Mastodawn

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

I’m going on another guided tour today. Was picked up at the hotel at 7:30. Now, 20 minutes later, we’re trying to pick up two other tourists, but we can’t find them 😬

I’ve done these kinds of guided tours in Indonesia, Thailand and Cambodia, but have never experienced losing another tourist or tourists not showing up for their pick up, and here it’s happened twice in a row 🫠

Your company’s communication has been prompt and mostly clear (not entirely sure what to make of that last message), so I’m inclined to think it’s not the tour company’s fault…

#LatourOnTour #Travel #Vietnam

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

After many phone calls, we finally found the first tourist. She loudly yelled “hello good morning” in a German accent as she entered the vehicle and is putting the “germ” into “German” by sneezing all over the place, so I think we’ll get along great! /s

#LatourOnTour #Travel #Vietnam

Dr. Anna Latour

Found two more tourists and reached the main vehicle. Sadly no seatbelt on my chair, but others have seatbelts and don’t use them. Life’s unfair, I guess, and so might death be, the way things are going.

#LatourOnTour #Travel #Vietnam

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

Okay so it seems that the reason that we left 15 minutes late is that the German tourist thought she was going on a tour with two friends, but each of them managed to book the same tour at a different time, which was why they weren’t there at the pickup point.

Tony the Tour Guide has been making phone calls for the last 20 minutes, and it looks like we’ll reunite the German tourist with her friend once we get to the first stop.

Hopefully that means I get to take her seat and seatbelt 🥳

#LatourOnTour #Vietnam #Travel

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

Update: I’m in her seat!

Not enjoying this tour as much as the last one. While Handsome Hau seemed to have been genetically engineered to be the most energetic and cheerful tour guide, Tony the Tour Guide is mostly focused on making sure that everybody understands what he says. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it makes him speak very slowly and it makes him repeat everything seemingly endlessly, and my brain needs a bit more stimulation than that.

We ended up swapping the German tourist for another tourist, a guy this time, and immediately lost him. That cut our sightseeing cut short again, which annoyed me.

Thankfully some of the others in our small group are nice and interesting people, so I’m at least having a few good chats. And I still got to see My Son, or what’s left of it after the Americans bombed it.

#LatourOnTour #Vietnam #Travel

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

lol the other tourists just told me to stop asking questions 🥲

#LatourOnTour #Vietnam #Travel

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

Tony: do you have questions? Any more questions? Just ask me, okay?
Australian tourist: *turns sharply towards me* sssshhh

#LatourOnTour #Vietnam #Travel

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

I must admit that I have earned the “huh. Interesting question. I don’t know the answer. Nobody ever asked me that “ badge on many a guided tour, which suggests that I ask a lot…

#LatourOnTour #Travel

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

Anyway so this was all prompted by me wondering how many kg of rice you can grind in this rice grinder before it needs to be replaced.

#latourontour #vietnam #Travel #Rice #RicePaper #Cooking

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

The answer Tony settled on was that it lasts at least a thousand years because it’s made of sandstone which is so soft that it’ll never crack, unlike marble.

This is obvious BS, but in a romantic enough way that I’m not mad about it. I find that there are many granite and blue hardstone mines, so those seem more likely materials to make a rice grinder from.

A Google search seems to suggest that a granite grinder will last 30-40 years, so I guess we have somewhat of an answer.

#LatourOnTour #Rice #Cooking #Vietnam #Granite

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

Another thing I learned today was that the Cham language uses prefixes to create frequentatives.

Unlike English’s suffixes (daze -> dazzle, sniff -> sniffle) and Dutch’s infixes (huppen -> huppelen, klinken -> klingelen).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cham_language

#LatourOnTour #Language #Linguistics #Vietnam #Cham #Champa

@anna ooh, that's so cool!

Marcus Müller Mar 13

@anna oh, Dutch doesn't do something like the German "rum-", as in "rollen->rumrollen" (to roll -> to roll around)? (also works with verbs of complaining, copulating, dallying, loitering,… you get the idea)
Interesting!

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

@funkylab ya we use “rond-” in the same way, I think:

Rondrennen
Rondlopen
Rondkijken
Rondvragen

Abhijit Menon-Sen Mar 13

@anna For what it's worth, I've worked as a guide, and the more questions people asked, the better the tour was. I used to put a lot of effort into preparation, and nothing is more disconcerting than having people be quiet and not really engaging.

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

@amenonsen aw thank you! What’s the coolest fact you memorised for one of your tours?

Abhijit Menon-Sen Mar 13

@anna I don't remember. 😅

But, for example, two facts that I probably did mention at some point are: (a) female and male marsh harriers migrate separately into India, and (b) the drab male Greater Painted-Snipe does all the egg-incubating and chick-rearing, while the female is much more brightly coloured… but even 17th century descriptions by British authors in India mention that the female is more brightly-coloured, so the descriptions must have been based on specimens, and not just observations.

https://toroid.org/partridge-snipe

The Partridge Snipe

Edward Buckley's seventeenth-century Latin description of the “Partridge Snipe” is detailed enough to identify the male bird, but ignores the more colourful female, Author: Abhijit Menon-Sen

toroid.org

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

@amenonsen oooooh thanks for sharing 🤩

Are you a bird nerd?

