Had a nice dinner at Alison and Calder's place yesterday. Had to go via Derry's to meet Nat so that he could follow me to their apartment, then Calder had to send the key down on a piece of string as they're on the fifth floor and can't be assed to walk up and down the stairs unless absolutely necessary. Alison cooked meat pie (from scratch!!!) with mash and veg and it was yummy yummy yummy. We had apple crumble and custard for dessert as I'd stopped at Joma (an ace new cafe we first investigated last weekend. This place sells real bread! None of this sweet bread nonsense - it's the real deal! And you can buy loaves to take home so I intend to indulge in some marmite sandwiches at work this week. The best lunch ever!) earlier in the day to pick some up. It was nice to just chill out for a few hours and eat good food in a nice Western apartment. I get jealous of their place sometimes as it's a really cool apartment, but I can't be bothered to pay two or three times my current rent for my own place (or to faff around moving stuff around Hanoi!. My house isn't actually too bad, particularly considering how little we pay for a fully furnished 4 floor house. And it is nice to have company without having to actually venture outside. We have a new housemate moving in sometime soon as Mark is finally off to Cambodia and so he managed to let out his room in less than 24 hours. We had heaps of people to choose from and hopefully we picked a nice normal housemate from the bunch!

I finally joined a gym (again!) today so am now all motivated to go and be active again. The super hot and humid time of the year is coming so my exercise will dwindle down to nothing which is not good for my plans to go climb a mountain before leaving Asia. When I got back from my big trip I didn't really have the funds to rejoin the hotel gym so I put it off. A new gym actually opened up fairly recently so I'm glad I didn't go back to the hotel as this one is heaps better. For starters it's a real gym rather than an attachment to a hotel and it is full of top quality equipment (including cross trainers! Yay!)that works really well. The staff there actually know stuff about training and there are a whole bunch of classes on offer like yoga, pilates, kickboxing etc. Will try some of them out at a later stage methinks. There is a $300 joining fee which kinda sucks but I get an appointment with a trainer as part of that so on Tuesday I'm going to embarrass myself and find out how unfit I am with this dudes help.

This week is the last week of term for all but one of my classes so a cruisy week is coming up. Time to relax!