Exercise

You gotta hand it to the Vietnamese. They really do appreciate the idea of a healthy body. Long before the sun comes up, everybody (it seems) flocks down to the lake to open up the blood-vessels in their bodies, and wake up for the day.

.. .. on the "Pepsi Max" scale of exercise intensity, its pretty poxy stuff, I have to say. You'd NEVER sell a can of red-bull or a sweat-band label using the Vietnamese lake routine as your advertisement visuals. But nonetheless, they are definitely "up and at it".

I do enjoy a good run around Lenin park myself, but my primary focus is on weightlifting.

Gyms in Vietnam are, well… weird….

Firstly, they are like the streets: totally crowded and cramped. Especially in the afternoon. Routines are impossible at this time, because there is a very minimal chance that the machine you want to use will be available. Westerners are all so incredibly polite (or think we are) that we tend to wait until a machine is free, before approaching it for use. Vietnamese people just go and use it, regardless of who is currently using the machine, and expect everyone else to be ok with that – which of course they are.

After living around a few spots in Hanoi, I've come to learn that gyms here are pretty cheap (about $7.00 AUS per month) however usually crap. Vietnam is a poor country, and while everything available in western countries,has an answer in Vietnam, its always an "affordable" answer. Meaning that things are made of cheap materials, by low paid workers, using inexpensive equipment. Hence, rarely can you use words like "parallel", "perpendicular", "straight", "strong" or "reliable" when describing gym equipment in Vietnam.

I have located a pretty decent gym in the central district of Vietnam, which is my local. Its fairly pricey (a whopping $14.00AUS/month), but definitely worth the splurge.

A few more points. Women exercise upstairs with women, in the aerobics area, and men downstairs in the weights room. The biggest mix of the sexes is in the pool, where both sexes share. Interestingly, there is, like in Australia, the usual gaggle of Uncle Pervey "Speedophiles" lurking about the shallow end of the pool.

Secondly, its well. Well... on the outside, it looks like a pretty damn gay scene. Nearly everybody is topless in the mens weights room. Quite frequently, people are just wearing small shorts. and a surprising percentage (30% ?? perhaps) are clad in nowt but a thin and very tight cotton mens- brief thing. Considering how cramped things get in the afternoon, it does make one wonder... gay as gay gets, from the Australian perspective.

Autum in Hanoi - Birds and Pickpockets

There is a little family of birds who next in the broken air exhaust fan of out office. It’s a hole in the wall, with a little grill and a fan, I guess used to help air circulate from outside the building to the inside. Anyway, it’s broken (probably never worked, judging by the way Vietnamese do things! Hehe) so the birds are making good use of the free space and I can here the little birds chirping away as I type this blog!!

Autumn in Hanoi is gorgeous. Its like a spring day in Perth, or a mid-dry season day in Darwin. Cool dry air, warmish sun. Absolutely lovely. Its incredible how it affects your mood, and the motorcycle makes it all the more fun. Its really nice to be wizzing along on a bike, (dangerously not wearing a helmet, but anyway) in the cool dry air.

Aaaaaaaaah. For those of you who don’t know, the b@#stard cops evicted me from my house a few weeks ago, they rocked up with no warning and said “Sayonara” to me at 9pm at night. Being in charge of public security for the area, they didn’t like the idea of a foreigner getting mugged or robbed or attacked – and them having to be responsible for it. So they said I should go find a more appropriate “foreigner designated area” to stay…. Obviously being in charge of public security, it seemed a little stupid to kick me out on the streets at 9pm at night, however, I guess they reasoned that if I’m not actually a member of the public anymore, then I’m not their responsibility.

So I’m back in the tourist centre at the moment, chillin’ out, ignoring anybody who tries to sell me something, and just enjoying the weather. It is still quite interesting. Pickpockets, for example….

I saw two Singaporean (??? Perhaps..) backpackers staggering down the street under the weight of their oversized backpacks. The bloke in the lead, and his poor girlfriend in tow behind, she looked pretty tired. Anyway, there’s this little punk Vietnamese kid, about 15 or 16 (maybe older, its hard to tell with the kids) and he’s rifling through every pocket in her back-pack!! She was none the wiser. I was on my motorbike at the time so I thought I’d follow for a while, and putted along behind as the little brat did the left pockets, the centre pockets and then the right pockets. He was still empty-handed at this point, so the audacious little sod decided he’d rip open the straps and have a proper rummage through the main compartment.

At this point, I thought I’d do the poor Singaporean girl a favour (fancy getting to the hotel finally, and finding out all your moisturizer cream, Cosmo magazines and hair-drier were no longer with you!!). So I revved up the bike a bit, and ran the front wheel across the back of the little punks ankles (which were bare, and hopefully gave a nice scrape), as he turned, I gave it a last little burst and knocked properly into him. He looked surprised of course, and I apologized as sarcastically as possible (actually- I don’t know how to use sarcasm in Vietnamese, so I might have come out sounding completely sincere….. except for the bogan “IS HE GETTIN’ SMUARRRRT IS HE??” scowl on my face). He actually looked like he wanted to turn it into something more, (which was worrying, I don’t think it’s a very good look getting into a fight with a child in the street!) but he had bigger fish to fry -ie that is relocating his victim and continuing the search of her backpack. I hope she got to the hotel in time!!