught in the fibres like the mosquito who rushed out, given freedom and then no doubt shock to find itself suddenly here. I know the feeling.

It's been great to have our tropical world join us here in our wee Swiss hamlet and it seems to have merged okay. I'm amazed our Japanese Phoenix made it without losing a wooden feather and musky belongings aside the Vietnamese packers did an amazing job.

So we are still settling in. Our necessarily minimal apartment now has clutter but hopefully character too. Below, painted on to a cliff face a cycle ride away from us, are shields depicting significant Kantonal events. And then one of us, on a wet visit to Zurich.










Thursday 2 September 2010

Photos from a New Life!


Summer is ending...

In the Bernese Alps with the kids, we chanced on a cafe selling Rosehip tea.

Our new home town...

In case you lose your way on the Wanderweg

Switzerland has a one of the highest ratios of gun ownerships in the world. No wonder they stayed neutral.

People are getting ready for a long winter..

This is our local cafe that has survived recent health scares.

Tuesday 17 August 2010

Heidi Hi



There's going to be a lot of that - cheesy jokes that amount to more than Fondue, chocolately sweet remarks about life here in Grellingen: Population 1700 + 2 now of course. Our arrival is to be announced in the local paper - not out of celebrity of course but by way of communal introduction. We are expected to introduce ourselves to our neighbours, formally one by one knocking on doors, so we tapped homes and waited to say hello; bought bikes and staggered into the hills to be passed by effortless joggers; stepping on and off trams to France and Germany, a kind of trans European travel that required little effort as we joined the Swiss Franc flockers to the limping Eurozone.

Then a balcony with the view shown in the photo above that allows us to sit outside in the dark without the bite of mosquito, the damp wrap of humidity.

The sledgehamming difference between life in Vietnam and living here in this quiet hamlet is as resounding as the bells from the church half way up the hill.

Also, gehen wir

Sunday 27 June 2010

Last Post



Just to say we are leaving VietNam. It would be both difficult and pointless to summarise our time here in one posting but I hope a sense of our life here has come through in The Junkyard of Circumstance. A little haphazard sometimes I know but I have really enjoyed writing the blog, sending my techie and sometimes tacky postcards from the eclectic thrall of SE Asia and have appreciated your reactions and communications. It has certainly been true that distance has accentuated communication and from both of us it has meant a lot to receive tales and packages; texts and calls from various hamelands. Thank you.

Will rejuvenate the blog in a colder place while hoping that the tropics never leave my bones.

Toni xxx

Saturday 8 May 2010

The Angina Monologues



As is often the way, it started with discomfort; such an everyday feeling, a slight ache, a moment of sinew awareness, of interior. The doctor asked me to categorise the pain and this was at least a familiar request. Pain has its definition and rememberance; in the hospital a few days later the nurse showed me a flashcard with an array of faces from happy through grimace then taut then crying, screaming at the very end. It made sense of course, such visual definition and recognition could be made sense of in a Singaporean hospital but the happy face at the beginning? I guess some people are happy in pain.

The GP should have been on the stage, a stretched Kiwi with a piquant sense of drama. From such dull symptoms she eeked out some bright scenario filled with sparkling dialogue and the set pieces of professionalism (hers) and shock (mine.) Given my description, my family history and my ex everything, I was whisked off to a cardiologist and hooked up to doppler and echogram; treadmilled like a frightened hamster beeping machines with my heart, an organ under such sudden scrutiny. With casual reassurance I was told there was leakage in a valve but it was okay likely. To be born with something does not mean to die of something. The stress test was borderline however and although the cardio guy looked pretty Gauloised by it, laconic in his description of potential risk the GP hit the roof and clung to it and me with her stethoscope.

