83 years and still going strong
Those flamboyant head-the-ball Cao Daiists celebrate 83 years of their hotch-potch religion this week and the giant unblinking Divine Eye knows you weren't there to blow out the candles.




It really is a far out religion. This year old timeout article on Cao Dai gives you the basics. Here's an older over the top article describing it as a congregation of kitsch amongst other things.

Trivia: Did you know even Mr. Graham Greene is said to have once flirted with the idea of converting to Caodaiism but quickly backtracked describing it on his return to England in the mid 1950s as, “a game that had gone on too long.” Must have been the pink decor that turned him off.

Check it out:



He also described it as a "Disney-like fantasia of the east". Whether he said that before or after he considered signing up for a colourful robe I know not.

My life with a bomb - part II
You might remember that story I was telling you about the poor wee man in Dong Trach commune in Quang Binh province in Central Vietnam, who found an undetonated bomb in his own backyard while building a new outhouse for himself and ever-so-BRAVELY removed it then drove off to an uninhabited area outside town, all by himself, to ensure the safety of others, only to be told to take it back to his house by a couple of silly-billies with uniforms, caps and whistles.

Well... after those fine, upstanding fellows at MAG (Mines Advisory Group - We salute you!) defused the bomb, the beleaguered gent revealed EXCLUSIVELY (to Pittstop Works' friend's colleague's interpreter) how he was forced to keep watch over the bomb for six sleepless days and nights.

"I couldn't do my job, I couldn't do anything. My wife and my grandchildren were afraid so they stayed with my relatives who live far away from here. So at night, I sat in the house alone. My neighbours knew what had happened so no one in the neighbourhood dared to go outside."

Poor man. Anyway, thankfully, he's survived his ordeal and lived to tell the tale.

Stock market philosophy - part 21 (from the VN Financial Gazette)

As the stock market grows with maturity, inevitably people are starting to come up with sage like advice for those either immersed in the world of trading stocks or tempted to test the waters. Everyday we hear a new one here at the VN Financial Gazette offices, like the other day, when a visiting executive told us: “When the tide is high, no one knows you’re naked…”
"Nothing wrong with a bit of skinny dipping," we replied, not really getting the point, if there was one.
"You see, what I mean is, when the tide is low you’ll see just how many people are completely starkers," he explained.
"..."
"Look, its a metaphor for the dangers of penniless speculators," he went on.
"..."
"And there's no lifeguards to bail you out of the deep end," he added.
"What about arm floats?"
"What?"
"Or expandable under arm gussets?"
"Excuse me?"
"Inflatable chair loungers? Buoyancy aids? Snorkeling equipment? Stock-market-goggles?"

After 30 minutes of continued discussions, we believe the point is... for those without significant financial backing, its recommended you do some semi-nude sub-aquatic investigation in shallow waters before going, er, deep-sea diving.

For those who are on the ocean’s floor in their birthday suits still trying to happen upon the treasure, the bad news is regulations are set to tighten meaning there won’t be so much side street dealings for stocks in the near future.

It might be time to come up for air.

Finally, a story of love in the time of … cholera!

On Bat Su street in Hanoi’s Old Quarter there’s a woman looking for love. She’s not afraid to stand right outside her own front door and let the world know that she’s ready for a young, handsome, charming man to sweep her off her 77-year-old-feet. Do Thi Tan hit the local newspapers last week after hanging a colourful banner in a bid to woo potential suitors. If ever there was a Queen Bee, it is she!

With one marriage under her belt already, Tan is keeping her eye out for a man who is tall, muscular, unmarried and handsome. She sells soft drinks and sweets outside her house, waiting patiently for the day her prince charming arrives. Her small house is said to be worth a rather whopping $1 million, so let’s hope no one uses the poor woman to get their hands on the property!

Yes, she may be long in the tooth, but she has passion in spades. Her banner, which she commissioned an artist to create, stresses how fierce this woman’s love is. She claims she is still quite robust and she can eat five kilogrammes of fried fish immediately, which is certainly no mean feat. Neighbours confirm she's healthy, light on her feet and easy going.

Her five children have grown up and have their own families and do not oppose her search for love, so you have no reason to fear the wrath of her irate children.

Recently, Tan is said to have “spotted” a man of her choice who is 22 years old, but so far she’s playing coy on how this relationship is progressing! Oh you tease!


Pic: from VNexpress

Your expression of the week: May bay ba gia thich phi cong tre (The old plane likes a young pilot!)

