While walking down the street here in Hanoi I felt a goodly portion of liquid splat against my head and shoulder from the sky. I didn't put my hand up and wipe it from my head because I was too afraid to find out what it was. There's a fairly popular local habit of clearing the sinuses and lungs vigorously and aerially, and many times I have seen people empty large bowls of filthy looking water by slinging them back over their shoulder without looking. So I decided that ignorance was preferable to horror and just let it trickle down the back of my neck and dry up.
While we were waiting in the airport in Adelaide, my Smaller Half and I were watching planes take off. Just as one left the ground she sang out, "Thar she blows!", which, apart from being irrelevantly (though poetically) nautical, strikes me as an unwise thing to be saying in an airport.
While flying to Singapore (ON A HOLIDAY), my Smaller Half pulled out a book of clinical cases and started quizzing me on what drugs would be standard immediate treatment for a patient presenting with acute coronary syndrome. Did I mention that I was ON A HOLIDAY???
While disembarking the plane in Singapore, the chap in front of me bent over to pick up his bag, revealing a patch of fuzzy hair in the small of his back. "Aha!", I thought, "spina bifida occulta!" No wonder my Smaller Half was quizzing me earlier - I'm a total loser.
After hours of hard bargaining in a fabric market here in Hanoi for some linen (I think I bargained them down from $Laughable to $Outrageous), the saleswomen suddenly turned out to speak English after all. Whoops! It seems they were listening to us discuss between ourselves the prices we were prepared to pay and were adjusting their prices accordingly. To top it all off, they then said to me, "This your wife? She so young! Ha ha ha!"
Ha ha ha.
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