I shouldn't say all of Vietnam because despite having lived here for over 5 years, I haven't really seen very much of the country. I can only speak for Da Nang, where I live, and how no matter where you go there is construction going on.

They do a pretty good job in Vietnam in getting their message across in English and I am happy for that. Even though the local language uses the same alphabet as English, it isn't as simple as it might look (to learn) at first glance. Sure, if you learn what a few words look like you will know what they are selling there but the difficulty arises because the letters do no make the same sounds as they do in English. There is also the added bonus of all the accent marks and I don't have any idea what any of them do So therefore, words NEVER look the same in both languages despite having similar building blocks.

My weight loss journey has been going pretty well I suppose and a lot of this has to do with me realizing that this takes time and isn't going to happen immediately. I have been doing the new diet of sorts for about 10 days now, and it depends a lot on whether or not I have eaten recently or not but my weight is down about 3.5 to 4 kg after just 10 days. For all the people using pounds out there this is 8.8 pounds, in 10 days.

It's been a bit of a slow week for me because about this time last week I decided to make some changes in my life. When I was traveling on my "hate-cation" about a month ago I was visiting a friend who was about the same size as me when we met. Now granted, that was 20 years ago so some allowances can be made but when I was visiting him it was impossible to not notice that I am significantly larger than he is. Also, his girlfriend is a pharmacist and at one of her shops they have a triple-beam scale to weigh people. These scales are never wrong and I found out that I weight 97kg now or nearly 215 pounds. Some of this is good weight but well, most of it isn't.

I'm sure you mostly all know, but Nadi is my dog and she really doesn't like other dogs. She doesn't try to attack them or anything like that, which is good since she is the size of a handbag, but she just wants them to go away and leave her alone. Every now and then a younger dog will try to play with her and she lets them know sternly in doggy language to "get the hell away from me."

I dream almost every night and for the most part, I wake up at least remembering some of what happened. My nightmares are not the traditional boogieman chasing you or scary creatures of the night, but rather, some sort of dreadful situation that perhaps is possible in regular life.