Direct insults of the day

This little vignette is Edwina's harmless attempt at small talk. Edwina, my colleague, it chatting with a local client. Her speech is a combination of baby talk and eager-but-staccato-slow-to-the-point-of-condescending speech. I think she sees them as the friendly natives.

"So do you speak Chinese? Oh No? That's right, yes yes. Because the Chinese invaded you didn't they?

"Do you speak French? No? Well they were here, too, before, also. They stayed until you fought them - fighting them - and they run away." [I kid you not. At this point I was just sitting there, mouth agape, no longer typing my own document but typing out this dialogue in total shock.]

"But now you speak English very good, right? You learn English a long time? Even though you fight to get the Americans out. And you win and  they have to leave? You learn English now."

"Everyone wants to move here to Vietnam and you need to fight them to go."

-- For fuck's sake, Edwina. 

Backhanded insult of the day

"You speak good English ... when you sing."

-- said by my colleague, to one of the locals in our meeting when he hummed a few notes from a song.

Oh, but what a journey it were, Pip!

I have now been brushing my teeth in Hanoi tap water for 3 weeks with no ill consequences. This journey could go one of three ways: 

1) Using tap water to wash down my morning vitamins; or

2) Implementation of a similar initiative when I'm in Thailand; or

3) Old Lace (http://news.bio-medicine.org/biology-news-2/Northern-Vietnam-drinking-water-contains-dangerous-arsenic-levels-9565-1/)

"Nothing shortens a journey so pleasantly as an account of misfortunes at which the hearer is permitted to laugh."

-- Quentin Crisp