Friday 1 March
Am
I too late to write for Rose’s birthday?
I don’t think so… We celebrated yesterday, on the 28th but
really – she was born a year ago today, on the auspicious date of 29th
February!
Rose
is a glorious baby, much adored by her brother, two sisters, mother, father, plethora
of grandparents, ditto of cousins, aunts, uncles. She is now very active and fit, exploring the
world at high speed, with lots of push-ups and sit-ups and practising of various
gymnastic postures. For the first nine months
of so of her life she lulled us into a false sense of security by just sitting,
cutely, blob-like, wherever we put her. In
fact, she didn’t even sit up unassisted for quite a long time, so we thought she
would always be easily found, easily placed… But not now! She could be anywhere, demolishing whatever comes
into her path…
Pete
has been SO busy, since I last saw him on Monday. A whirlwind of activity, mostly boat-related. He has had people fixing the radio, fixing the
AIS (boat locator thingy), trying to get an internet connection, amongst other things. And he has been constructing, in his garage,
a weird and wonderful bookshelf to put on the only available wall - in the second
forward cabin. I think Pete loves a challenge;
his own house, which he built from scratch with a few faithful helpers, has
a bewildering number of angles and curves.
And this bookshelf has to conform to a slightly strange boat wall so it
too has many angles. I am mightily
impressed, and how nice it will be to have books UP, out of the cupboards where, sadly,
they sometimes get damp, and often get musty and mouldy.
Hoa Tuc Restaurant –
Vietnam 2008
After
the game, we took Ben and Rose and their Vietnamese friends Ben and Bo to a
fabulous restaurant. Hoa Tuc serves a tantalizing selection of Vietnamese dishes in
an elegant setting of green and purple hues, or so Google
tells me, and none of us would disagree.
Ben, Bo and Rose chose the food and it was all too delicious for
words. The restaurant had at one stage
been an opium den, and it had delicate tracings of opium poppies on the walls.
Nightclub
We
were all very happy after our siesta, rugby, and feast so we were more than
happy to follow Ben and Rose to a nearby nightclub, where they had a great
little Vietnamese band playing cover music - lots of 70s and 80s rock and
roll. Pete and I drank sangria and
danced for many hours; Rina and Kerry, Ben and Rose, were more circumspect and
just drank sangria…
Pete
and I made lots of new friends. The
Vietnamese girls there for a night out all wanted to dance with him, but they
also, surprisingly, wanted to dance with me, and to stroke my arm and tell me I
was beautiful. This happened over and
again in Vietnam, to Rina and to me.
They think we are so much more beautiful because they see us as being
desirably pale-skinned. Tragic really;
they are the most beautiful mellow golden colour, just what we would like for
our own skin tone!!
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