Why does writing seem like such work! I have not blogged in over a month, and now I actually dread the prospect of sitting and typing my way toward even a paragraph—at the moment, I deplore the thought of generating text. It feels like such drudgery! The past few weeks are a jumble in my brain. I don’t feel like sorting out the details—Hanoi, Staff Build, Hai Lang Bay, train ride to Saigon, this week. Too much has happened.

At any rate, Hanoi was everything I had imagined Vietnam to be and more—winding, circuitous streets of the Old Quarter, peaceful parks along West Lake and Hoan Kiem, French colonial architecture, the guts of the city spilling out onto noisy, narrow alley ways. Hanoi marries the past with the present, the ugly with the elegant. There the Vietnam I had hoped to find actually exists.