Hog thoughts

This blog is going to be more of a pressure valve than ever, given that it's one of the only links to the English-speaking world I've got here. Translation: aquackening will be even more wanktastic than usual! I find when I'm isolated for too long I get all self-loathing and angsty. Will ask training dude about international students to befriend.

Musings from the back of a motorbike:

• From the Idiot's Guide to Idiocy: riding a motorbike just after you've come from a ward full of people with pins and contraptions on their limbs, and surgery where you saw hammers, chisels, screwdrivers, power drills, pliers and nails applied to a HUMAN BODY - most as a result of motorbike accidents. Own damn fault if anything happens. But taxis are hard to catch back from hospital and slow and you don't get to ZOOMZOOM with the wind in your face.
  
• Orthopaedics is just like mechanics except you're not allowed to scratch your nose. Ohmygod. The no-scratch thing should be used in Gitmo, it is serious torture. I'm going to invent a surgical itch stick.
• Finally I know why everyone always think my name is Thuy Tien instead of Thao - for some reason Thuy Tien is the preferred name for dozens and dozens of restaurants here. FYI people: I do not serve pho.
  
• Are you supposed to lean into bends or against them?! I reckon the former, but that's based on a half-remembered bit from The History Boys where the smarmy new teacher gets paralysed because he's unused to riding on the back of Mr History's bike (on which Mr History takes boys and feels them up). Um. I think. Alan Bennett: my life is in your hands.
• My Viet is sometimes taken for native, and yet at other times entire sections of conversation whizz over my head because I don't understand key words, or I misunderstand and answer some totally different question. In the Romance languages, even those I don't know well, at least educated guessing is possible, but in Viet the etymology is often from Chinese, so all that's possible is a dopey Huh?! face. Serious damper on personality.