#not sure we learnt much french that day But we definitely got an insight into french cinema

[ssaalexblake]

i’m still laughing abt french cinema potentially killing ‘the sex scenes will scar people’ pearl clutchers bc one of my french teachers when i was 16ish showed my class some french movies that were in no way like, centered around anything sexual But they definitely had far more racy shit in them than your average classroom movie would and just casually did not warn anybody about it, and suddenly there was a cut scene with no warning of two characters just fucking vigorously and everybody was silent for a second before we cracked up. Teacher did not give a shit. Apparently nobody sold her out, either. 

[mom-maeum-seoul]

Hanoi and Halong Bay

Vietnam was a really cool country. I spent two weeks there (and Ville 1 month!) and especially loved Hanoi.

Hanoi feels kind of magical - a perfect fusion of old and new, buzzing with traffic that is the embodiment of organised chaos. There’s a permanent mist hanging in the air (which may just be pollution - a little less magical haha!) that creates a surreal and ethereal feel to the city, particularly at night as it’s illuminated by the thousands of fairy lights strung up around the city. Nature also invades every corner, refusing to be beaten back by the concrete, with trees bursting through the pavement and walls, their leaves hanging low. 

There are often wide pavements, but they are filled with scooters and people cooking and eating at small tables, so most of the time you have no choice but to walk in the road. Crossing the road is a daunting prospect when you first arrive - no one stops for anything, so there’s no other option but to simply walk into the traffic. The first few times it’s terrifying and like nothing you’d have experienced in the West, but once you get the hang of it, it’s surprisingly easy and the scooters casually drive around you as you cross. You can always spot the tourists who’ve just arrived as they linger at the roadside waiting for a gap that never comes. You’ll see many strange sights in the traffic in Vietnam - some people will simply drive their scooters the wrong way down the side of the road. Others have their dogs on leads as they weave through traffic. In Ho Chi Minh City, rather than wait in traffic jams, scooters mount the pavements and drive around them.

Hanoi made a wonderful first impression on me. Everything is crowded and chaotic but there was a vibrant atmosphere in the streets that Friday night (and seemingly most evenings!). Hundreds of people walked the streets and sat eating outside amongst the drooping leaves and dots of light. Tiny, curious dogs ran wild and I was back amongst crowds of European tourists for the first time since Bali.

We had soup and spring rolls for dinner, accompanied by 50c beers. The whole meal must have been about ���2-3, which was a welcome change from Japan, Hong Kong and Korea! I’d also been staying in dorm rooms for the past couple of weeks, so was extremely happy to be in a fancy(ish) hotel for about $12 each per night (see video below)! We then went for a few drinks and saw some lives bands in the street and a few half-hearted Halloween parties.

On Saturday, we went to see one of the lakes (West Lake - not the nicest as it’s very dirty and smells pretty bad) and then onto another couchsurfing meet-up in the evening. It wasn’t the most engaging one as there was a really random mix of people there but we ended up staying out late dancing anyway and getting locked out of the hotel. Luckily, there’s always a member of staff sleeping in the lobby so we got in - but we had a moment of panic when we saw the padlock on the door!

West Lake

One of West Lake’s pagodas

Couchsurfing meet-up in Hanoi’s old town

On Sunday, we did almost nothing and ordered room service, which was the first peaceful rest day either of us had had for ages after two weeks in dorm rooms! 

That evening, we went to see one of the other lakes (Hoàn Kiếm Lake), which was much nicer! There was a festival atmosphere along its banks as the roads had been closed off - Ville thought this might be something they did every Sunday but we don’t know for sure. I’m not sure what the lake is like during the day but it certainly didn’t smell as bad as the other one and at night the lights of the buildings surrounding the lake create beautiful reflections on the surface. Around the edges we witnessed all sorts of activities going on - a band playing with a lead violinist instead of a singer, caricature and calligraphy artists, life-size cartoons roaming around (people in suits), giant jenga, dance shows put on by kids and silk dragon displays. There was also a nearby night market worth browsing if you’re looking for a bargain.

