Ho Chi Minh City

The first thing I noticed on the taxi ride from the airport to our guest house was the insane amount of traffic on the road, 95% of which was motorcycles. Or "motobai", like how our taxi driver said it. It's fine if you're in an air-conditioned car but once you're out, you better be dexterous enough to weave through the motobais and the occasional BMW. That's another thing I've noticed, it's either a motobai or a luxury car for the Vietnamese; a perfect visualisation of the class breakdown in Ho Chi Minh City.

As with any other developing South-East Asian country, there are many beggars and tacky mass-produced plastic goods for stupid tourists to spend their USD on. That being said, I bought four pin badges with either communist stars or my homie Ho Chi Minh's face on them. At 10 000VND (or Dong (Hehe, dongs)) each, I could have bought two bowls of Pho, or five servings of Banh Mi, or enough to stop 40 beggars from pestering us.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate them. I just think it's pointless to give them money, my measly donation of 20 000 VND (Approximately 2SGD) is not going to raise their standard of living. And this one scraggly-looking beggar was aware of that as well. She approached us with her palms out while we were walking near Ben Thanh market so Jules the Charitable gave her 2000VND (20 cents) but guess what? She glared at us, one eye livid with rage and the other glassy with...glass and shrieked "NO!" while waving her hand around.

A beggar just rejected Jules.

In a moment of shock and disgust, I looked at the beggar, spread-eagled my arms and shook my head, "Then you're not getting anything." I really hope that was obvious enough for Old Glass-eye.

The rest of the trip is a lot better so don't worry, an entry or two on the food (See what I meant about being a lot better?) is coming. So, next entry: Banh Mi, various shellfishes, Goulash (in Vietnam!) and balut. Yes, I ate duck embryo voluntarily and not because I could stand to win $50 000.

Fat

It was a pleasant surprise to be able to get a seat on the 6 p.m. train ride home. Usually, I would be pressed all the way right up to the door, close enough for me to breathe in the reflection of my own breath. Even better, there was a whole row of blue empty seats. Between standing and having to squeeze in between two other passengers, I would choose standing because you will look like a dumb ass trying to fit into the small allowance of space by arching your shoulders into each other.

A seat away to my left, was an obese lady. No way getting around that (or her), she's huge, ass-spilling-over-to-adjacent-seats huge. (So, to be accurate, there was only half a seat separating the two of us.) Not pudgy, not chubby, not pleasantly plump, not big-boned, not slightly overweight, not full figured, not curvy, just plain obese.

She was looking downwards on a book, not once did she look up. It must have been a very engrossing read.

People were stealing glances at her, it must been very engrossing for them as well. A woman, the housewife kind, was more obvious than the rest. Despite averting her gaze every few seconds, she might as well be staring at the fat lady. Not just the harmless "looking around in a public place" kind of eyeballing either, her nose was slightly crinkled up, chin slightly angled up, eyes narrowed into a glint, contempt and disgust.

People were looking at the fat lady, she knows it, she must have known it. She must have felt the heat of the glares, the kind that burn into your neck and the back of your shoulders when you were asked to stand in front of the whole school, or when you tripped over a chipped pavement tile on Orchard Road and the whole world was staring at you. You couldn't see them but you knew, you just knew it.

It wasn't a long train ride, it reached Boon Lay 15 minutes later and everyone alighted then. I have forgotten about my observation, instead thinking about what I would do when I got home while winding my earphones cord around my iPod. I took my time; I hate to rush things when I'm not working because it's a good way to preserve my sanity. The fat lady was just getting up too, she waited for the carriage to empty before alighting. I half-turned to put my iPod with neatly-wound earphones cord into my bag's front compartment and I saw her patting her book with the corners of her cardigan. She was trying to preserve the pages, they had blotches of tears on them.

Slayer of zombies, ghouls...and women

The Witcher is one of those games in which you get a good amount of freedom to do whatever you want with your character. Your melanin-deprived hero, Geralt of Riviera is supposed to be a well-known and feared monster hunter or something generic like that. Fuck it, I said. If I wanted to save the goddamn world I would have gotten one of those Japanese RPGs with caucasian-looking ladyboys wielding giant penis swords fighting against blatantly evil deep-voiced bad guys with distractingly awful outfits. And along the way, an underaged girl and a MILF-y woman will always join your team. And you fight giant tentacled monsters. Video game developers know their target audience, that's for sure.

Thankfully, I can be a bastard from the get go in The Witcher because I sure as hell am not one in real life. Call it an escape from reality if you will.

