What I’m doing now (monthly updated)

These are my last days in Hanoi. We stayed here for almost two months, eating liters of Pho and even more Banh mi sandwiches. My final conclusion is that Hanoi can be the best city in South East Asia if only it fixes its air and noise pollution problems. We had to top up our stash of face masks and earplugs here.

This was the first time we booked a motorbike for months. Our own vehicle improved the quality of life significantly. We could do many things outdoor without interruptions, such as visiting favorite dining places before a cafe and then going to a grocery store, and pharmacy, and oh Tzeyu can you please drop me here I want to buy some milk tea for climbing. Ah, milk tea!

Tzeyu left earlier. She went to Korea, and we will reunion¹ in a few weeks in Malaysia or nearby. Until that I have an important mission. I’m going to China and I have to use as much vocabulary as I could remember in the last months. I don’t really have many ideas what I’m going to do in China. For now, I know for sure that I’m going to order a lot of meals, pastries, and drinks, but probably I need to find more things to do. As I understood, Chinese tourism didn’t fully recover from Covid. It’s hard to find updated information in English as soon as I search for something weirder than Palace Museum, Tiananmen Square, and the Great Wall. For example, I still don’t know if there’s any good climbing gym in Beijing! There definitely must be a few, it’s just hard to find.

Here, in Hanoi, I climbed twice per week without skipping, and I don’t want to break my personal streak even on a “vacation”. And as I started talking about sports, it’s probably an ideal paragraph to mention that we tried Lindy Hop dancing courses. I wasn’t good and it was stressing for me but I know Tzeyu enjoyed it a lot, and this matters.

I keep studying Chinese but it doesn’t become easier. I gave up studying writing and focused on vocabulary. Currently my Anki deck has 1200 cards. I do at least 20 minutes of grinding per day stably… And it’s not enough. I can see progress but Anki was never a suitable tool to show how good you are, its algorithms are meant to always push you into unknown territory. I hope my adventures in China will show my studying is worth something. If my “能便宜一点儿吗？” (can be a bit cheaper?) works at least once, I will be the happiest tourist in the country.

I’d organized a few Geoguessr parties in vas3k.club community, and these occasional meetings led to a Geoguessr community of 100+ members, a few small tournaments, and non-stop dicsussions of road poles. That’s great!

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