On Monday, we went on a free tour with a local student through http://hanoifreelocaltours.com, a really good initiative that pairs up students who want to meet people from around the world and work on their English skills with tourists looking for a local perspective. We went to see the Temple of Literature and La Maison Centrale prison - a relic of the French colonial days where the French kept, tortured and executed communist rebels. It was quite a harrowing experience (although not compared to what we were to see at S21 in Phnom Penh) but interesting to get an insight into Vietnam’s past. Our tour guide explained that Vietnam had had to fight for its freedom and independence for a very long time.

A recreation of prisoner conditions

The guillotine

On Tuesday, we spent most of the day travelling down to Halong Bay, where we stayed overnight before our tour the next day. There was nothing of note in the town really - just masses and masses of construction going on. It’s quite incredible to see the rapid development going on in Vietnam with your own eyes when you visit!

The Halong Bay tour was unfortunately an absolute shambles! We were picked up as agreed at 11am, but then proceeded to drive around in circles for the next hour picking other people up in a seemingly completely random order. I am not exaggerating when I say we must have driven past our pick-up point about 4 or 5 times before finally embarking on the 15-minute drive to the harbour. It wasn’t until 3 hours after pick-up that our boat actually left as we kept getting moved around and told to wait at various spots in the harbour. We’d been promised an “English-speaking guide” but what we actually got was a rude salesman who spent the day trying to sell everyone extras. All the staff on the boat were really rude actually and kept inventing new and contradictory rules about where we were and weren’t allowed to sit - although, surprisingly, the food provided was actually really good! Half the people on the boat had paid to go kayaking, so the rest of us just had to sit and wait on the boat for an hour while that took place, which we obviously hadn’t been informed of in advance. We probably only had about 1-2 hours on the water in total. The bay was beautiful though and we saw a cool cave, so I’m glad we went - it just could have been a more pleasant experience in general. 

One lesson we learnt in Vietnam is that you should avoid booking things through the hotels without checking the reviews yourself online first, and as soon as someone tells you “don’t worry”, it’s time to start worrying! The trip back to Hanoi was also a farce. They clearly didn’t know who was supposed to be going or not and the bus was extremely crowded. We left late and made a few unnecessary stops as well, meaning that some people missed their onward travel. The “tour guide” was obviously extremely rude about it, taking no responsibility whatsoever or even apologising. Really despised that guy…!

Thursday was our last day in Hanoi before moving on for what we thought would be some “beach time” at Nha Trang (hahaha - little did we know that a typhoon was approaching). We went to see Ho Chi Mihn’s mausoleum, which is very impressive, and the war museum (Vietnam Military History Museum), which was pretty shambolic as well. The information is chaotic, the English translations are poor, and nothing seems to be in the correct order. I left none the wiser about why the Vietnam war had actually happened, or even what had really happened... I’d definitely advise people to give this one a miss and go to the one in Ho Chi Minh City instead if possible, as it’s much more coherent.

Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum on the right

One final point about my first impressions of Vietnam is that it was intriguing to visit my first communist country! The hammer and sickle are omnipresent around Hanoi, although Vietnam clearly has capitalist elements as well.

Hammer and sickle on a government building (right in the centre of the photo) - I got in trouble with a soldier for taking this picture!

Statue of Lenin

That evening, we flew to Nha Trang and towards the storm...

-Maddy

[theminafournier]

A Psychological Assessment of Mina Fournier.

From Laura: Honestly, it’s taken me a long time to get around to doing Mina’s psychology. Just the little things about her that I might have headcanoned but not fully explained to this extent. This is the whys and a chance for me to really get inside Mina’s head. 

Trigger Warnings: Physical Abuse, Abusive Relationship, Miscarriage, PTSD

Word Count: 3,054

Tell us about your parents/family.

All therapists look in to the backstory when they try to get an insight in to who a person is but for Mina, there was nothing wrong with her childhood at least on the surface. Her mum is a chef and her dad eventually ended up owning a bakery. Although her dad is classified as French-Canadian, the predominant language spoken in the household was always English but Mina was taught French by her father since she was a kid. She is an only child which meant her parents adored her. They have always been incredibly supportive of everything she has ever done. They are an amazing family unit that always appears so perfect and they are. In some ways, this aided in her perfectionist complex. Because her parents were always so supportive, she never wanted to let them down so she always tried to do good in anything. Even if she failed, they would still support her but Mina always felt like she failed them.  

