I spent my time off for Labour Day and Liberation Day in Hanoi as flights to anywhere exciting were expensive. A week or two before the holiday the weather was great in Hanoi - no longer cold and grey and depressing but not yet so hot you break a sweat just by getting out of bed. Sadly by the holiday it had changed to superheated summer weather making you feel like you are living inside an oven. This made it harder to motivate myself to do much but I tried to get out and do some things.

I went for a walk around the two lakes by my house - I've discovered a road along the edge of West Lake which is much quieter than the one I used to drive along, and after driving along it a few times a week to get to the gym I decided to go and walk a little way around the lake as it is quite pretty. As it was a holiday no one was about so it was pretty peaceful!

I also went out into the countryside with Tuan. We drove down to the south of Hanoi where they are doing a lot of building in the hope of making it the new business centre of the city. The tallest building in Vietnam has been built there and we drove past that, though after places like New York, tall buildings in Hanoi don't seem all that tall! We headed out of the city to the south - they have just opened a brand new highway which all the cars and trucks use leaving the old road free for motorbikes so it wasn't too terrifying a journey as all the speeding trucks were nowhere near us. We went to a place called Sai Son to go to the temple there. After looking around the temple we went to sit on the covered bridge by the lake where lots of people were swimming, and then a procession to another temple for some ceremony started up so we went round to watch that. Once the procession finished we drove back to Hanoi as the sun was setting - it looks very pretty setting over the rice fields with buffalo wandering around. It made a nice change to be in the countryside rather than the city and I got to see something a bit different so it was a nice afternoon.

Other than that I didn't do too much with my time off. I attempted to bake cookies, but they didn't turn out to be quite as awesome as I was expecting - I think the little table top oven isn't great for baking as I've not had much luck with my attempts to bake bread either. However, we took some when we went to Sai Son and Tuan ended up sharing them with the people sitting on the bridge with us and they seemed to enjoy them!

As I was putting the photos onto my computer I came across some from March - Tuan had never eaten Japanese food so I took him to my favourite Japanese restaurant for his birthday. It seems there are a couple of nice pictures from that night so here they are:

Far too much wasabi in the soy sauce! This made my eyes water:

Full set of pics here.