Jan 18

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Today is the kind of day where I wouldn't have normally written a blog post. But because of my resolution to do one per day, I'm going to do just that.

To start with, it's Saturday night around 10pm, prime time for going out in Hanoi, and I'm at the hotel listening to trance music from my laptop. The reason is, I think I got food poisoning. Or at least I hope it's food poisoning and not something more severe. My stomach is cramping and has been for the past few days. It's kind of sucky.

During the day I hung out with my friend which included buying a book for her and myself from Bookworm, a handy little English language bookstore in Truc Bach. I got Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for myself, and Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things for her. The latter is a book I read for English class in uni some time ago - I don't remember the plotline or characters much, but I remember really liking it, and made sure to keep my copy rather than get rid of it like a lot of my other uni texts. As for Murakami, my friend lent me a book of short stories titled The Elephant Vanishes, and he had me at hello. Kind of like with a person, you usually know pretty quickly whether you're going to like a writer. The surrealism and internal richness was me all over. I don't want to talk too soon, but hopefully I stay as enthralled as I have been so far.

I'm checking into a new hotel tomorrow closer to West Lake. Not that there's anything wrong with this one, but I'm kind of over the hecticness of Old Quarter. At first it felt electric but no it feels congested, and after a motorbike ride around West Lake today I felt it'd be nicer to stay closer to there.

My last weekend in Hanoi, and 5 days until I jet off for Ho Chi Minh City.

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