Mina always considered herself a ‘Daddy’s girl’. They used to go to ice hockey matches when they had the money to buy season tickets to the Toronto Maple Leaves. It was the only time she actually saw her drunk who was a notorious drunk of the family. He called her Maple but mainly because he thought her name was Mabel. He was the first person in her family that wasn’t so perfect and she saw how he was never invited to family events at the risk of him being embarrassing. This furthered the need to be perfect for Mina even if she doesn’t realize that this is what she’s doing. Yes, she felt like she failed her parents at times but she doesn’t realize that this is when her perfectionism started.

Let’s move on to your first relationship...

Jordan Dargan. They’d know each other since they were kids and although they hadn’t been particularly close in elementary school, they grew a lot closer in middle school and as they were entering high school, they began dating. It made sense to them both. They were friends, they made each other laugh and things weren’t complicated. Mina definitely loved him for a long time and perhaps at some points he loved her but he definitely didn’t love her as much as she loved him. They were the ‘high school sweethearts’ of the school. It was that typical power couple and that’s more what Jordan loved about his relationship with Mina. He knew she was loved and had a strong group of being popular and if he ruined that, it would go much worse for him. It didn’t stop him sleeping with all of her best friend group eventually and none of them ever telling her which probably hurt more when she found out about it. Mina has a bad habit of putting on rose coloured glasses when it comes to the men she has feelings for. She doesn’t like to believe things people say about them because in her eyes, things have to be perfect. She almost deludes herself in to thinking things are going fine and this is what makes it harder for her to see that maybe things aren’t as well as they seem. It’s a large part naivety but her judgment is entirely clouded when it comes to her feelings. It’s a weakness that – even now – she refuses to admit she does. It takes a lot for that fog to disappear as we later find out.  

Going past high school and in to the big world around them, Mina had a good job. She did social media for companies which earned a good amount of money while Jordan was a construction worker. Mina never saw anything wrong with being a construction worker and never would. However, Jordan saw this as Mina doing better than him in life which caused some resentment. He’d start to stray but if he saw anyone talking to Mina, he grew jealous very easily. It was like he was allowed to but if she dared to do the same (though it would take a lot for her to do something like that), there would be hell. This is where Caleb Whitmore comes in. He was definitely a catalyst for this jealous behaviour growing worse. He was Jordan’s friend first and met Mina while out with a group of friends at a bar. He saw how Caleb flirted with her and he saw how Mina looked at him, laughed with him, talked to him. His jealousy snowballed more and more with each visit. He’d have to check her phone and her texts to make sure she wasn’t doing anything with Caleb or anyone else for that matter. He practically drag her away from men on nights out or start fights with people who talked to her. He’d become more abusive when he was drunk. After taking Mina out of the situation at clubs because of his jealous, he’d take her home and practically beg for sex or force a kiss on her the second they got in which led to sex towards the end of the relationship.

Mina saw this behaviour from Jordan as normal. This was her first relationship. She wore rose coloured glasses during this time and her naivety led her to think all of this was normal. To this day, she still thinks that relationships involve having your phone checked when you claim you’ve been somewhere. She thinks you need to have evidence to prove you’re telling the truth. All because she thinks that’s how you’ve meant to be treated when you’re in love. She’s never been treated right and that’s why she hasn’t seen that it isn’t normal. Looking back and hearing things from people, she can admit that he was paranoid but that doesn’t change her mentality of being cautious with her relationship. There was also definitely a fear of losing him. Losing him would mean losing someone she loved. This relationship also led to more perfectionism in Mina. Because he’d blame her for things, she’d always try to do better, be better. Moving on to the sexual abuse, Mina technically never said no. She didn’t see the problems and because she wanted to do better, she’d comply more so to accomplish this. He really did play her like putty in his hands.  

What happened when you became pregnant?

