Mastodawn

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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

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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.

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 🥳

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.

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

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

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…

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

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.

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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.

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

Dr. Anna Latour

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).

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

Florine Mar 13

@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!