5th January- Nha Trang

I can finally drink coffee, after the tooth withering embargo is over. They serve it black or with condensed milk and it takes me straight back to Jamaica circa ’91. Couldn’t get enough of it. Previously had never thought of using condensed milk and had only had it as a sort of topping on some pudding and by now was too health conscious to ingest that much sugar, but I loved it. That holiday was also the first time I went into a club where the western man were there seeking local women whose job it was to dance and go off with them. I was with my sister and boyfriend D and as we were much younger, we were mildly shocked by the sexual market/sex as a commodity scenario before us. I mean, we went there just to dance.

Here I idly watch the couples strolling by or lying on loungers next to me. The mixed ones (ie. local girl and foreign man) are not exchanging a word. The man usually has a big gut and he reads or sleeps. The woman keeps covered from the sun and is fully dressed in jeans and a t-shirt usually and either looks out to the sea or leafs through a magazine. Local vietnameee girls wear heels while the western travellers are always in flats. That’s what holidays are for right? The only exception is the super glamorous Russians. The older women all have Amy Winehouse beehives. Too funny, the height of fashion. Not. But she’s popular Amy, on café’s and restaurant stereos, I guess no. 1 hits still travel. In 96 it was Ace of Base everywhere…. Umh, the younger Russians are impossibly tall and skinny. They all look like storky Natalia Vodanovna. At least their hard looking men stick by them and don’t consort with the locals. They seem to enjoy banter and games and drinking and more banter.

I have to be careful about what I allow myself to think about the sex trade. After all, a friend of ours goes to Thailand regularly for a dose of intimacy he doesn’t get in London. He has a double PHD and published books to his name, but this is what he does once or twice a year. But what level of communication can be achieved for someone so wordy and sophisticated when he doesn't speak the local language and the locals don't speak but broken English? But it only takes one g/friend to screw you over for your life to take an irreversible dip into deepest waters, you probably tell yourself that no, you won’t be screwed by a woman again, not by surprise any way. Sex is like some king of oxygen, and if you don’t have it in you, you buy bottles like you do when you go for dives.

I have to be careful what I say here as more than one friend is dating a much, much younger oriental girl with whom they can’t speak and of course you only have to read ‘The Quiet American’ to have it explained in a brilliant way. Nobody gets hurt (or do they?) when the transaction is an actual sale. But as Belle says, we’re all whores. And to an oriental our ideas of beauty and handsom-ness are an ungraspable concept. Just me being white is seen as an enviable state, the amount of time I ask what do you consider beautiful? Thin, fat, blond, dark, tall or what and they all just say ‘Your white skin’. It means they can’t actually find N. as ugly as he seems to me and would to most western women. And if he doesn’t care to discuss politics or economics or literature then so be it. It’s almost an accelerated move into old age. Even if you were Einstein married to Simone de Beauvoir you would probably only talk very little in the end and about totally mundane things so like Fowler with Phuong, you only want her body next to yours and that she prepares your opium pipe. In return she wants money to buy scarves and a dream of Europe or some promises. But Europe doesn’t work very well for these women... but what do I know.

As far as I know N. Is too intelligent to think he could have one full time and bring her to London, he just vacations in Thailand like these men do here. Here they’re probably even less world aware than the Thais, though they may have an overall better education (94% literacy I read somewhere). But the deals are so simple. I’d like to know how much men pay for this. Probably the same as some people pay for their servants. There’s enough returning Viets here who now live comfortable lives in the USA or Australia and they’re after maids and housekeepers and cooks and the rest.

29 September - Women, they talk too much - p2

Well, yes, am aware of the irony of having a part 2 on this post, clearly I also write too much....

Recently I went to a yoga one-to-one with a new teacher I like and she told me so much about herself even though I was making the right signs about leaving, you know, jacket on, bag on shoulder, standing next to door, opening door to hallway (we were in her flat). Well, she’s trained as an actor before turning to yoga so it does fit my mental pigeonhole that they mostly are people who desperately need yoga calming them down or saving them from various addictions. M. told me she has also written a screenplay about a yoga teacher, how very postmodern and she arrived frazzled at one session and wanting to calm down she told me the Jubilee line was not working, and about the taxi driver who asked her what she teaches and she didn't want to say as she was not the picture of a yoga teacher but a madly stressed person (she was coming from her group therapy session don't you know) and btw, there's a scene just like that one in her screenplay. Then she told me about her Iranian father and the near rape in India with her friend and the 4 guys with long knives/swords and and and ... I'd already said I was ok, hadn't minded waiting too much but I really had to be out of there by 9.30 so, er, can we get on with it? I sympathised and had, in woman's communication etiquette, tell her how a mugging left me pretty nerved shakey many years ago and I wasn’t hurt either but yeah, it stays with you so had you had real violence done to you there’s no way you’d recover that fast or well but it’s all so much and now we have to chant the darn prayer which I will never learn and she insists in making me repeat line by line after her. I only want to learn the moves, not the philosophy of it, or rather I know the philosophy (roughly) and take what I want from it, not the prayer please. Thank god I nipped in the bud any suggestion of chanting to her altar.
Where was I? Oh yes,

So later on that evening at movie with friends Toph mentions this lush yoga retreat paradise in the forest of Thailand that you reach by trek, boat and the rest, and how we could go there at Xmas/new year and I find myself surprisingly sanguine about not wanting to be stuck in the middle of nowhere with no escape routes and having to make friends with crazy people, there ain’t a single one who’s regular in my experience, not talking about yoga pupils but yoga teachers in general and plus it’s just too claustrophobic. And yes, you have to make friends because if you don’t, you’re a stuck up bitch and not in the spirit of yoga (and because I'm not really a stuck up bitch I would care that this opinion is formed, rather than not giving a damn) and despite having a blog believe me in real life am a little reluctant to just off load my life onto strangers and just listening would drive me mad. So I tell Toph we can both go to Bangkok and then he goes to retreat and I go to … beach frequented by well fit Israeli military boys and just read and ogle to my heart’s content. I may have to murder the odd juggler or those ones who juggle long bands of fabric or flags but at least they don’t talk and I can look the other way. Or ask them to move from my eyeline.

It surprises me that Toph wants to go on yoga holiday being that it was upon his return from one in Ibiza that he got finally dumped by the ex g/friend. Must mean he was not as traumatised as one would think.