nipple battle
"this pig is so fat! she is the fattest pig i have ever seen! why is this pig so fat?"
(investigation)
"this pig is so fat because she is a mummy pig! she ought to be given Savlon to stop her fat tummy chafing on the group thereby forming a painful rash, but they don't have much Savlon in the remote Vietnamese highlands, especially not for use by pigs. if only she lived in Kirdford, my mum would give all all the Savlon she needs, probably applied by hand in a warm soapy bath and followed by kisses and some Marks & Spencer's control pants."
another enigma, as of yet unsolved: apparently this is neither 'vịt' (duck) nor is it 'ngỗng' (goose), but 'ngan', a third duck-goose-like animal. i suspect it's actually just a duck, and that i was being had.
this is a cockrel. he's sitting on a swing, in a cocky fashion.
this is a human child.
Another highpoint of my day was when a fat old French man got stuck in knee-deep mud, and I had to pull him out. Then he put his other foot straight into the same mud, and I had to pull him out again. He lost both shoes. He seemed kind of angry with me, as though I was a mudwitch who had planned this whole thing, although in retrospect maybe he was just angry because I was laughing so hard.
An educational note: In many places throughout the highlands of northern and central Vietnam, there are ethnic minority people, who aren't Vietnamese but have migrated to Vietnam at various points in the last 1000 years or so. Sapa is probably the most popular place to go and gawp at these ethnic minority people, buy their trinkets, and patronise them by taking photographs. Because I'm really ignorant, before I went to Sapa I wasn't really interested in them and thought they were basically just Vietnamese people who dressed up in funny clothes to make money from tourists. Now I am wise, and know this is not the case. Physically they look very different to the Vietnamese, and there are around 54 ethnically different groups, each of which speak their own language, and have different traditional dress and different customs. They still live almost exclusively in their own villages, having changed little since they settled in Vietnam, and the people you meet in Sapa making money from tourism are the tiniest proportion of the total number. Because the ethnic minorities are migrants that got here a bit late, and were never really accepted by the Vietnamese people, they've been marginalised and given the scraps when it comes to choosing where to live. This is why they live in the moutains where it's pretty difficult to farm anything. They were big producers of opium for a long time, but that made the Vietnamese government hate them even more, so now it's mainly rice and just a lil opium. I reckon the women I saw here work EVEN HARDER than Vietnamese women do (which is saying something).
these are Red Dao women. they shave their foreheads which makes them look a bit bad-ass.
these are Flower Hmong women, their clothes are my favourite.
this is a Black Hmong woman, this photograph is awesome (not mine) (the other two aren't mine either, I feel weird taking photos of people) I'm going to stop now, because of all the inane posts I write, I feel that saying "ethnic minorities actually aren't in fancy dress but their clothes are very pretty anyway" makes me sound even more stupid and blonde than normal. I just learnt about ethnic minorities in the last week so I think it's very interesting, but really after going to Sapa for a day and then going to the Ethnology museum in Hanoi, I'm still not much of an expert. In fact, this entire post could be the work of a five year old.
uh-oh! bronun-a-lorry! (on the bus on the way home)
