 offering help to people and regretting it afterwards. Lynx - you were good declining the party invitation. Did you tell the truth or make up an excuse?
Sally good luck with your plans for new accommodation. A house near the woods sounds lovely. Mannix, I empathise with your current routines out of sync, my son has just gone home today and this now means I can get back to normal so the house won't be full of muddly cycling stuff and I won't be on edge he's gone out and left the front door open - which happens a lot. Even the other day when I was at home talking to him upstairs, I had no idea the door had been left wide open until I felt a very cold draft of air. So you've potentially got another week. So who does all the cooking and looking after them? Tapit, can I ask what's the play about?
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Re: 150 Steps for January '10
Happy New Year One and All: Mannix: Thank you for taking care to repost the monthly success thread. Clearly we have one of the best threads going and always have. I'm on the 15 minute computer here. So, I'm going to log off and log back on. PLG
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Re: 150 Steps for January '10
Hi again:
Last edited by paralegalgirl on Sat Apr 16, 2011 9:17 am, edited 1 time in total.
Re: 150 Steps for January '10
Hello PLG in 2010
I was thinking about your comments about how to spend your day without returning to smoking. If you read a similar post to yours and it was written by someone else, what advice would you give them if they asked you to give about 3 suggestions?
Re: 150 Steps for January '10
Wow- I'm getting dizzy keeping up with everyone's posts. I loved the fact that you declined the invitation, Lynx. I had to do the same earlier in December and was trying to think of all kinds of ways I could do it without hurting anyone's feelings. Finally, I just told the truth (I was feeling overwhelmed with things right then). What a relief. Why was it so hard? And what is your best time of day that you're losing??? Yikes, Unity- sounds like your family communications are really complicated. Hope you can breathe your way through them. But it also seems like you're doing your best to clear the air of negative secrets and miscommunication and that's always a great thing. Hopefully, it will make the rest of the year lighter. I've been shoveling a great deal instead of going to the gym the past few days, and have been eating better. Maybe eventually the scale will start to slide downward. I've signed up for which at least lets me see how things are trending. My most important goals this year are to get back into the play writing game (I don't know why, but it really seems important to me- so I'll let that be enough justification for now). There are a lot of calls out for ten minute plays, so I began working on four ideas that are particularly close to my heart. Wrote the rough drafts of all four over the past week, and they were dreadful. But, as they say, it's all in the rewrite. I finished the second drafts of two of them and am beginning on the next one. I also developed a set of questions that cut right to the bone and answering them, (which takes several tries) has really tightened up the work I'm doing. And I'm beginning to find the surprises along the way that make me know I'm on the right track. My first goal is to finish the four plays and get them out to a number of competitions and theatre groups that are looking for scripts. The other goal is to finish at least a section of the documentary about elephants that I started last year. I got most of the research done, lots of footage shot, and now need to shape it and shoot more stuff that I need. For some reason, that paralyzes me. I made some mistakes last year, and I really don't want to repeat them this year. The third thing is that I'm teaching short film classes at the local universities for their "learners over 50" programs and that takes a lot of prep time, but it's oh, so fun. It should be a good creative year.(With advance apologies for the world’s most obvious blog title ever…)
You get the idea.
On 4 August 2013 I boarded a train at Liverpool Lime Street station. Last Tuesday, 10 long weeks, 9,800 varipaced miles, a few dozen excruciating train journeys, several borderline tantrums at various Chinese people and at least one disconcerting camel ride later, I arrived at my destination: the capital city of Vietnam, Hanoi.
For those of you who don’t know, I’m now planning on making Hanoi my home, at least for a little while. In a fortnight I will begin studying for a CELTA English language teaching certificate. I then plan to get a job as an English teacher here in Hanoi, to find myself an apartment, and to fulfill a lifelong ambition to live and work overseas.
This is what I left home to come and do. Sure, I still want to complete my journey to New Zealand. But for now, I’m unpacking my backpack, stowing my guidebooks, and finding things at the bottom of my bag which I haven’t seen for weeks (like the LeatherMan Phil and the guys at Clarity bought for me, which I’m afraid has so far only been used to pop a few blisters in Russia. I’m sure it’ll come in handy soon though guys…)
When you’re moving to a new city, you do some research, right? So did I. I wanted to give myself a head start getting to know Hanoi and Vietnam, so I took a few basic steps to acquaint myself with my new home before arriving. I started to gobble up news articles about Vietnam, and to read websites like the English daily Vietnam News. I read books about Vietnam, fiction and non-fiction – Bill Hayton’s Vietnam: Rising Dragon and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. I joined Vietnamese social networking communities – the frankly astonishingly useful classifieds website The New Hanoian, and Facebook’s occasionally hilarious but invariably handy Hanoi Massive community page. I watched and re-watched the Top Gear Vietnam special. All of this in an effort to prepare myself, and through it all I gradually constructed a mental image of what Hanoi was going to be like.
Well… What can I say, other than that I failed with admirable plenum. Frankly, having now spent a week in Vietnam and having been bewildered by the pace of life in Hanoi, immersed in the bewildering and endless energy of this city and its people, found myself repeatedly surprised by the amaranthine variety of food on offer, and on at least a few occasions been left stranded and helpless in the middle of busy roads swarming in every direction with scooters, I’m fairly sure no amount of research could ever have prepared me for what I’ve found here. Its addictive, adrenaline fuelled, hypnotic, crazy and chaotic, all at the same time, in countless different ways.
I’ll be honest – I’ve never been so excited in my life!
This is a city where the local beer – bia hoi, as its known – is served on street corners, freshly brewed the same day, with customers sat on small plastic stools paying 30p a glass. This is a city where many restaurants serve only one dish, but where they’ve become masters at preparing said dish and do so to utter perfection – and still rarely charge more than £2 a pop. It’s a city where streets become known for the rows of shops selling the same gear that line them: Shoe Shop Street features dozens of shoe shops; Chicken Street is home to a string of vendors serving fried and barbequed chicken; Mannequin Street sells… Well, mannequins, as carefully documented in this very funny blog at The City That Never Sleeps In.
It’s not a ‘nice’ city. It lacks the grandeur of other major capital cities, and somehow doesn’t have the same sense that you’re in the heart of a country. Don’t come here and expect fine dining and trendy wine bars. Too often it even appears shabby.
But what Hanoi lacks in bling, it makes up for in character. Other capital cities can quickly lose their identity as they become international hubs. Hanoi has identity in bags and bags and bags, and you’ll find it as intoxicating as the bia. This is a city which seems to have escaped mass commercialization. I’m in the first city on my journey where Starbucks is nowhere to be seen – and the unique and independent coffee shops that line the roads instead are much more welcome than Starbucks, with its £3.50 vanilla lattes and its identikit hyperexpensive ciabattas.
If Starbucks ever opens here, I hope there’s a protest. I’ll join in.
So, here I am, in Hanoi, at the start of a new life. It’s a new life with an indefinite end point. Adam’s Grand Tour will continue, and I’ll continue to write about my life as it unfolds over the next few months, an ex