You've Got to be Kidding...

So, I just found out that the person (Teeny Weeny) who made my hotel reservations a month ago forgot to tell me one teeny, tiny thing. The hotel wouldn’t be able to accommodate me after the first week. So I’m due to arrive back in Hanoi and I have nowhere to stay. I’m sure she’ll find something, and once again I feel like a spoiled brat, but for the past week and change, every time I’ve woken up to things crawling on me (I think I shared my bed with an exceptionally large roach that I saw skitter away last night, and I woke up with some new insect bites), every time I’ve opened my suitcase to see ants scatter into dark little corners, every time I’ve been woken up because of paper thin walls, or Itsy Bitsy’s message tone on her cell phone going off last night (all night), and every time my freaking room has flooded (and something in this current place is dripping from the ceiling onto my bed, so we’ll have to change rooms), I have thought fondly of my nice, quiet, clean, non-insect infested hotel in Hanoi, where I can get my laundry done, get room service, get a good night’s sleep, which hasn’t happened since I left Hanoi, and generally relax. And now that’s gone. I just can’t believe that she didn’t tell me this a month ago, when I could have made alternate arrangements. To say that I’m not happy about this would be the understatement of the century. I know that I can be a control freak, which is not a trait I’m particularly proud of, and while I’ve been trying to be more go-with-the-flow in life, this is not a situation to which I react well. When things just don’t work the way they’re supposed to, I get really frustrated.

Well, the dripping from the ceiling has stopped (for now?), and TW called and said she found a room for me somewhere else. But honestly, it’s things like this that are exactly why I usually make my own arrangements. That way, if there’s some kind of screw up, at least I know who to blame. Not that I don’t know who to blame in this situation, but I’d feel bad being bitchy about it. In any event, she said that the new place is 2 km away from the old one, but that it’s still in the downtown area. Hanoi is a fairly big city, so I’m sure she’s right, but I really liked my “old neighborhood”, if I can even call it that, since I only spent 10 days or so there. But 2 km is an easy walk, so I can’t imagine that I’ll be prohibitively far from anything.

The women on the team went out to dinner tonight, and I really like them. We’ve spent a *lot* of time together over the past week and a half, so I suppose it’s good. One of the women (let’s call her Millie) is a very motherly type, and she usually orders for us when we go out to eat. It’s funny because when she gets on the bossier side (which really only relates to things like how the food should be served, what kind of wine we should get, if we ever get wine [PM wanted to get Vietnamese wine one night and she looked as though he’d just spit on her, it was hilarious], and things like that), PM will call her “mother in law” which is now a joke among the whole team. Apparently the term “mother in law” (the literal translation is “my husband’s mother”) is not exactly a compliment, and it basically means someone who is bossy and officious. They’ve actually taught me to say “thank you mother in law” in Vietnamese. But sometimes she’ll do something and look at me and say “mother in law!” and start laughing. She ordered some braised pork ribs last night (among other things), which were delicious, and were kinda really spicy. I commented that they were spicy and she said “you drink more beer, feel better!” and refilled my glass. It was great.

One more day to go, and we’ll be heading back to Hanoi on Thursday. Now that I know I have a place to stay, that’s good news. Hurrah! I don’t know if the new place will be as nice as my Zephyr Hotel, but I’m sure it will be fine. It wasn’t quite The Plaza, but it sure was nice. However, this new place better have laundry service, since the first thing I’m doing when I get there is dumping the contents of my suitcase into a laundry bag. It may not *all* be dirty, but it’s all going in. I feel really, really weird about letting other people wash my underwear (shut up, it’s a hang up of mine – I never said I wasn’t weird. Quite the contrary, I freely admit that I’m a freak) but at this point, I don’t have much choice, everything’s got to be washed.