Today you just get a few loose thoughts from me. Reader beware.

It hasn’t quite become everyday life for me yet. There’s too much that’s new, and everyday life for me means routines. So far I’ve gotten up at wildly different times, eaten meals at wildly different times, and done wildly different things. I’ve been looking for a good workspace, aka. a café. The problem with finding just the right place to sit and tinker with my PC is that I’m very picky about my setup. The basics are wifi and a wall socket for power. There are actually quite a few cafés that offer that. It’s typically the ones where the coffee costs double or triple, though. There are a couple of places where I think I could just sit down without ordering/buying anything, but that also feels a bit pathetic.

Another problem; pepsi max is basically not sold in this country. I’ve only seen it in one big supermarket. I can get regular pepsi, pepsi max with lime, coca cola, and coca cola light. No! I’m not going through withdrawal from overconsumption of pepsi max!!

In connection with my search for pepsi max I also got a reality check on grocery prices. So far I’ve been buying water and snacks from the many small stalls that are on every road. 0.5l water for 7k dong and 1.5l for 21k dong. Snacks between 30k and 50k. So I was a bit surprised when I found out I could buy 1.5l water for 12k dong and a bag of chips for 20k inside WinMart.

To be fair; I’ve been inside more than one supermarket, and WinMart is probably the cheapest I’ve seen, with almost 50%-70% lower prices than everywhere else. And I’ve also been inside a 24-hour kiosk early in the morning, where it said 40k for 1l water. So I haven’t been completely ripped off, not as much as a Dane who pays 36 Dkk for 2 x 0.5l soda at 7-Eleven.

Before any of you back home cross yourselves too much over this, I’d like to give you this perspective. 10k dong is 2,43 dkk. So we’re talking about a 2-6 kr. difference depending on where I shop. Right now I’m thinking I’ll keep buying from the little stalls on the street. Especially if they have pepsi max! Then they can pretty much charge whatever they want for a bottle.

While I’m sitting in my room writing this post, I can hear singing outside my window. It’s pretty incredible, because it drowns out the constant noise of the city traffic. When I open the window and look out, I can see a big garbage truck with a speaker on top, playing a nice melody performed by a women’s choir. Vietnamese people go out and throw away their trash as it passes by. Quietly and calmly, the street gets cleared of trash. It’s efficient and something I’ve noticed. Hanoi is a huge city with tons of people, and it’s much less full of trash than I had expected. It would be wrong to call it a clean city. It’s lived in, and you can definitely find a grimy alley. But you actually have to look a bit for them. The regular roads, where cars can drive, and which have tourists and street stalls, have relatively little trash, and what’s there is usually from that same day. The garbage trucks with their little melody remind everyone that now it’s time to get rid of their trash. It’s good evidence of the strong sense of community spirit I feel I’ve encountered here in Vietnam.

On Monday I’ve booked a trip to Ninh Binh. Tomorrow I need to see if I can’t get my blog website finished.

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