That week
in Da Nang.

Forecasters expect heavy rain across central Vietnam from today until around the 17th. The figures being given are 70 to 150 millimetres in one burst, some places over 250, and a risk of more than 100 millimetres falling inside three hours.

On 8 September the government told 21 provinces and cities to get ready.

For Da Nang itself the national weather service gives moderate rain today and tomorrow, heavy rain on Saturday and Sunday, thunderstorms on Monday and Tuesday, and moderate rain again on the Wednesday and Thursday. It does not stop on the 17th either. Their ten day forecast has heavy rain again on Friday the 18th and Saturday the 19th. Highs stay between 29 and 31 the whole way through, so it will be warm and wet rather than cold.

Then the part that is still a maybe. Forecasters think a tropical depression could form in the middle of the East Sea around the 12th or 13th, and that it could grow into the sixth storm of this year. Where it would go, or whether it forms at all, nobody knows yet.

A forecast four days out is a forecast, not a plan.

What is worth doing this week is dull and takes ten minutes. Find out whether your street holds water. Put the rain cover back in the bike seat. If you have a boat booked to Cu Lao Cham, ask before you travel, because the boats stop when the sea gets up.

We will tell you when something is actually coming, not every time a headline says it might.

The full moon falls on Friday 25 September.

Hoi An runs its Mid-Autumn programme over four days, 23 to 26 September, across Hoi An, Hoi An Dong and Hoi An Tay wards. Those dates come from the city tourism board.

You have already seen the boxes stacked up in every bakery. In Vietnam the mooncake is mostly a gift rather than a dessert, so the giving starts weeks before the eating.

If you want lanterns, Hoi An is the place, and the closer it gets to the 25th the harder that walk becomes. If you want to know what you are actually being handed, we wrote about banh deo, the soft white one that never goes near an oven and that nobody explains.

Read it at lifeofdanang.com/story/banh-deo

At the foot of Hai Van Pass there is a line of old defences nobody could see. A rescue excavation that began on 25 May has now uncovered it.

Over 600 square metres the team found defensive walls, moats, stone foundations laid in steps, brick floors and the stone bases that columns once stood on. More than 960 objects came out of the ground, from the Champa, Tran and Nguyen periods.

The two sites are Tram Nam Chon and Don Chon Sang. They were part of the ring that defended Da Nang between 1858 and 1860. What makes them unusual is that they are still almost whole. Most defensive works from that time in this city were flattened or built over long ago.

On 9 September a deputy mayor walked both sites to work out how to protect them, and the city is putting them forward to be listed as heritage.

They sit at the bottom of the pass we wrote about earlier this year.

Read it at lifeofdanang.com/story/hai-van-pass

Several ward offices here have put an AI assistant on their Zalo page, and it answers at any hour.

You can ask it about land paperwork, births and marriages, certifying documents, building permits and registering a business. It is aimed at the questions that normally mean going in, queueing, and finding out you brought the wrong form.

This is happening ward by ward, not across the city at once. Hoa Cuong and Hoa Khanh have one, and so does Ba Na commune. To find out about yours, open your own ward's Zalo official account and look.

It answers in Vietnamese. If you read Vietnamese slowly, that is still faster than the queue.