Kimono traders

Bored, rich and restless? Wondering what to do with your surplus cash? Well, how about jetting off to a foreign country and dabbling in the stock market? It might seem a rather risky practice, or even complete madness, but recent reports in local media suggest that scores of Japanese have been lured by the attractiveness of Vietnam's red-hot stock market and are doing just that. Tours are available for individual investors who want to fly into Ho Chi Minh City and make transactions in the stock market. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that these investors are said to be house wives, who have the money and time to swoop in and buy and sell stocks. And while they’re at it, sure a bit of shopping on Dong Khoi and a foot massage, one might imagine. This is not specific to Vietnam and part of a wider trend which has seen Japanese housewives ditch their traditional roles, or daytime soaps, for the world of currency trading and influencing both international markets and Japan’s economy while they’re at it. They have been dubbed 'the kimono traders' by the international media. (From TO)

Nothing to do with Vietnam whatsoever...
Even if you're not a folkie you'll enjoy Irish musician Fionn Regan's video amongst the elements and the ticks and tocks of life at large. Very clever. And great wellies.



1. Drinking water ain't what it should be but what are you gonna do?
   
2. Apparently AsiaLIFE HCMC has stalled over some internal brouhaha -- time to swoop in and set up LIFEAsia HCMC while no one is looking. Who's with me?
   
3. A very troubling article by Marcus Gee on child prostitution in the southern city
4. PLUG: Those HITS fellas (Thespians of Hanoi!) are putting on two mini-plays this weekend. One's a satire so it might be funny but don't come complaining to me if it's not. Personally I'm allergic to theatre performances where everyone in the audience knows everyone on stage -- the collective chumminess makes me a bit claustrophobic...
   
5. And one serious food-blogger is most confused at why "Germany's most famous man of letters" has kebab stands all over Hanoi...
6. ANOTHER PLUG: There's a music festival in Hanoi -- not very well advertised as per usual so here's the poster. Free tickets from Goethe Institut, L'Espace, British Council, wrap up of the bands here
   

Vietnam's so hot right now...

A Canadian financial journalist is in town and he says "surf's up".

But if someone's friend's friend's friend says its safe to surf is it safe to surf?
With many newly privatized companies releasing little reliable financial information, surfers often buy and sell on the basis of rumour and hearsay. "They'll say things like, 'My friend has an uncle who has a sister who's married to a guy who bought this stock,' " says Mark Djandjy, a Canadian who is head of research for Ho Chi Minh City's Horizon Security Analysis.

Surfer Pham Thanh Tung, 29, says he has increased his money 11 times since he started trading a couple of years ago. "It's easy to buy, easy to sell," he says, "I give you money and you give me stocks - nobody knows."

Another surfer, Trinh Tuan Vu, 26, says he once walked into a café with six billion Vietnamese dong, the local currency, in three ordinary plastic shopping bags. That's nearly $400,000 (US).


And what's that got to do with the price of cabbage, says you.... Well, while its good surf for some the auld dears ain't so happy with ... well, the price of cabbage.

Snippets from the local press...

Million-dollar-dolt
Police in Hanoi arrested an employee of the Noi Bai Airport Joint Stock Cargo Services Company (NCS) after mysterious disappearance and subsequent reappearance of two boxes containing $1 million from warehouses at Noi Bai Airport early last week. The saga began yesterday at the warehouses operated by NCS when the two boxes arrived at 10:30 a.m last week. Techcombank was the intended receiver of the currency. However no one from the bank was there to retrieve the packages when the money arrived. At noon, the employee reported that the packages had suspiciously vanished. The contents were approximately $900,000 worth of Euro along with other foreign currencies. Police came to the scene to investigate. By 4pm the boxes were surprisingly located in another area of the warehouse. Four suspects including Thang were detained by police for questioning and he confessed to having moved the boxes himself

Please can I go to prison
The vice Director of Nhat Tan Co Ltd which specialised in import-export activities, has submitted an application to be jailed along with his brother, the director of the company, to “avoid tax payment” due to what he called the indifference attitude of the taxation authorities in his locality.

¥ A writer from Atlantic.com is in Vietnam and blogging like Billio. Wish I was on holidays.

¥ Meanwhile those Crocs are still on the loose and...

¥ Rain, rain, rain... in the central parts of Vietnam.

"About 2,500 foreigners were among 3,000 tourists who have been confined to hotels in the city of Hue by floodwaters triggered by heavy rains from a tropical depression." says Reuters. "Nearly 150 old houses have been submerged in Hoi An town, a World Heritage site and a popular tourist destination in Quang Nam province..."

I'm working on a synopsis for my new film: Crocodiles on a Train. Feel free to drop suggestions in the comment box. Get on board, it's going to be MASSIVE.

