These past few days a friend's brother has been in town so I've been meeting up with him and giving him some advice about Hanoi and (more importantly I feel) taking him to good places to eat. There are some people in HCM City who went to Sussex Uni and studied on the same courses as me and one of then had a visit from her brother. After spending time with my friends in HCMC and Cambodia he flew to Hanoi for a couple of days and I offered to meet up with him here. He arrived on Thursday and we went for dinner (timed beautifully to avoid the worst of the torrential rain) and I gave him a few ideas of places he could go on Friday and Saturday and and then helped him find his way through the maze of the Old Quarter back to his hotel. I had to work on Friday but we arranged to meet in the evening for Indian food and then some drinks at Derry's. In the end I went to Derry's to wait for him to arrive as Alison and Calder were already there so we just ended up ordering Indian food into Derry's. As they are pretty much next to each other you can place and order and they just bring the food around on a tray - one of the good things about this country! We stayed there pretty late - well beyond curfew - so as we waved him off in a taxi at the end of the night I was concerned that he'd get back to a locked up hotel but thankfully there was still someone up to let him in. It probably wouldn't have been a great idea to end up getting him accidentally locked out of his hotel! Today we met up and went for lunch where we witnessed some responsible Australian parents letting their 2 year old kid drink beer - what?! - and after he got in some last minute shopping for gifts we parted ways and he went to the airport for a flight to Hong Kong and I went to the bookshop (AGAIN!).

It's always nice to meet up with random people in Hanoi. Usually if they are in some way connected to friends then they're good fun as we tend have things in common (as well as meeting Michael this week I've also met up with a friend of a friend from home, Rachel, which was cool). I've also met people occasionally in places like Hoi An and deemed them cool enough to meet up with them when they come through Hanoi which is nice. It gets me thinking about the positive things in this city rather than just the negative stuff I encounter all the time. It's also good to have some interesting people to talk to!

In the bookshop today I picked up a guide book to South Korea for £1. It's from 2005 but I tend to only use a guide book for ideas of places to visit and general info about travelling around a country, not to find places to stay so it's not so important if it's an old book. You can usually pick up guide books for places like Laos and Thailand pretty cheap as there are lots of second hand copies in this city but there aren't so many books for Korea, and those that I do see are usually pretty expensive so when i saw this one for the bargain price of 30,000 I had to buy it! I plan to go to Korea at some point so now I'm prepared with a guide book for the place! I did also buy yet more books despite the fact that I have plenty already that I've not yet read. Oops.

I have no plans for tomorrow aside for a trip to the gym and a bit of swimming. I'm gonna get that out of the way in the morning then I have the rest of the day to get reading some of my books! I might watch a film or two as well as next to my massive pile of unread books I have a stack of unwatched DVDs. I must stop buying books and DVDs!

Randomly this has entertained me greatly - how to fly in Vietnam!