Preparation for departure

Yesterday was a boiling and busy day, a day to spend money. I made an appointment with Tuan to go looking around at some camera models, particularly Canon S95 and G11. I need a good camera to keep some of the departing moments with my family and friends before leaving. That S95 seemed most possible, given it small size and my unwillingness to enslave myself to a more professional yet expensive and cumbersome design. It was way more costly in Vietnam than it is in the States, but I had no other choices.

Entertaining Tuan to a Thai lunch at Sawasdee, only to find the food, tasty as it was, seemed too expensive for the ordinary pocket. Only the shrimp vermicelli, a fried morning glory dish and two little bunch of sticky rice cost me almost 20 dollars. It was not that it was too much for me. I just felt it a little bit too much for such a meal.

Going to Tran Phu originally to look for a warm coat, yet I ended up buying a two pairs of trousers instead. Tuan insisted on paying, saying that he gave them to me as a present. "Good friends make you rich, good wife makes you smart" :D

After some electric outlets, I wanted to buy another pair of glasses. The one in Do Hanh Street that Tuan recommended seemed a bit suspicious, so I took a safe side and went back to Cau Giay to buy one at the more prestigious Viet Tin, though it cost me another 1,500,000 VND.

And that was not everything. I ended a day of shopping spree buying a portable hard disk drive at nearly 100 dollars. It was a Seagate HDD with a global warranty of over five years.

In the evening I went with mum to the hospital, stopping midway in Fivimart to buy a cushion and a bag of adult diaper. Grandpa looked pitiful, breathing with difficulty and could not communicate verbally no matter how little with his surrounding daughters and nephews.

Two pieces of good news came up, though. In the morning Huyen messaged telling me she had won that coveted Erasmus Mundus Scholarship. A feeling of joy was mixed with some envy. Huong and Huyen, whose company and care I have enjoyed all those years, received two most prestigious grants from Fulbright and Erasmus Mundus while I, the "big brother", could only go for the much less known ADS :-)

And I was able to get the The gioi Publishers to license the coming edition of Learning Maths through Verses. Much remains to be done though, before the final product came out.