For the first time in a number of years I didn't attend an ANZAC day dawn parade, didn't hear any bagpipes or watch through misty eyes as war veterans march wearing their medals thinking of their mates. But I didn't forget it was ANZAC day. I read about the always well attended dawn parades online and watched some tv footage from the Wellington service before heading into the city by myself.
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| It's not "our" War Memorial but it is a War Memorial nonetheless in a country that knows a bit about war. So I paused here to remember soldiers everywhere, past and present. |
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| I stepped inside Notre Dame Cathedral in Saigon for the first time today. I ended up in the "visitors" section and couldn't see any access to the "praying" section where other people were doing just that so I just prayed in the visitors section. |
I saw a streetseller with a pile of English newspapers and the top one was the Australian so I thought as my 3rd act of remembrance and symbolic gesture of mate-ship with our friends down under I would buy an Australian newspaper on ANZAC day, thinking I could then share the news articles about ANZAC day commemorations with my english class tomorrow. Streetsellers in Ho Chi Minh see me coming. My Vietnamese number skills aren't fast enough to figure out what someone is asking, convert it in my head to NZ dollars, figure out if it is reasonable and negotiate a better price for myself so I tend to just hand over cash, in this case 60,000 vnd or $3.50. It wasn't until I was walking away that I looked down at my patriotic purchase and saw it was a $2 paper dated April 23rd. So nothing in it about ANZAC day at all, just stuff about the Australian economy and Aboriginal drinking problems.
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| She'll be right .... |
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