A moment
Around town you can see the vans lurk. Inside the eyes of men in uniform scan the paths. Ahead street vendors hightail it with their baskets of strawberries or water melons or flowers or whatever is ripe or in season. Old ladies at tea stalls pack up their miniature stools and shove their kettles inside the door. Deliverymen run out of shops mid-delivery to drive around the block. You see, blocking the paths is illegal. Any object blocking the path is subject to confiscation. Which is why street cafes have such cheap chairs - so it doesn't matter if they're taken. It's nothing new, if you live here in Hanoi you've seen the chairs, fruit, bicylces and pots being hurled in the back of the van, heard the pitiful pleas of the owner begging for clemency.

But the other day, a first of sorts. On a winter's morning, as the boys in the back of the van sat shivering in the cold, a woman cooking (chesnuts roasting on a open fire? Perhaps it was sweetcorn or chao) with a bep than is spotted on the street. Her stove is duly confiscated - nothing else.

One of the men then places it carefully in the middle of the back of the van, which lurches forward, and rolls away; the men in the back then huddle around their heater and warm their icy hands, the sounds of the woman shouting are soon left behind, soon unheard, soon forgotten.

I just wanted to say, I've never seen a bep than confiscated before. That's all.

Quickies
Chicken Run continues into TPHCM

If you're having a party and are the little boy who lives down a lane this website might help your friends find your house. Click on your street while "holding the Shift-Key down. A link is then generated which you can include in your email or web site..."


The design isn't magnificent but it's handy enough - here's a link to point you in CAMA's direction come this weekend (the last ever).

It's 2007
So 2007, underway and isn't that lovely. If you've been clicking on and finding nothing here is new you've obviously been spending too much of the festive season surfing the web when you should have been eating and drinking - what were you thinking? You'd do well to remember the internet turns you into a nerd.

Anyway, we were eating and drinking, which is why we weren't posting anything.

First good news for the Pittstop Team this year is founding-blogger-man Connla Stokes's story the Lover's Nest has been translated into Turkish, which is of no use to any of you probably, but on the off chance you are a) Turkish b) speak Turkish c) know someone who is a) or does b), well you can let them know their soon-to-be-favourite journal is called Esik Cini.

Anyway just felt like bragging.

You can buy and read the original in Tieng Anh here at Total Cardboard HQ

Or you can read it for free here.

More Vina stories coming soon.