In the three months that Mina was pregnant, she actually started to notice the changes in Jordan that everyone else could see. He didn’t want a kid yet. He came from a conservative family who were the type to not have kids before marriage. Mina believed they’d understand since she’d been with him for years. He disagreed which led to more arguments; more arguments led to more drinking; more drinking led to more angry sex. It was an odd cycle while she was pregnant. He also began disappearing to go and hook up with random girls at bars which Mina was oblivious to. It wasn’t that he was sneaky enough, it’s more that Mina was blind to it. She was excited about the baby. She’d told her parents (this leading to another argument with Jordan). As you can expect, they were fully supportive and excited to have a grandchild. The first three months of pregnancy are a very cautious time as it’s the highest risk of a miscarriage. Mina obsessively did research in to pregnancy and everything she could do to prevent things like that happening. She’d take vitamin supplements to make sure she had the right levels for the baby. She was cautious about what she ate and how much exercise she did. If anything, this actually helped to fuel her love for yoga. It was something relaxing and meant to be good for the baby. She learnt how to sew and sewed the name she had chosen for her baby. From the get go, she always believed it would be a boy. She couldn’t tell you why she thought this but she really imagined this little baby with her slightly tanned skin, the dad’s icy blue eyes, dark hair. She spent so long imagining this future. Three months arrives and Mina is obviously excited. She can finally announce it to everyone and let everyone know she has a baby growing inside her. She was going to be a mum. Well, we know what happens next...

An argument spirals over her wanting to post the announcement when Jordan didn’t want this baby. He tells her all about how he cheats on her and blames her for this. This is the moment that her rose coloured glasses are shattered when it comes to Jordan. She saw everything in a new light and she didn’t like it. If he didn’t want this baby, she would raise it without him. She calls her dad because her parent’s home is her safe place. She knows they’ll look after her and support her. A small part of her feels like she’s let them down because she is leaving her relationship and her baby’s dad behind to be a single mum. It wasn’t the ideal. It wasn’t perfect. Jordan drinks and when Jordan drinks he gets more violet and this time, he doesn’t go for sex. It becomes a fight. He chokes her, he tries to literally kill her and when she tries to get away, she ends up pushed down the stairs.

How did the miscarriage make you feel?

The miscarriage was the hardest thing Mina has ever had to go through. It wasn’t the fight for her life against Jordan, it was losing the baby that really was the struggle. She felt she had let down her parents who were so excited about becoming grandparents that they had bought so many clothes and toys despite the fact that they don’t come from a lot of money. The worst part being that she had failed as a mother. A mother should protect her baby from any harm and she couldn’t even do that. Maybe it was her own fault for building so many expectations of this perfect family life in her head but how was she supposed to know this would happen? There were warning signs and plenty of red flags but she definitely never thought Jordan would try to kill her. Not hearing her baby’s heartbeat on the monitor was the most heartbreaking thing for Mina. She really shut down after this.  

The police came in to the hospital and repeatedly kept asking her for her statement on what happened. During this, Mina was pretty numb. She’d just been told that her baby had passed and now she had police questioning her. She gave her statement without much emotion seemingly behind it. She was shell shocked. She spent the next hour having her body checked over and any grab marks being checked to see if her story lined up. She could finally go home to her parent’s house and was left to go to sleep. This is when her nightmares started. Although Mina could never tell you what her nightmares were about, it wasn’t hard to tell that it was related to Jordan and everything she had experience that day. She would wake up kicking and screaming like she was being attacked. I’ll come back to this. It took some of the day but the police finally came back and re-asked for Mina’s story about what happened so she had to recalled every excruciating detail only to be told that Jordan had an alibi and that his alibi had been confirmed by the girl he had been with. They questioned whether she wanted to stick to her ‘story’ and really made it seem like she was telling them lies because no one else could corroborate her version of events. No neighbours had been in to hear them fighting or her shouting in the hallways like she claimed. He had an alibi that placed him no where near the apartment and he even claimed that she had been cheating on him so maybe it was actually the guy that she had been seeing. At this point, Mina was exhausted from a lack of sleep and the trauma she had been through that she stopped pressing charges because she really had no more fight left in her. This led her to leave her friendship group with Jordan. She figured he was already telling lies to the police so she was certain he would only continue to lie to their friends so it was easier to leave them behind but this led to a lot of loneliness too.  

