Tales from two cities (part 2)

So where was I? ah yes, water puppets. This is precisely how it sounds. Puppets in/on the water. This is supposed to be an ancient Northern Vietnamese cultural thing and a must-see. We booked tickets and off we went. It was in a small theatre with a pool of murky green water at the front with some scenery around it. It all started off with some plinky-plonky Vietnamese music and out came 'the narrator' of the story, a little wooden man with pigtails his arms sloshing about - it was all in Vietnamese I have no idea what he said. It looked weird and the puppet didn't do much and quite frankly I started to snigger. The dragon fight was cool though. The 'man playing the flute on a water buffalo' was scintillating stuff and has to be said the mating dances of the phoenix where they danced for a really long time then even produced an egg, followed by a chick was pure puppetry genius. These people stand in this murky water for hours doing this show. Apparently they are now forced to wear waders because they used to get all sorts of parasites and disease from standing in the water that long. It smells that water I can tell yo. Don't know why they don't put clear water in with food colouring rather than murky stuff from the lake, but whatever.
Vietnam was great though, and I'd go back again in a heartbeat. Upon returning from there and recovering from the shock of being back at work, I had the privilege of being invited to celebrate the Czech national day with the Czech ambassador and the 50 other Czech and Slovak people in Bangkok. I got excited by the prospect of Czech beer and indeed they had some. The woman wandering around with the drinks tray kept trying to give me red wine and looked at me funny when I insisted on having beer but I wasn't going to pass it up!
It was a very posh do, complete with Czech flag ice statues. The Ambassador and co. were all standing in a line at the entrance and you had to shake their hands and introduce yourself on the way in. Weird. There were lots of people there, many who weren't even Czech. We couldn't find the two people we knew would be there when we arrived so we thought we would try and mingle. We got some finger food and saw a guy standing on his own so we thought we would join him. He was Italian and really nice, we were having a fun conversation and eventually after about 20 minutes I decided to ask him what his job was and he replied "Oh, I am the Italian consul at the Embassy here in Bangkok" aarrgh! Should have been one of my first questions really before I started shooting the shit with him. Never mind, he was really nice and we soon found our friends and made our excuses.
Other than that the night went fairly smoothly, the Czech ambassador made a speech in which it was revealed that the current King of Cambodia actually speaks Czech as he studied ballet in Prague, as you do. After the speech we had the joyous entertainment of school children trying unsuccessfully to dance in sync to some horrendously inappropriate tune for their age. The highlight of the evening being the absolute treat that was the guy playing the Czech national anthem on wine glasses, followed of course by the Thai national anthem and then just in case you had just realised that you simply couldn't live without the whine of wine glasses we also got the King's favourite tune played to us. ahhh happy times. Hob-nobbing clearly has it's down sides! It was a nice night though. Have finally made a decision on what I will do for Christmas and I am going to the Philippines - yay! Volcanoes, natural spas, the smallest monkey in the world, mountains, beaches, can't wait. shall take lots of photos. My mate Mark arrives on Monday and I shall finally be off to fulfill my dream of riding an elephant with him so you have that to look forward to...