Tetherd Cow Ahead

This framed poster, on a wall at the Xinh Moi. Look carefully at the legend above the girl’s knee…

I have momentary wi-fi. Nurse Myra has treated me to a couple of hours at the wonderful Victoria Hotel in Hoi An. Pool, cocktails, wi-fi. Sigh.

I’d like to write more guys, really I would. But I can see the pool from where I’m sitting, and well, you know I love yez all, but… oh, is that the time?

Nurse Myra has us staying at the wonderful Xinh Moi Hotel* in the newly decreed ‘city’ (it was until recently a town) Quang Ngai. The Xinh Moi is a kind of grand palatial kind of building, painted a very fetching shade of hyper-peppermint green (I’m not being sarcastic – I do think it’s a lovely colour). In the manner of many Vietnamese buildings it has a haphazard shabbiness that makes it very appealing. It is also quite weird – the entire centre of the hotel is a three-storey big empty room. Cars and bikes get parked on the ground floor, but aside from that, it has to be said that the Xinh Moi, as a piece of architecture, is mostly empty space.

We have our suspicions about some of the activities going on in the Xinh Moi. More about that in a bit.

One of the great features of the Xinh Moi, along with the air-conditioning and the very polite staff, is the list of guest rules.

Here are a couple (verbatim):

5. Don’t bring foods such as dry squids, octopus little fishes, dry fishes into the room. If the guests have them. Please send them in the kitchen of the hotel.

6. Don’t bring the flamable materials and the things easily explode (burst) into the room.

This causes me to wonder if in the past there has been some very unfortunate kind of fish-based explosive incident in one of the rooms, the aftermath of which can only be imagined. It would, perhaps, also explain the industrial quantities of mothballs and napthalene-fumed cleaning solutions that the housekeeping staff seem to like to douse our room with each day.

Another favourite is:

12. Everybody much obey the struction number 05 of the Government about the guests houses and hotels never taking the possitude oneselt girl into the room.

Now, we’ve been sitting in the cocktail bar across the road these past few evenings, and our considered opinion is that there is something of a business of extra-hotel activities in operation at the back of the Xinh Moi. Certainly, a couple of nights back, the room next door was breaking rule:

7. Don’t make very noisly and loudly sound that are able to affect badly to next rooms

…what with the exuberant male voices and the flirtatious female giggling…

Nurse Myra and I looked at each other.

“Possitude oneselt girls”, we agreed.

___________________________________________________________________________

*Not its real name. I’d hate to get these poor people in trouble with the government, which is a very real possibility in this country.

A couple o’ weeks back I was visiting Radioactive Jam as I am wont to do, and through some freakish collision of cosmic particles I happened to make the 2000th comment on RaJ’s blog.

Of course, I doubt I would have ever noticed this unless there had been a big flashing red light, sirens, dancing girls and a prize associated with the event.

Anyway, the prize arrived in the post the other day and I saw with delight that it was a little 1992 book called ‘Sign Language’ by Ann Sanfedele. It’s a collection of photos of odd signs and strange confluences of signage and reality. Right up my alley.

Thanks Jam, I love it.

I notice you can still buy the book on Amazon, and that Ann herself runs a Cafe Press shop where you can buy her pictures on calendars, mugs and shirts and so forth. You folks mosey on over and buy something from her. Tell her The Cow sent you.

Provedore Pelagio in inner-city Sydney is re-writing the rules of solid geometry this Easter to provide new dimensions in chocolate fulfilment…

*Thanks Sarah!

The biggest scandal since Mrs McIntosh served the Archbishop raspberry lamingtons at Lent.

My lucky-dip present from my mate Pete at our writing group’s annual Christmas meeting was this ‘Super High’ set of sunglasses. The packaging promises ‘Super Amusive Play’ and warns ‘This Is a Toy!’ (just in case you get so Super High that you are tempted to wear them to your next United Nations press briefing).

But the best part is the contents description:

It says at the bottom: ‘Specifications colours and contents may vary from illustration.’

Fantastic! They could stick anything in this bag and not get sued.

But I know that the thing you all really want to see is how cool I look wearing them. Oh very well.