She was ordering an immediate evacuation to Bangkok with accompanying nurse to undergo an angiogram - I now have a few more words in my vocabulary, the grafted language of medicine that seldom seems to stick for long - but this is, if you want to know, the insertion of a catheter into a vein in the arm ( ouch of course) which is then pushed up until a dye is released and a Chernobyl-like radiance fills the body until it is pissed out like fireworks in a dark bathroom. I kicked in denial, punted downplays and avoided all sense of urgency - after all I had gone simply for a check up while telling Kate I had gone to the dentist. Yuh, I know. The doc was sticking to her training, the smooth procedures and protocols of private medicine that launch symbiotically as soon as you step through the door. As the slogan says, Your Health is Our Wealth.

" I have seen people die of heart attacks. You could die during sexual intercourse."

It was ironic then that her bedside manner was rigid.

I walked out. Signed a form absolving everyone apart from myself of all risk and went home to see Kate, bare some bad tidings and work out what to do next.



A few days later, the urgency of the situation having been reduced by time and bureaucracy, I was given approval by the insurance company to go to Singapore for the procedure. Normally they use Bangkok but the doctor there phoned me and said
he could see wave after wave of red shirts marching down Silom and that they couldn't guarantee my safety. I wasn't allowed however, to travel just with Kate. A nurse was sent from Raffles Hospital ( Yuh, I KNOW) and she, Kate and a bottle of oxygen would be accompanying me from our apartment to the hospital. The nurse declared, as she strapped me into the wheelchair, that I was the healthiest patient she had seen in ages but heart patients are always treated as though they could keel over any moment. To the enduring curiosity of other passengers, I was installed in the unnecessarily wide seats of Singapore Air Business Class and while the medical equipment, leads and masks dangling ominously, was piled next to me Kate took her seat in the narrow confines of Economy class. I felt it necessary - what a bore - to refuse proffered champagne but I did accept the public blood pressure and pulse taking every 20 minutes. The flight attendants whispered behind cupped hands. The nurse asked me if I could look a little more ill.

The journey to the airport had more of sightseeing about it than the evacuation. Anne, the garrulous Filipino nurse cured the world with conversation and reassurance and who managed to talk for 40 minutes non stop in the airport cafe while a segment of muffin perched on her spoon, wilted from expectation. Anne pointed out the parks and landmarks of a journey and I felt as though I had won a competition, my prize the unexpected.

The patients at Raffles were sealed in their rooms rather than displayed on wards; such was the privacy of this medicine that
the only sign of who was in each room was their dietary instructions from soft to nil by mouth; everyone was cocooned within beige walls and crisp hospital linen. It was all ensuite of course with bathrobes, bespoke toiletries and television. The feeling of being hoteled rather than hospitalised grew until each morning I was awakened at 6.00am by the clatter of a trolley and the sudden squeeze of my arm.

What did the angiogram show? That I was fine. A little of this and that but nothing that needed treatment. If I have discomfort it is not to do with my heart. I got to see my glowing core, its pulse strangely distant from me. It was encased in a mysterious, luminous world of shadow and halo; the unseen territory of my own body. The doctor had that brusque air of clinical disappointment, the sigh of an opportunity squandered by health. We checked out. We were discharged. It felt like both. On the last day I paced my guilded cage as I waited for my case to get through the catheter squeeze of insurance payout while the insurers battled against the covert largesse of hospital hospitality. Would you like an x-ray with that Sir? They were old adversaries and I was new at this. But I know enough to be grateful for intervention, to be able to access care however it is administered. Not just harking with misty-eyed expat thoughts of a free and fair NHS back home but knowing that many people much more ill than me don't receive the care they need. Those with Dengue for instance are kept at home because it is hoped time or belief will heal, because symptoms merge undistinguished from less lethal complaints and for some they are kept at home because there is not enough money to pay for a hospital visit or for the drugs to bring the fever down.


Monday 15 February 2010

Tet: An Phu, Ho Chi Minh City 2010



Stayed at home for Tet this year and it's worth it just to reclaim the streets for a few days as a big chunk of the neighbourhood
pack their mopeds high with food and gifts and head off to distant relatives. Birdsong, usually vanquished by engines could be heard and the rats too seemed to be enjoying the freedom of the road, unsquashed.

Chuc Mung Nam Moi! Happy Year of the Tiger.