I've woken up to a really sunny day so I think I'm going to go for walk down to the lake and see what I can find. It's really blue and sunny outside! It's been grey and dingy for a while now so this is a nice change. I am tempted to go further afield and see what I can find but I have 12 pieces of writing about Hanoi to mark as well as 15 assignments entitled "My last holiday" which for the most part start with "last year I go to..."

I was supposed to mark all this on Thursday but I felt like death so I spent pretty much the whole day in bed watching movies. I only left the house to get some ice cream to soothe my sore throat! I ended up watching the TV series Gossip Girl which was very strange and seemed quite boring at first but before I knew it I had been completely sucked into it and watched an entire series in a day.

Yesterday I had good intentions to get on with some marking but somehow it didn't quite happen. I spent ages doing bugger all in the morning then I went into the Old Quarter to post some things to people. I decided to go to one of my favourite cafes to get something to eat which took a lot longer than I was expecting. It's a really cool place and it serves the most amazing eggs benedict I have ever had so I decided to go get my fix there. I got there as the lunchtime rush was underway and they only have a really small kitchen so it took a while to get served but I enjoyed sitting reading m book on one of the sofas upstairs. The wait certainly made me appreciate the food even more when it finally arrived!

The downside to waiting such a long time is that I didn't have time to deal with the Vietnamese postal system before going to the cinema so I had to take all my crap along with me. The cinema is about the only thing in Hanoi which feels exactly like it does back home. As long as you ignore the Vietnamese subtitles at the bottom of the screen (easy enough as the screen is absolutely massive) you could be sitting in any cinema anywhere in the world watching an American film and eating popcorn. It was kinda weird to them step out of the cinema back onto the street. I get that feeling sometimes when I'm at work. If I don't leave the building during the day then when I finally leave to make my way home in the evening it feels kinda weird walking out onto the street. It's almost as if I forget about the chaos whilst I'm inside.

I made my way back to the post office and psyched myself up for the endless paperwork needed to send three different packages on their way. This time I only needed to fill in two forms per package! It still takes forever though, particularly as they have to look at everything before you can send it. This means that if you are ever sending gifts and you want to wrap them up you have to do it at the post office once they have inspected them, which is very annoying!

Finally once I was done with all of that I made my way over to the language school to do all my prep for Monday so I don't have to try and get it done first thing Monday morning right before the lesson. It took me a lot longer to get there than it should as I got on a bus that didn't follow the route on the map at all. I ended up in some random suburb and had to get another bus back into the city in the middle of the rush hour traffic.The traffic on the roads is a little heavier now as everyone is starting to gear up for Tet and in the evening rush hour it is now insane. Usually my bus ride back home takes about 15 mins in the evenings but on Wednesday it took nearly an hour as the traffic was so bad. It doesn't help that instead of waiting patiently, a lot of motorbike drivers decide to drive along the pavement instead and them when the pavement is blocked by something further up they all filter back onto the road holding everybody else up even more. There were similar sights yesterday and it took me so long to get to work. I made it in the end though and got some stuff prepared then made my way to the bus stop.

I'm getting used to people looking at me on the street and it really doesn't bother me if they just look at me when I pass. However on my way to the bus stop yesterday there were a group of men sitting down eating and as I passed one of them jumped up and started pointing at me and shouting something. He started hitting his friends and getting them to look at me so they were all pointing at me and shouting stuff. That annoys me. It also makes me wonder if I got my skirt tucked into my pants, or maybe I've rubbed my makeup down my face, possibly I've grown another head since leaving work. As I walked past my pus passed me so I ran to the bus stop and thankfully the driver waited for me - they don't often do that so I was impressed this guy did. I went to sit down and there was a guy sitting in the seat in front of me who turned around and just stared at me open mouthed for the whole journey home which also got a bit annoying. I know that quite often when I get on a bus people look at me as I guess not so many Westerners use the bus but they look briefly then look away, and perhaps occasionally take a subtle glance at me throughout the journey. That I can deal with as I know I look very different here but when someone right in front of me spends the whole journey staring at me that makes me kinda uncomfortable.