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!