Abhijit Menon-Sen Mar 13

@anna The guided tours were for fairly serious birdwatchers. So yes, I was a bird nerd, but I'm in recovery now.

Soon I'll be just a bird.

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

@amenonsen I love that! It’s a good reminder to me how infinitely and creatively endless this world is, and how much there is to learn and see ❤️❤️

Big Belgian Bopper 🔻🐸Mar 13

@anna travel is learning. so never be ashamed to ask and learn. If the others on the tour just wanted a break from the beach, then they should go watch a docu :D

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

@bigbelgianbopper it’s not like you really have to go to the beach to swim around here…

#HoiAn #Vietnam #RainySeason

Big Belgian Bopper 🔻🐸Mar 13

@anna ow! 😮

Adrien Plazas Mar 13

@anna Ask! Ask! Fuck them, enjoy it your way!

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

@KekunPlazas tbf: I was asking a lot, mostly about things that I couldn’t find myself on English or French Wikipedia, and it was a bit of a struggle

https://mathstodon.xyz/@anna/116220623146715436

Dr. Anna Latour (@[email protected])

@[email protected] the tour guide keeps not answering my questions. Not clear to me if he doesn’t understand my questions or doesn’t know the answers, but he basically keeps answering different questions and I keep rephrasing my questions. The Australian tourists think that the guide doesn’t understand my questions and also seem to think that I don’t understand that the guide doesn’t understand my questions. Their way of coping with the situation is to loudly tell me that the guide doesn’t understand my questions and then loudly repeat my questions to the guide in a manner that I find quite offensive. Anyway the guy told me “don’t you dare. We cannot afford it” and poked me in the ribs with his elbow.

Mathstodon

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

@KekunPlazas at the same time: we were in a car, on a 30 minute drive, so it’s not like I was holding up the group, unlike certain other ppl…

Abhijit Menon-Sen Mar 13

@anna Gosh, that's so mean. May they always have watery sambar with red oil floating on top.

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

@amenonsen ya I found them quite unpleasant in general. The guy kept falling asleep and manspreading when he did. He had a lot of body hair that was very prickly even through my clothes

https://mathstodon.xyz/@anna/116220623146715436

Dr. Anna Latour (@[email protected])

@[email protected] the tour guide keeps not answering my questions. Not clear to me if he doesn’t understand my questions or doesn’t know the answers, but he basically keeps answering different questions and I keep rephrasing my questions. The Australian tourists think that the guide doesn’t understand my questions and also seem to think that I don’t understand that the guide doesn’t understand my questions. Their way of coping with the situation is to loudly tell me that the guide doesn’t understand my questions and then loudly repeat my questions to the guide in a manner that I find quite offensive. Anyway the guy told me “don’t you dare. We cannot afford it” and poked me in the ribs with his elbow.

Mathstodon

Abhijit Menon-Sen Mar 13

@anna Yikes, that prickly sentence is going to give me nightmares.

But elbowing you, ugh. I'm upgrading their punishment to being eaten by a grue forthwith.

@anna This is school all over again.

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

@jkn 😩😩

@anna how rude [of them]

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

@EF ya I did find them quite rude https://mathstodon.xyz/@anna/116220623146715436

Dr. Anna Latour (@[email protected])

@[email protected] the tour guide keeps not answering my questions. Not clear to me if he doesn’t understand my questions or doesn’t know the answers, but he basically keeps answering different questions and I keep rephrasing my questions. The Australian tourists think that the guide doesn’t understand my questions and also seem to think that I don’t understand that the guide doesn’t understand my questions. Their way of coping with the situation is to loudly tell me that the guide doesn’t understand my questions and then loudly repeat my questions to the guide in a manner that I find quite offensive. Anyway the guy told me “don’t you dare. We cannot afford it” and poked me in the ribs with his elbow.

Mathstodon

Rupert Curwen Mar 13

@anna Did you ask them why?

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

@smashtie the tour guide keeps not answering my questions. Not clear to me if he doesn’t understand my questions or doesn’t know the answers, but he basically keeps answering different questions and I keep rephrasing my questions. The Australian tourists think that the guide doesn’t understand my questions and also seem to think that I don’t understand that the guide doesn’t understand my questions. Their way of coping with the situation is to loudly tell me that the guide doesn’t understand my questions and then loudly repeat my questions to the guide in a manner that I find quite offensive.

Anyway the guy told me “don’t you dare. We cannot afford it” and poked me in the ribs with his elbow.

@anna @smashtie he sounds like an arse

Marc Olschok Mar 13

@anna @smashtie That is weird. Unless the tour guide is also the bus driver (and needs to stop driving in order to answer a question), what could the cost of you asking probably be?

Dr. Anna Latour Mar 13

@0lschok we even made a small #LatourDetour tot aan atm so another tourist could get cash b/c he didn’t bring any

I think he was just annoyed. Tbf: so was I. I normally already never have enough time to see the sights during these tours, and today we just wasted a lot of extra time on difficult tourists, eating away at our sightseeing time even more. I don’t know why this guy was so annoyed at me, in particular, tho