First injury

I am typing with one hand today. On my way to my Lao lesson on Tuesday I had a stack on my one day old bicycle.

Chris bought me a $150 bike on Monday – it’s the first time I’ve ridden a bike in years. So instead of Chris driving me to work in the morning, I rode – it was a lot of fun. The front mudflap was not secured properly though, and just before I got to work a screw fell off. There wasn’t much I could do though, so I just kept riding.

I left work at 3.30 to head to Vientiane College for my lesson. I was about 10 minutes away when all of a sudden it was like I’d applied both brakes really hard. I went straight over the handlebars, and landed on my right arm, which swelled up pretty much immediately and started caning. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the loss of the screw actually made the mudflap jam against the front wheel. I gave Chris a call and got a van from the college to come and pick me and my busted bike up, and take me to the Australian Embassy medical clinic. I had an Xray, which thankfully came back negative yesterday morning - so it appears like I've just sprained it. The doctor thinks it will take about a week to heal. I spent most of yesterday sleeping and getting some rest :-)

The most unfortunate thing about hurting my arm is that I won’t be able to play netball in Hanoi this weekend – I’m still going, of course, but just not playing. Hopefully it heals quickly enough so I can take advantage of the two other long weekends coming up :-)

In other news :-) Work has been really stressful since my boss came back from his work trip last Friday. A Cambodian company urgently required a design and a quote for a massive solar system plus back up generator for a series of telecoms installations. Neither Nishan or I has designed a system in years and I was almost tearing my hair out trying to remember how to do it and get it right. I managed to download AS4509.2 (the Australian standard for the design of stand alone systems) and that saved my skin. Its about as far in the deep end as I’ve been thrown since I started working. But I’ve been told not to expect to achieve anything in my first three months here, so to get something major done in my first two weeks is pretty amazing :-)

I’ll leave you with some funny stories:

• On Friday night, Chris and I went out for drinks with some work colleagues and AYAD’s. When we left, we realised Chris’ helmet was no longer with the bike. Chris was pretty despondent all dinner about his helmet being stolen, until an AYAD told us there was meant to be staff at the bar whose job was to mind the bikes. We went back to ask. It turns out that the staff had taken the helmet inside to keep it safe, and in true Lao style, hadn’t told us – because we didn’t ask.

• On Monday night Chris and I went across the road from our house to have dinner with our housemates (we have two housemates at the moment – Keith, who is heading to the south of Laos in two weeks, is staying in our spare room). We didn’t really have any idea what we were ordering, so we picked the most expensive thing on the menu. A plate of red liquid with stuff floating in it came out, with our waitress also covered in the red liquid. It was…ducks blood salad, a Lao delicacy (and something we were told to avoid in our avian influenza briefing, because it could potentially carry bird flu). I think the duck met its fate about two minutes before we saw it in pieces in front of us. After seeing that we moved to another restaurant for second dinner :-)

I'll write again soon with news from Hanoi :-)