Month: September 2013

Freshly pressed thoughts (on way to Bangkok)

On By saigonsaysIn Well-Being3 Comments
image
Awakening your senses – Bangkok’s colourful street vending network

I’m a mile or so up in the air once more, the flooded dark green plains of the Mekong Delta below so very familiar now after 2.5 years of traversing over them.  Hunched and huddled in the fish-ponged cabin of a Vietnamese airlines aeroplane, I dodge the smiling offers of tepid seafood noodles and ground boot-dust tasting coffee.

This week, up until Wednesday night when I’ll be back to Saigon in time for my daughter’s 5th birthday, it’s Bangkok, for a conference and some networking.

Headphones on, I’m in auto-pilot mode. Continue reading “Freshly pressed thoughts (on way to Bangkok)” →

Brit-speak

On By saigonsaysIn Communications7 Comments

image

I had coffee with a fellow NGO peer earlier today and, as usual, our chat about work was diverted several times, and we traded amusing anecdotes about life in general.

Van has lived here for 7 years, having been brought up in the USA.  Her Vietnamese is not too bad, but her passion for investing a career and a life in Saigon, where her parents and grandparents lived, like many returning here, is really notable.

This doesn’t mean that some of the quirkiness of living in Vietnam washes over Van: in fact at times it leaves her agog.  Like the occasion when her newly appointed PR assistant (on hearing Van admit to being on a diet, and down the gym each morning) asked her bluntly in front of the team why it was then that Van was wearing “an outfit today which highlights your flabby tummy?” Continue reading “Brit-speak” →