Việt Nam Blogs - a new batch

The blogroll is updated - and now I've added four new blogs on Việt Nam. They're all expats, too. I have not yet encountered many blogs from Vietnamese - a big shame. Let's introduce them in some kind of order.

• There's Long Xuyen (Vietnam through my eyes): a young Memmonite works at an university around the Mê Kông river delta. Good for him - that's doing it a lot tougher than this jaded city slicker likes to do. My only gripe is that the whole blog seems to have been written without the use of capital letters. the sentences start like this. and this. finally, this. It's his choice, but I find the "e.e. cummings" style painful to read.  
• Then closer to home, we have I love the smell of coffee in the morning...  A fairly simple layout, but lots of perty pictures. However, the site seems to have been put on hiatus since mid-September.
• Over in Hà Nôi, we have two. The first is Our Man in Hanoi - a "Geordie in Vietnam". Lot's more colour, a little bit up to date than the last.
• The other - and probably the best laid out - is Noodle Pie. If you like food blogs, then this seem the best for you. Nicely maintained and up to date.

What can I say about them, apart from "They're here, they're blogging, and hats off to them!" They look more colorful or polished than my Black-on-White coloured blog. On the other hand, none of them spell Vietnamese names with the right diactritics - but then again, neither do 99% of expats, especially when the keyboard is the only means of entry.

That's a shame, but a perfectly understandable shame - most don't know how to do it. That's the reason why I wrote How to enter Vietnamese inside Blogger (or anywhere else) - it's the first information of this sort as I know available in English. For that reason I've put that on permanent display in the blogrolling sidebar.

Perhaps I should add a little bit of explanation on why I perservere in spelling names as the locals do. But that will be the subject of my next post.