Oh the irony! Tomorrow, I’ll be working from home, so you can guess what happens. The busses are running again. Typical. Just typical.

I have no idea how they get away with paralysing a whole city for so long, but in the last seven days the city busses have operated only Wednesday. I don’t even quite understand what the bus drivers are angry about, so I really don’t think a week long strike is the way forward. Ironically, I bought a new buscard for the next half year starting, of course, the day the strikes started. Just my luck.
Luckily, it finally starts to get spring and I got my motorbike out of winterstorage yesterday. So no more begging for a ride or biking those 5km uphill myself :)

The city busses are really starting to piss me off. Of the 4 workdays in this week, they are now on strike for the 3rd day. Tuesday, after I came home around 1am, I just went to work normally with one of the intercity busses and only found out I couldn’t get home after I got to work. Luckily, I could get a ride from a collegue. Wednesday, everything was fine again, but yesterday I was waiting for about 10 minutes for the bus and thought it odd I had seen no city bus whatsoever. So I checked their webpage from my phone, and lo and behold, they were on strike again. A bicycle trip followed. Today, I was clever enough to check the webpage during breakfast and send a text message to a collegue. Funny thing is that the busdrivers are public servants and are actually not allowed by law to strike. And I thought that it was only in Italy where public transport was on strike every other day…

The first pictures from Bulgaria are online. Mainly from the last few days in Bansko, high up in the mountains where we did some skiing, and from last night where we went out in Sofia to a bar/restaurant with live music with the rest of the FreeBSD Bulgarian World Domination Team.

After almost a week back at work, it’s time for the final Vietnam mail. In the last mail, we already arrived in Ha Noi, our final destination in Vietnam. From Ha Noi, we did three major excursions. The first one was a two day trip to Ha Long bay, where we slept on the boat in the bay between the clifs. Quite surprisingly, we were booked on the standard class and were 3 guests only, us and an swedish guy, on the boat with at least 5 people working for us. I could get used to that ;) Especially the lunches, consisting of 3 courses, gaint shrimps, crab, and much much more seafood. I’m still not sure if I should say unfortuntaly or unfortunately, the weather was cloudy and misty while were were in Ha Long bay. Sunshine would have been great, especially during our kayakking trips, but the mist did give a very mysterious atmosphere around the clifs.

The day after returning to Ha Noi, we were already on our way again for the next trip. This time to Hoa Lu, the old capital of King Dinh and King Le. Not much to see here, except the tempels for the two kings built as models of their castles. The surrounding nature was much more impressive, especially seen from the water. The last trip was to the Perfume Pagoda. The Perfume Pagoda is actually the name of an area with a lot of pagoda’s only reachable by water via the river Yen. We visited two of the pagoda’s, one of which was built into a grotto about 3km walk up the mountain. Of course, all the way along the path were stand with people trying to sell food, drinks and what obviously was the latest top10 hit in Vietnam, of course all with the stereo at max.
Then the final day in Vietnam. Last minute shopping of souvenirs and a walk to the biggest park in Ha Noi, where preparations for a 4 day
festival were in full progress. Knowing us, you will guess that this was a festival for the locals and not tourist, so asking for food an adventure. We went to one of the food stalls that looked most finished and where they were preparing food. With the few words of english the guy spoke, he told us that he only had food tomorrow. After the long walk we were more thirsty than hungry and a beer was no problem. Then 10 minutes later, he had a moment of geniousness and asked if it was food we wanted. Yes, we wanted food. Oooh, no problem… Another noodle soup for us it was, and a nice conversation about the festival the next few days. Which we couldn’t attend as wewere on our way back to Europe, with a small stop-over of about 1 hour, plus travel back and forth from the airport, in Kuala Lumpur.

Then the last thing remaining to tell you all, is that all the pictures are online now. The last 240 or something unsorted pictures from there last few weeks and a short series of 74 pictures of the whole 3 weeks.

And after one week at work, I can use another vacation…