Annie's Adventures in Vietnam: Perfect Day at Pearl River Hotel

This morning I was all ready to go to teach Vinh's class at 7am only to find out that it was cancelled for today. I had no classes at VAIE either, so unexpectedly I had a free day! I wrote a few emails and chatted to Katie... some dramas at home began to resolve themselves. My gorgeous mother is in hospital having suffered a stroke as well as gall stones, an infection and shingles!!! The poor darling is 92 years old and it is very distressing to be so far away from home when she is not well. But my sister, Sue, is doing a wonderful job of looking after her and Katie visits her with my letters and flowers etc. I just have to sit tight and trust God to watch over her.

Anyway, after such an early start to the day, by 9am it felt like I'd done all the jobs waiting for me and I decided that today would be a perfect opportunity to finally get to go for a swim!!! There's a big hotel not far from here called Pearl River and Will has been talking about going swimming there in the lap of luxury for months, but I've never been. So I sent him and Khánh a text, to see if they wanted to join me. Will was probably still asleep, for he didn't reply till later, but Khánh was free so off we went...

What can I say? We had the best day! It is such a buzz to be surrounded by beautiful things and pretend to be one of the rich crowd... and we had the pool all to ourselves all morning!

The pool is on the roof at the third floor so it looks out over the city well above street level.

And it was just as perfect in as it looks... not too warm, either.

We swam for ages - two laps then a chat in the shade under these palm trees, then a couple more laps... Khánh, like many young people here, didn't learn to swim till he was at Uni. It is compulsary here for all Uni students to learn to swim 100m. He was taught to swim freestyle keeping his head out of the water. When he saw me swimming, he wanted to learn how to swim 'like a Westerner', so for the rest of the day he practiced and practiced as we fine tuned his breathing technique.

After a few hours we got out and had a rest on the day beds in the shade...

You can see the skyline behind Khánh... blue skies, gorgeous day...

And still not a soul in sight. Since I had the camera out, we started mucking around taking photos... The action sequence shots are hysterical - but they don't translate to a blog too well, so here are a couple of highlights...

Nah, you don't get to see any action shots of me... one of me on the sunbed is as much as I'm prepared to post! By then we were hungry, so we ordered some lunch...

I know, I know....

As we were waiting for our food to digest a little before going back in the water some more swimmers arrived (... like, Hello!...), a group of men and a Chinese family. But there weren't many and we still had our end of the pool to ourselves. Then the weather changed and it began to rain... and the rain turned into a tropical thunderstorm! Needless to say we got out of the water when the lightning began! Khánh put my camera out of the rain into his locker, so it wasn't on hand to photograph the storm. We sat under an awning and watched it. So much rain! The two little Chinese boys didn't get out of the water, they were having so much fun.

But it was just a passing storm and we were soon swimming again and it wasn't long before we had the pool to ourselves. Khánh was still practicing his new stroke and breathing and I showed him how to do turns... we weren't so successful mastering floating though... It's always pretty funny trying to teach someone how to float and today was no exception. But we swam and we swam. (Did I mention how much I've been missing being able to just go for a swim...?). You can see that Khánh's persistence paid off and he nailed the new breathing technique:

Eventually it was time to go home, so reluctantly we got out of the water for the last time. The shower rooms are fully equipped and lovely except that they are not air-conditioned, nor are there any fans, so it was disappointing to get out of the shower into a room so hot you just start to sweat. However, the waiting area in Reception was lovely.