General gist: A flashflood washes away 5,000 crocs in Khanh Hoa province. Meanwhile a young man witnesses the murder of a hapless drug dealer by a mafia boss. He escapes and tells the police what he saw, which is pretty handy as the police just can't put away this nasty mafia boss without a first hand witness. Bad-ass detective Samuel Jackson takes the young hero by train (planes can't fly in the storm, see) to Hanoi to testify against the mafia boss. But the dastardly mafia boss rounds up all the crocs before the croc farmers do and puts them all on the train to Hanoi and creates a powerful drug which after being set off by timed-bomb-device makes the crocs go really, really loco. Like frothing at the mouth ready for a feeding frenzy-loco. So the crocs go berserk and eat pretty much everyone except for our young hero, Samuel L. Jackson, a really good looking female-train-steward and a fat kid who learnt to drive trains with the help of a computer game. Samuel gets really annoyed and says "I've had it with these mudderfuggin crocodiles on this mudderfuggin train..." so he tells everyone to tie themselves to the chairs, drives the train through a lake and washes away all the crocs, while the young fat kid successfully pulls the train into Hanoi station. Samuel kisses the steward and everyone heads off for bun cha through the "mudderffuggin'" traffic .

Le fin

‡ Gangsters online -- you have to admire the 'thinking outside the box' entrepreneurial spirit. Though now they've been arrested you'd also have to say on a scale of one to ten, one being thick as two short planks, ten being super brainy, they'd score pretty low.

‡ Back in the one-room house he shares with his mother, he says what most impressed him about Hanoi was electricity, but otherwise he didn't really like the big city. Read on...

• Floods in central Vietnam in pictures

• A colleague just sent me this story from a local paper: What do you do if you find an undetonated bomb in your backyard? Put it somewhere safe? Recently a man living in Dong Trach commune in Quang Binh province in Central Vietnam, had some extra facilities added to his house and came across a bomb around 1.6m long. He informed the authorities then carried the bomb off to the uninhabited sand dunes far from all residential areas. But when two members of the local military force caught up with him, they ordered him to bring the bomb back to his home for safekeeping! They also warned him if he lost it, he would assume all possible responsibility. Baffled, the man obliged though the two men have since been punished by the local authorities.

A blog in the time of Cholera. SARS, bird flu, cholera... give us a break will ya?!

Finally... three points for the Minsk football club

Now turn off your computer and go outside and play (A photo essay)
"The government requires that games developed in Vietnam get more boring after five hours of play, encouraging children to focus on other activities."

Vietnam is apparently a "crouching tech tiger" but seriously who's gonna buy the Segway??? Then again people still buy the Sinclair C5. Poor auld Clive... way ahead of his time.

Mind you, a Segway or a C5 might be handy for nipping down the road at lunchtime for an egg sandwich or a post-work bia.

* Ia Chay: RE the outbreak of the runs, it's the vegetables. Those god-damn raw vegetables! (or so says someone
from WHO, who told someone I know). So leave mam tom out of this. Though it is still banned

* After eating nom du du on Thursday and Friday, all the accompanying veg I had with bun cha on Friday, the salad I had on Friday night... I was thinking I was eating healthily. The Ngoc Ha market was half-empty this morning. Only meat and fruit available, so the powers that be are taking this pretty seriously.

* The weather, oh we'll always have the weather: A stunning day, like a perfect Irish summer's day (no sniggering at the back), 25 degrees, blue sunny skies... but my office colleagues are wearing jumpers and scarves. It was good enough for the turtle (perhaps he's Irish?). He clambered up onto the island in Hoan kiem lake to soak up the rays according to that man-about-town-Julio. Of course, the turtle might just be trying to get out of the murky depths to breathe. Of course if you foolishly believed everything you read at Pittstop Works you'd know that he's actually a 62-year old retired sub-aquatic minesweeper.

* I am, for the record, wearing socks.

* Correction: I said that Thuy Linh was a verb and an adjective, but it was actually Vang Anh, the name of the show she was in. Example: A young man comes home late at night and his brother will tease him, I'm translating obviously, "You were out doing a Vang Anh", or something along those lines.

The mam tom bellyache



Foreigners often retch at the sight or thought of mam tom (fermented shrimp paste) and while ye hardy-eaters and locals might titter at others timidity before wolfing down some mam tom on top of your tofu or cha ca, it appears that the infamous purple substance is the cause of an outbreak of the runs. Really, really bad runs according to this article.

A few dozen patients in the capital city and other northern provinces have been hospitalised with identical symptoms: diarrhea, vomiting, and water exhaustion and up to 90 per cent of these people ate raw food, such as -- we all need a scapegoat in times of trouble -- mam tom (shrimp paste)!

According to the article, the local authorities have even banned the use of shrimp paste at restaurants -- I'd like to see if that's actually being followed -- and people are being warned off other raw goodies such as those pork rolls (nem chua) you get at bia hoi.

Banning mam tom and nem chua... well I never.