It finally happened. A plastic stool succumbed under the weight of my weightiness. Luckily I had prepared for this moment, with a nightly routine of squats, pulling chairs away from myself, graceful backward rolls, observing others in similar incidents, and practising my “a chair didn’t just break from under me, let’s get on with the meeting” face, it’s a very specific look.

Most activities that involve sitting in Vietnam will likely be facilitated by a plastic stool if anything at all. Plastic stools range from the tiny plastic stool which is really just the lazy man’s squat to a full adult sized chair with a backrest. The one I had was a tall variety without a backrest, similar to the top most picture. They also tend to come in red, yellow and green but i don’t think i’ve ever seen black.

It was kind of a lucky break I had though. I was coming to the end of a meeting and was just chatting casually with colleagues when the *crack* sound came which you wouldn’t hear in a crowded Little Italy restaurant or Dinh Liet Bia Hoi for instance. This triggered my training instincts to tense up my quad muscles and go into a kind of tall squat formation. As the crumbling of the chair leg occurred I was able to remain reasonably upright, I thought about preforming a backward roll, but figured it would just be showing off and rather unusual for my colleagues to see, then came the reflex to in a flash replace the broken stool with a fresh one and lay on the “a chair didn’t just break from under me, let’s get on with the meeting” face. My colleagues didn’t know what hit ‘em as the conversation flowed naturally onto why I wasn’t married and how that made me ugly and pitiable.

With two days of continual downpour at a rapid rate, the streets of hanoi were swimmable, parts of the city were under various levels of flooding. This left movement by motorbike or car almost impossible with scenes of people pushing their vehicles along and major queues at motor repair shops. My movements however were largely unaffected seeing as i didn’t move much, deciding that the streets would be too flooded to get around. I was happily enjoying the pounding of the rain which was a nice change from honking traffic horns, until my neighbourhood also decided to blackout. With almost no food in the house, no power, a suggestion of dinner and an otherwise early friday evening on hand, i set out with my housemate to see if we could get across town for dinner. Riding my honda wave, we made it 500m before hitting the intersection shown above. I turned back rather than risk joining the throngs of dead motorbikes. Sure we could have just eaten around the corner from my house, but that wouldn’t have been an adventure. It was time to bring pretty lady back out. Our bicycles were thriving in the rain and flood leaving in our wake hesitant and or broken down cars and motorcycles. We picked up a friend who was stuck in town as the road back to his town was chest deep in water (unfortunately he was already half way to his town before finding this out, which resulted in a lonely delirious several hours walk back to hanoi!). Taking advantage of his delirium we convinced him that spending the rest of the evening cycling would be in his best interest. We managed to travel across town quite easily in the end with only a few stretches of flood to deal with. My 85000 dong three course meal was well earned that night. With this new found sense of pedal powered freedom, Saturday was spent in the company of pretty lady and now less delirious friend, cycling up to and around West Lake. The above pic is of Hoan Kiem lake in the centre of Hanoi which overflowed. People are standing on what is normally a few metres wide footpath around the lake. As the rain started weakening, there was almost a sense of disappointment that the flooding was subsiding (this sentiment was probably not shared by many, especially for those who where knee deep in water standing in their kitchen). Being overtaken by motorbikes and cars was once again the norm. At the top of westlake we came across graffiti street (everything in Hanoi has a street, e.g Chicken Street, Shoe Street, Creme Caramel Street, female motorbike taxi?? street), not the usual gritty inner city graffiti you might get around a major city, it was more the etching person a loves person b into a tree kind of graffiti. Along graffiti street on a 10 metre stretch of lake a whole bunch of fishermen were gathered. They all stood body to body as opposed to spread out across the lake, for warmth? probably not, perhaps it was the best fishing spot and not unlike shops in Hanoi, when someone is onto a good idea, then you’ll get a whole bunch of copy cats, or perhaps they were just being sociable. The fishermen don’t use any bait but have this spider like hook, not really sure how it encouraged fish to hook themselves, but it seemed to work. And thus ends the flooded weekend. More flood and fishing pics from the vietnamese press here. Apparently fishing and floods go hand in hand, in some cases the overflowed (or overflown?) lakes mean fish end up getting washed down drains, so waiting with nets outside a drain is a good idea. There did seem to be an unusually large amount of people fishing around west lake matched by the amount of people spectating too.