For New Years Eve we went out with Pauline and met up with Ella and Ros for dinner. After eating we went on a brief tour of Westerner bars around the old quarter, my favourite being Mao’s Red Lounge, for its comfortable seats and occasionally cool music. Naturally we weren’t the only people attracted to the place and so over the course of a couple of drinks the place filled up with loud folk, and the music volume raised accordingly and we moved on in search of a venue for easier conversation. After checking out The Funky Buddah (and, possibly having an LSD flashback, I’m not sure… oooh laser lights..) and being set upon immediately by a gang of aggressive bartenders, we finally opted for Roots, a reggae themed place that wasn’t _too_ offensive.

Sadly, us kids were flagging by this time, and after another round of drinks we basically went our separate ways. Lili and I were home before midnight.

I feel obliged to acknowledge that Pauline was the only one of us with the drive and party spirit required to do New Year’s properly. How can my generation be such a bunch of failures?

Happy New Year!

There’s a small lake within walking distance of Pauline’s place. We walked to it, and then around it.

I was heckled more or less constantly by young guys who wanted to acknowledge that my haircut was “Numba 1! *thumbs up*” which was fun for a while, then tiring, but it’s nice to draw some positive attention. I’m amused that I am more of a curiosity to the youngin’s here than they are to me.

Anyway, we finally found a place that served local style coffee and sat down. Its as good as I remember it. Rich and almost chocolaty in combination with the sua (milk, from a tin.. aka condensed).

Thus invigorated I felt up to taking some photos:

Later, on our way back, we stopped for lunch at a place doing Bun Cha - grilled pork in a sort of papaya seasoned broth with noodles on the side, to be submerged and eaten with the pork.

Pauline took us out to dinner again, and then we slept.

We woke early and finished packing our stuff, then hoisted our bags onto our backs and retraced the steps we made in getting to our hotel.

The MRT was busier than I expected for pre-dawn. Mostly kids, apparently a team of street hockey playing girls were seeing a friend or two off at the airport. Or something.

Anyway, we made it okay and managed to get breakfast in a Chinese restaurant. You can never tell when a Chinese place is going to turn out to be good. I’m sure there’s some function involving tackiness of decor and inverse apathy of staff or something. In any case, the food was a-okay and we made it onto our plane for the relatively short flight to Hanoi.

The inflight entertainment was actually on demand this time. I watched the new X-Files movie. Lili’s system was broken. Hah.

Hanoi airport is amusing after Singapore. Hell it makes Brisbane international terminal look like a bustling hub. It took about an hour for Lili’s bag to come out and then we braved the horde and got a taxi to the Sheraton near where Pauline lives.

After warm welcomes we had a fairly sedate afternoon with a brief tour of the surrounds, and explanation of the house/gate/etc and finally some dinner.

We don’t have time for cultureshock you know, we only have four weeks away and we’ll be making the most of as much as possible.

After an almost feverish night of dry aircon hate and jetlagged body clock confusion, the sky lightened on the cityscape view from our window and we got up.

Lili found something promising in the guidebook about a plane that served coffee and somethingsomething. Coffee? I’m game. I took some non-exiting cold and flu medication as a rather ritualistic bid for good luck and we set off back to the local MRT station where we learned that you have to take your single/return journey tickets and get a refund on your deposit - all via machine. Having done that we bought proper tickets which you just swipe any time you go in or out of a station to automatically pay for your trip. Clever right? They have a similar thing in Hong Kong, but after throwing several large amounts of money at the problem, MY home city couldn’t even agree to how something like that should work. Idiots. Anyway, at least I get to enjoy living in the future when I travel.

SO we made it to this place and there was indeed coffee, which was very reasonable, and there was food, which I enjoyed far more than I think was reasonable. I hate french toast with very salty butter and kaya(?) - coconut jam stuff - which I smeared liberally onto the toast.

I dunno, it seemed sort of weird, but then.. it just tasted good, and I ordered a second serve.

Breakfast done we made our way to Little India, taking our time and shooting a bunch of photos along the way.

Little India was cramped - the streets were lined with shops, which as the day wore on expanded their wares out onto the footpaths until it was basically impossible to not walk on the roads most of the time. That was okay too, the traffic here is a-okay. I only nearly got run over once. Go me.

