Reading not writing
Ok, It would be better if I wrote my own articles but seen as Messers Elliott-o, Oslo and Witloof enjoyed my last link to Vietnam, I found another one for their reading pleasure. Perhaps a bit long and dull, but hey it's the New York times on Hanoi's art scene - what would you expect?

Spot your own pet-hate clangers and cliches. Personally I just wonder why it is they always end up in Bobby Chinn's (Hanoi c'est surprisingly chic!). Other spots namedropped are the Metropole (old world class oozes from the taps) and quite astonishingly the PARIS EFFING DELI:

I took in the street scene below as I sipped a glass of Beaujolais nouveau, which had just arrived that week, right on time.

Hence the nouveau! Thank heavens for the Oriental express!

Another good one is: “We come to Duc to create contemporary art and to talk about ideas with him,” said one of them, who like the others, had never left the country, though each of them had a Yahoo e-mail address.

Vietnam - c'est online!

Very sadly, the journo saves the best till last when she says: No wonder most tourists try it once (walk across a street), and then spend the rest of their trip either in the back seat of a taxi or in the cramped quarters of a tuk-tuk

Tuk-tuk?

Anyway, I promise not to just slag off articles written by people who were here for three days and write an article myself one of these days, but the post Tet malaise is deep in my bones. And it's so easy being lazy and cynical.

Advertorial
By the way, if you're in TPHCM and feel like climbing up a wall, a couple of friends have a wall with your name on it.

New year sabbatical
Mr. Witloof in Brussels tells me he's been worried sick - sleepless nights no doubt - over the recent flatline here at Pittstop HQ. At least we know if a blogger drops dead someone will notice. Eventually over time, alas, they will move on to pastures new and abundant - perhaps in this case to our blog directory neighbours pitstop or even pittstopp.

But fear not Meneer Witloof - We've been busy, busy, busy what with all that Tet Lunar New Year malarkey.

Now that we're back hopefully we'll be posting with the frequency of a 16-year old internet nerd, reassured that despite our sabbatical, we're still ahead of the print press. Then again you wouldn't have to get out of bed too early in the afternoon to be quicker than the Seattle Times (and also CNN - both pieces via AP) who finally caught wind of the North vs South furore that a teenage blogger kicked off aaaaaaagess ago. In November to be exact.

The Seattle Times article has a few cliches I groaned at:
Southerners with money take their friends out to dinner; northerners tend to be thrifty and prefer to visit friends at home, said Kim Dung, a journalist who moved to Ho Chi Minh City from Hanoi 12 years ago. (She obviously hasn't been back to Hanoi since.)

and...

But northerners generally are more concerned about status and will buy one expensive motorbike while the southerner is more likely to buy two cheap ones, she said.

??????!!!!!!!!!!!!!????

The article concludes with one man from the south comically complaining... "The service is terrible [in the north/Hanoi]!" he said. "If you go to a restaurant and ask for an extra chopstick, the owners get angry at you."

Which if you were this poor couple who dined out in TPHCM one night a while ago, you'd probably find a wee bit hard to believe.