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Lightning, pictures, really-south Vietnam

Flash! Bang!

Had a lightning strike a few minutes ago with no delay at all between flash & bang. Very unsettling.

Pix 1

One side-effect of a quite boring ’plane flight has been a number of fairly reasonable cloudscapes, sample following:

One assertion which frustrates & disappoints me is that I will not be permitted to show such pictures to some people I love & respect because apparently it’s too remote from them, too indirect, & not on the very short list of topics I’m allowed to broach with them.

Now, if I described these as being not so much like surfey waves as like big, fluffy candy floss in a gentle blue setting, apparently that’s right out of the question.

However, I can so show them to you, & so describe them, & hopefully you’ll enjoy at least a small fraction of the challenge I faced in getting a cheap little camera to accrue even this much reality through a thick, smudged perspex AirBus window.

Pix 2

The next shot arrived through the cheap, smudged perspex window of a train today, & I'm seriously impressed at how good a job the GREYCstoration plugin filter for GIMP did at recovering believable diggers & trucks from the resulting bland mess.

Vietnam

The area I’m staying in has a predominantly Viet population, I think due at least in part to the non Asian reaction to the suburb’s name.

This predominance has some interesting if minor effects, such as an attitude to junk-mail which represents, basically, ignoring it.

This results in big wads of paper piled in & around the mailboxes of partially-inhabited blocks of units, which in a more Caucasian-oriented chunk of society would signify the clumsy don’t-care attitude which comes with a “lower-class” solution to problems (punch them out) & a seriously deficient attitude, but here there are flocks of pleasant, neatly-dressed, polite residents wandering through who simply view it as someone else’s problem, which they expect to go away by itself when the commercial litterbugs come to their senses & stop wasting effort.

There are also no Thai or Indian restaurants about, but plenty of Korean & Viet places to munch in. This, I view as a good thing. I like a big cross-section of Korean & Viet food.

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