Mina went through the darkest period of her life over the next few months. She wasn’t leaving the house. She was barely sleeping because any time she would sleep, she would wake up screaming not long after going to sleep. She had a lot of symptoms of lack of sleep which you can find in this post. She was constantly exhausted. She didn’t talk much to her parents and mostly stayed in her room. She didn’t eat much. She could swear when she laid in bed she could hear her baby’s heart beat which was both oddly comforting and truly heartbreaking. Despite the fact that she never reached the point of feeling the baby move inside of her, she could swear she could feel the baby kicking her stomach. This was definitely some lack of sleep hallucinations but a part of her didn’t want it to stop because for a minute she could pretend. This is when she grew a strong attachment to the baby comforter that had Aaron sewn in to it. It became her own comfort blanket when she missed Aaron. She would occasionally sleep better if she had it but still, she would get nightmares around this time.  

When did she get better from this stage of grief?

When she began to move on a little more, she wanted to get out of Toronto. This was when she decided to apply to Monarch as a means of getting away from any run-ins with her ex and all the bad memories. Yes, she was running away instead of dealing with it. The first night she was at Monarch, she had to sleep with the comfort blanket to make her feel okay. This was when she began to throw herself in to a million and one things. If she was busy, she didn’t have to think. That’s how she has ultimately dealt with all of her problems. She joined a sorority so she would always be around people and took a leadership position so she would always be busy with sorority things. She joined the cheer team and the volleyball team as yet another method of being busy as well as being a part of the media club too. She got a job at Solstice as yoga instructor and when they found out she used to do social media for companies, they reached out to her and she accepted the position for more money and more things to do. This is how Mina developed the inability to tell people no. She became the person everyone seeked out when they had a problem or if they knew she could help. She wanted to be helpful and needed. It also kept her even more busy. It’s exhausting, yes, but at least she didn’t have time to think about anything back in Toronto. It is something she is working on because she knows she’s doing too much but it’s how she’s dealt with her problems for two years now. It is good that she is acknowledging that it isn’t actually as healthy as she may have once thought.  

How does Mina feel about relationships?

After Jordan, Mina swore she didn’t want anything serious. Her time in Monarch, she wasn’t going to find love. She wanted meaningless hook ups and a few friends with benefits. Girls got needs, you know? Especially with her hectic schedule, no strings attached arrangements worked best for her lifestyle. It was easy. Simpler. Then Caleb fucking Whitmore had to turn up and ruin that. He was a tie back to Toronto and one that was on her side in all of the mess when she figured a lot of their friendship group wasn’t on her side. He was only meant to be another person to flirt with, maybe a fling when they first found each other again but the distractions from her busy schedule and inability to say no played a big part in them spending more time together talking and getting close without it just being sex. Now she’s got strong feelings for him and she’s really like “fuck.” She was never supposed to catch feelings for anyone here but now she’s ended up with a mild rose coloured glasses thing for him. She even recognises that she probably doesn’t see Caleb the way that everyone else does but she doesn’t care either. He’s done nothing wrong to her and has helped her when she really needed him. However, both her and Caleb have acknowledged that they aren’t ready for an actual relationship with each other yet. They both have things they need to work out but that doesn’t mean the feelings are going away. If anything, they’re getting stronger for Mina.  

How is Mina now?

Mina comes and goes in waves. She has good days and she has bad days. She can do good for a while but can get exhausted eventually and has to reset herself. Any time anniversaries regarding Aaron come up, Mina struggles a lot. She throws herself more in to work and extracurricular things to try and avoid thinking about it. It’s also when she sleeps less due to her fear of having nightmares so she gets a little more ill and shows her symptoms of sleep-deprivation around these times. As I mentioned, she is working on saying no to people and learning that it’s okay to not be perfect all the time. She’s working hard to better herself mentally, emotionally and physically but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t slip up from time to time. She is grateful to the friends she has who remind her of all these things and that it’s okay and normal.