The Great Nha Trang Police Station Fiasco
Needing our second police report of the trip, we postponed our city tour to the next day. We walked all over Nha Trang in search of the police station - once again in not quite the correct place Mr Rough Guide! After various left-means right directions we spotted it on the roundabout we'd walked past twice already!
They didn't speak a word of English, well beyond, "Hello what is the problem?", "camera" and "Violet" - the name of our hotel which they kept repeating with and almost French accent. Through some kind of sign language they realised we wanted something writing down - so proceded to get out a pen and plain piece of paper - apparently this police station didn't do official forms! Twenty minutes more of confused "violet"'s later and we walked to some building with a badminton court and four people, all clearly unimpressed with us interrupting their game. Back to the police station and "violet, violet, violet" and "you are fomr England? Ah Manchester United" landed us on the back of polive motorbikes and heading for...another police station! Fantastic!
So the policeman from the first station explained the situation (that we were staying at Hotel Violet and wanted them to write about a camera for which we had a manual) to the policeman at the second station. Hardly surprising this is all they knew as the Rough Guide provides you with Vietnamese for police station, but no way of explaining the problem once you get there! So then this policeman explained to another policeman who then phoned a friend, well two actually. The second one wanted to speak to Martin and explained that we should come back in two hours with the receptionist from our hotel. Erm...OK.
Bemused as we couldn't get any reason for why we had to wait for another 2 hours we got a moto back to the hotel. Enter our saviour - Mi - part hotel-owner, part receptionish and partly wandering what Martin had been up to outside her hotel with three prostitutes in the middle of the night! She was probably wandering what drove them to steal his camera and like Nick she probably cited stingy tips!
She got Martin to write his story down and then explain it all so that she could in turn translate it into Vietnamese. After dinner we found ourselves back on the motos and back at Police Station 1, which shunted us once again to Police Station 2. This time we had an explanation - number 1 was a "Police Station", whilst number 2 was a "Police Office". This means they have forms and upon Mi's request we finally saw what we'd been trying to get all day!
We don't really know what happened in the following hour, but what we are sure about is that Martin was the butt of all the jokes and everyone in the Police Office had a good laugh at his expense! I'm quite sure from his actions that the officer with the forms though Martin should have just slept with them and had done with it!
After much persuasion it was decided that the forms could be stamped before 5pm the following day, just before our bus left. "Now" never seems to be a good time to do things!!
That night, worn out from the day's test we headed upstairs and recorded Saigon's Burning's first ever music video! Apologies for the poor quality of the vocals but the acoustic dampening in our studio wasn't quite up to scratch... ;-)
They didn't speak a word of English, well beyond, "Hello what is the problem?", "camera" and "Violet" - the name of our hotel which they kept repeating with and almost French accent. Through some kind of sign language they realised we wanted something writing down - so proceded to get out a pen and plain piece of paper - apparently this police station didn't do official forms! Twenty minutes more of confused "violet"'s later and we walked to some building with a badminton court and four people, all clearly unimpressed with us interrupting their game. Back to the police station and "violet, violet, violet" and "you are fomr England? Ah Manchester United" landed us on the back of polive motorbikes and heading for...another police station! Fantastic!
So the policeman from the first station explained the situation (that we were staying at Hotel Violet and wanted them to write about a camera for which we had a manual) to the policeman at the second station. Hardly surprising this is all they knew as the Rough Guide provides you with Vietnamese for police station, but no way of explaining the problem once you get there! So then this policeman explained to another policeman who then phoned a friend, well two actually. The second one wanted to speak to Martin and explained that we should come back in two hours with the receptionist from our hotel. Erm...OK.
Bemused as we couldn't get any reason for why we had to wait for another 2 hours we got a moto back to the hotel. Enter our saviour - Mi - part hotel-owner, part receptionish and partly wandering what Martin had been up to outside her hotel with three prostitutes in the middle of the night! She was probably wandering what drove them to steal his camera and like Nick she probably cited stingy tips!
She got Martin to write his story down and then explain it all so that she could in turn translate it into Vietnamese. After dinner we found ourselves back on the motos and back at Police Station 1, which shunted us once again to Police Station 2. This time we had an explanation - number 1 was a "Police Station", whilst number 2 was a "Police Office". This means they have forms and upon Mi's request we finally saw what we'd been trying to get all day!
We don't really know what happened in the following hour, but what we are sure about is that Martin was the butt of all the jokes and everyone in the Police Office had a good laugh at his expense! I'm quite sure from his actions that the officer with the forms though Martin should have just slept with them and had done with it!
After much persuasion it was decided that the forms could be stamped before 5pm the following day, just before our bus left. "Now" never seems to be a good time to do things!!
That night, worn out from the day's test we headed upstairs and recorded Saigon's Burning's first ever music video! Apologies for the poor quality of the vocals but the acoustic dampening in our studio wasn't quite up to scratch... ;-)
Labels: Vietnam
posted by Ian Matthias at
10/15/2006 09:02:00 am
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