My Protanopic Life

Since we had bought our tickets for June 2nd, June 1st was an open day to do anything. We spent the morning being lazy but eventually made it out to enjoy the city. We found no shortage of camera shops, which was great because a lot of them had vintage gear that was neat to see. I stopped into one and priced an SD card to help me hack the Wii, and ended up going back for it later when I found out it was the best deal.

We strolled down to the cafe by the lake that we'd eaten at last time we were in Hanoi. Its "The Quintessence of Hanoian", though I can't remember the name. The cafe is nice but there's no internet, which kinda sucks, especially when there's an e-mail waiting in your inbox that tells you that your flight on the next morning has been canceled and you've been put on a flight later that evening. I got that e-mail when we eventually found internet elsewhere, but it was too late to check out of our hotel that day even if we could get on a flight that evening, so we stayed. We did call them on the phone to plea with them to reconsider, but the best they could do was put us on a flight at 8pm, not 9pm. So much for arriving home at a decent hour.

That evening we decided to check out a western restaurant. I had seen it while we were walking around and decided to check it out to get away from the continual asian selections we were surviving on. This night I got pizza, nachos, and sangria, and Tien got honey chicken. None of it was the best I'd had, but it was delicious and welcome to my taste buds.

After dinner we went down to the lake to watch the sun set. We missed the most beautiful parts of it, but it was still nice and we sat down there for a while taking photos and just watching the world. Just before we left, power flickered on and off in a large part of the city, and when we got back to our neighborhood the power was out on the entire block. Tien didn't want to go into the hotel because it was dark and scary and probably too hot, but I wanted to make it to our air conditioned room. Sure the power was out, but it hadn't been all night, and the room was probably nice and cool. In fact, the room was nice and cool, and the power came on just after we found our way up the candle lit stairwell and into the room.