After work today I went to Derrys as usual and met Alison, Calder and Lyle there. A little while after arriving one of the owners, Huong, got back from Singapore. She brought McDonalds with her!! We had some Big Mac and some cheeseburger goodness. Man it was good!

BOOKS!

Apparently BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible (parts of it anyway)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Total 1-10: 3

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk X
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

Total 11-20: 5

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X

Total 21-30: 2

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres X
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X

Total 31-40: 5

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X

Total 41-50: 5

51 Life of Pi - Yann Marte X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Total 51-60: 3

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt X
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

Total 61-70: 3

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome X
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

Total 71-80: 5

80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry X
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Total 81-90:2

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Eupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Total 91-100: 1

Total: 34

I've just finished Bill Bryson, Notes From A Small Island. The last part of his book was all about Scotland - now I have tentative plans to head up there whenever I'm next home! I'll prolly take a term off whenever I decide to go home so will hopefully have some time to squeeze in a trip to Scotland whilst I'm there! It won't be for some time yet though so I have heaps of time to change my mind! I'm now keeping an eye out for his book on the English language as that cound be pretty entertaining too.

It's the last week of term this week so I get to do heaps of speaking exams and then mark a bunch of other papers on Thursday. Fun times. As the school was closed for a day last week due to flooding we have regular lessons on Friday rather than the usual movie and party thing. This means that I have to try and motivate a bunch of teenage girls who really don't care about learning English on a Friday afternoon after their exams are all done. That's gonna suck.

I've finished my cross stitch!



It's taken me months. I don't know what to do when I'm watching films and TV now - I need something else to keep me occupied and stop me fidgeting.

For the first time in a long time today I got up before 8! I went to Derrys as usual last night for a drink or 4 after work and the owner Victor invited me to join Alison and Calder at his hotel for a buffet breakfast this morning. It was worth the early start tho - the eggs were freshly made to order and there was lovely jam! I was kinda surprised to find that it was really hot so early in the day - I always assumed it would be a lot cooler first thing.

After breakfast I caught the bus back to where I live and there were a bunch of tourists on the bus going to see Uncle Ho. The conductor herded them all off at the appropriate place and then tried to send me off with them too, assuming I was a tourist too. It took a lot of work to convince her and the driver that I did in fact want to head further down the road to go to my house but they got it in the end!

Later on in the day I headed over to West Lake to go to a couple of places that sell lovely Western goods. One was a deli with an amazing selection of meats and cheeses with some decent bread too. I got some ham that was imported from France and it was nice to have real ham rather than the watery stuff you can buy in a bog standard Vietnamese supermarket! I had ham and cheese sandwiches for dinner and they were good! The other store was kinda like a dried goods store and had a bunch of sauces etc and MARMITE!!! They also had stuff like biscuits and chocolate - I got excited to see Cadburys but upon closer inspection it turned out to be Australian and so I decided it wasn't good enough to justify the high price. I did find kit kat chunky's though for a fairly reasonable price so I am soon to enjoy a bit of British chocolate goodness. The best thing about this shop though is the range of coke products they have - the only place in Vietnam to sell coke zero and the only place outside of Singapore and Brunei to sell lime coke (as far as I can tell!) and it's not even expensive. These imported cans cost the same as a regular can back home - bargain! I also found some sour cream so tomorrow I'm gonna make some sort of Mexican dish and them I'm gonna try a recipe to make dip as that's something that's not available here and I really miss it.

Travel plans have been discussed a bit recently and I'm getting excited about the prospect of travel, even though it is quite far away. As I have taken an entire term off for when the parents come over I will have some time to fill when they have gone home so I'm considering options like Taiwan and Hong Kong, or maybe Indonesia. Last night I discussed plans for China with Alison and Calder too which got me excited (except for the thought of the cold). Sadly there is no travel for me for a while unless I maybe have a weekend here and there, but at least it means I can save my pennies!

Have been playing around with google maps (OK, looking at stuff in Auckland) and decided to have a look at Hanoi. They've finally put the street names on! when I was looking for a place to stay just before I came out here there were no street names so I had no idea where I would be doing my CELTA course but now there are street names so you can see where I live!

A map of Hanoi I live in a lane just off of Doi Can. If you draw a line up from the letter H (VIKI Weddings!!) and one across from the swimming pool you can just about make out a little to the right above the H my house is about the point where they meet! As you can see its a fairly densely packed city. I also had a look at what comes up in google images for Doi Can - on the first row there is a pic of the horrible traffic on Doi Can in this article This is why I try my hardest not to by tackling Doi Can in rush hour!

After a few days with little rain it absolutely hammered down today. It was raining when I woke up and I waited for it to stop before going to work but no joy so eventually I had to give up and ride through the rain. My timing turned out to be really good - when I was driving there were rather large puddles but within about half an hour of getting to work the street outside began to flood. After about 20 mins of more heavy rain the water had risen above the pavement and was lapping at the stairs into work - this was the point the morning classes finished so all the students headed downstairs to shout loudly at each other about the flood. The delivery man bringing my lunch managed to get through as the water at that point was only at one side of the street but later on the entire street was flooded. I teach the afternoon class and my students all squelched in after having to wade through the water to get in. I'm impressed they made the effort! I tend not to leave the house unless its absolutely necessary when its raining as I really don't want to end up wading through minging water.

I've not done much recently aside from a lot of eating out. Last Sunday we went for brunch at the Melia hotel - $30 gets you free flow drinks and all you can eat food from the buffet. The Melia is one of the swankiest hotels in Hanoi so the quality of food is good, plus they have a chocolate fountain! The day before I met some people from work for lunch at a place called Cafe Smile - it is a training place for disadvantaged youth and all the staff are being trained so there is good comedy to be had as long as you have plenty of time and lots of patience. Tomorrow is gonna be decent pasta at a good Italian place as Tuesday night is pasta night, and a Moroccan place is on the list for sometime soon.

Other than that I got some awesome shoes the other day -