Because of how vast the game world is, you meet a huge variety of characters (called NPCs or Non-Playable Characters, this piece of knowledge is going to get me pussy one day) ranging from a corrupt priest who dabble in politics to a village retard who became so because of a whack on his head when he was four. However, the women NPCs in this game are less varied because they're either:

1) Big-boobied
or
2) Old



Boobs.



Tits.



Boobs, tits, boobs.



Badly-lit tits.



Booby booby boob boobs.



Titty tit tit tits.



Boo-OLD. I MEAN OLD, NOT BOOBS. SHIT.

And yes, that's an old woman hitting on you, tales of your sword-thrusting skills have gotten around. But mainly because she's not had sex since 1218.

Geralt is also a master pick-up artist, having written Thy Mysterie Methodology way before some faggot re-wrote it a few years ago. Here's an example of his skills:



It's important to note that he showed vague disinterest before using negging to bring the HB9 down a few notches on her self-confidence before moving in for the closing line and BAM, he manages to score.

But sometimes Geralt gets too lazy to go through the whole process of picking up and dating before he gets to hunt the cunt so he just sneaks into strangers' homes.



Surprise Sex time.



Shit, she's a light sleeper.

To add to the prick factor, Geralt also listens to indie music.



In the local pub, Geralt meets this guy:



Drool dribbling off chin, clothes that his mother chose, inproportionately-sized head; he is clearly retarded.



Hate time.

But believe it or not, this is actually a pretty good game even though the voice-overs get really ridiculous, with Geralt sounding too much like an albino James Bond at times and some women sounding like they got wet the instant they had their eyes on our cum-haired hero. The main storyline is nothing special but the side quests and subplots are actually interesting enough to keep you going for a while.

Get it if you have the time to spare like if you're...oh...serving NS or if you like tits modeled by creepy neckbearded 3D artists with enough chins for a Chinese phonebook.

A little too late for Christmas, but...

It's a tradition for some people to watch the yearly Tim-Allen-preparing-for-Christmas-as-bumbling-Dad movie but next year, don't. Just...don't. Even though there wasn't one of those this Christmas, we received a huge piece of coal from Hollywood in the form of Fred Claus. I remember a friend telling me, "I watched Fred Claus over the weekend. It was bad."

Really? Didn't expect that at all.




























There's no way this can be a shitty movie filmed with the "Hurr Christmas, must eat Christmas food watch Christmas film take a Christmas dump" audience in mind! Too bad Vince Vaughn's career though, not so money now huh?

What I watched for this Christmas though, was "Joyeux Noël", a film based on the series of Christmas truces that actually happened during World War I, which many called the "last humane war".



It's heartwarming, well-acted, has great atmosphere, features good actors, has a nude scene, has Diane Kruger looking pretty, has tits, Diane kruger shows tits heartwarming christmassyfeeling elves and other good points BUT NOBODY WANTS TO READ THINGS and it's always so much more satisfying and easier to be a funny asshole than a funny saint. (Which one is funnier? A chicken crossing a road or a retard thinking he's a chicken crossing a road?) The movie climaxes when the two sides climb out of their trenches, singing Christmas carols in their own languages and exchanging gifts in the form of French champagne, German chocolate and Scottish...erm...Scotch.

This would be pushing it quite far, in terms of cheesiness but no, the film doesn't stop there. The Scots started the whole truce by singing a traditional folk song accompanied by five bagpipes. FIVE bagpipes. FIVE. Makes you wonder if they wanted to kill Germans any more than wanting to annoy the shit out of the French with incessant wailing of their testicle-like musical instruments.



I only managed to capture three here because it's physically impossible to fit so much bagpipes-induced cheesiness in one picture.

Not to be outdone, the Germans happen to have a tenor fighting the war as a grunt soldier so he steps out onto no-mans-land and sings Christmas carols in a dubbed voice which got quite distracting because the movement of his mouth doesn't sync up well with the sound he's supposed to produce. Why does it feel like I'm QC-ing a badly-encoded gay porno clip? Quite the coincidence, isn't it? Conveniently having a tenor and five ballsbagpipes on a battlefield.

But you'd be surprised, it doesn't just end there. The Germans had more surprises up their sleeves, adding to the epic-ness of the whole scene. I have included the original subtitles in the following screenshots.





I'm just having fun, of course. I liked the film and shedded very manly tears while watching it the first time around. Go watch it even if it isn't Christmas now, you'll appreciate the side-themes of enemy dehumanisation, religion and bagpipes.

For the time being, put papaya there!