We happened across a huge mall specalising in Comptuer & Electronics Equipment, or something. I got jeered by one shopkeeper for not having a filter on my lens - quite a reasonable thing to call me out on, but still, fuck off. Finally I found a card reader for the now practically niche Compact Flash cards my camera takes, which was reasonably priced. We ate a light lunch in little India and came back to the hotel to rest a bit and figure out a plan for dinner.

Dinner was in the CBD. We tried to eat the national chicken rice dish but failed, because apparently nobody makes it on the weekends. In fact, dinner was lame, but at least we saw some more of the city. Icecreams for desert and preparations for leaving tomorrow. Finally internet, and now- sleep.

We decided on the plan that we’d make our own way to the hotel. After all, it would me mid afternoon, plenty of time to figure it all out.

We checked over our travel documents and figured out where the cheap hotel we’d booked is located and then, after getting our bags and negotiating customs, made our way to the MRT light rail station and hopped aboard.

Somehow, despite buying our ticket to the wrong station, we managed to get off at the right one and the turnstiles opened for us at the swipe of a card/ticket/thing..

Then we walked, backpacks on, for the ten minutes or so it takes to get to Lorang 6 in Geylang and found our lovely little hotel. We checked into our room, and tried to find room for our bags around the bed which takes up something like 95% of the floorspace. We managed to head out again and found a fairly inoffensive looking Chinese restaurant and ate some reassuringly familiar dishes before navigating the oh-so-seedy streets back to the hotel for sleep.

I think I’m getting sick and 8 hours of airplane airconditioning followed by a night of dusty hotel + more bad aircon left no doubt, but I’m pretty sure I’ll bounce back when we get to Hanoi’s more hospitable climes.

We’re wrapped up in hospital blankets, having eaten hospital-grade nut-free meals and strangely brittle icecreams.

I think the next chance I get I’ll score some sort of alcoholic beverage- perhaps one of those cans of tigers I saw when I went for a wander.

The seat-back “entertainment” entertains as follows:

• First, you read a little brochure telling you what exciting shows you can watch.
• Then, you get your headphones and plug their priorietry double-pronged thingies into the arm rest.
• Then you switch on your TV thing using a game controller / credit card swiping machine / telephone.

All standard operating procedure to this point.

Then once you find your way to the menu you start trying to choose movies, and that’s when you realise you’re looking at a tarted up interface to one of those oldschool early 90s AV systems where everything runs on a seperate channel, on a loop, and you have you choose your movie based first on preference and then on time until next showing. If you’re unlucky you choose a two hour movie that’s already 30 minutes in. Of course, every movie started at the same time so there’s nothing for an hour and a half at least.

Oh, and that’s just the movies, the TV shows all run on one channel, one after another, and the whole lot is looped. Once again, frustrating for those of us who would skip Top Gear and head straight for the Runway Challenge episode, or whatever….

“ON DEMAND!” Lili’s frustration is undertandable. She’s helped build these inflight entertainment interfaces. She mutters under her breath for something like half an hour pointing out all the dumb flaws in the menu system, the inability to pause, fast forward or otherwise navigate the shitty selection of offerings.

I read, and finally get my computer out. In a little while we should be able to watch The Duchess from the beginning. Aww-right.

I’m sitting here in Brisbane contemplating going for a swim having now replaced the pretty masthead image of the blog with my own even more generic looking ugly picture. I’ll replace it when I have some cool photos.

I guess this is my general website now but for the foreseeable future I’ll just be recording my holiday on here.

In 3 days we head to the airport, destination: Singapore. That’s just a stop over, two nights of delicious humidity in a cheap hotel before heading to Vietnam, where we’ll be visiting Pauline in Hanoi. The lazy non-plan is to stay there until we get bored and possibly break our lethargy with a trip to Hoi An. After a relaxin’ two weeks in Vietnam we ship out to Malaysia where we’ll do something approximating backpacking as we travel north to south over the course of about a week, ending up again in Singapore where we’ll spend the last few days in the lap of luxury, where the toughest decision will be which delicious breakfast items to consume on any given morning.

Well, that’s probably a rough over simplification of the expected happenin’s but it gives you alls a rough idea of what we’re planning. Actual events will unfold chronologically according to the rules of physics and/or fate. Stay tuned for photography and poorly written blog posts from the 27th onwards.

<3

Getting ready to go.. 36 hours awake with last minute preparations etc.

Taxi driver speculated that I must’ve been teased in school for my name…. wtf.

Plane to Brisbane at 10:00am.