A day in the oubliette

My hotel is having some renovation work done. Several of the 10 guest rooms have been gutted and are getting new floors, windows, and fixtures. Naturally this has involved a lot of drilling, sawing, hammering, pounding (my head), and grinding (my teeth). Up until today the work has been confined to daylight hours, but it's now 9:30PM and apparently the work is going to continue until the entire hallway outside my door has a brand new floor. This, I suppose, is what I get for not booking the Somerset Maugham suite at the Metropole.

You might be wondering why I don't just take a powder. Go someplace where the drunken laughter and hot jazz are loud enough to drown out renovations, honking horns, and cats in heat. Don't think that hasn't crossed my addled mind. I've been looking all week for the strength to return to Language Link and get myself invited out for some weekend carousing with those funloving pedagogues and goguettes.

To my chagrin, I woke up with a low-grade headache and even lower-grade diarrhea to go along with my throbbing ribs, sore throat, and still swollen and tender ankle. If Gordon were fluent in English like that Geico spokeslizard, I'd send him out to look for Imodium and a few more Vicodin, but I'm afraid Gordon is just out for himself. Time after time today I dressed up like I had somewhere to go, but I never got twenty feet from my bathroom except for a hurried excursion to the market for more bottled water and baguettes.

About the only thing I accomplished today was to read some of the other blogs being written by expatriates in Hanoi. There are a surprising number of these and every one I looked at succeeded in depressing me. Either the blogger is a handsome, athletic twenty-something zipping around on a motorbike picking up chicks, eating bats, drinking Irishmen under the table, and getting book offers for the ongoing tale of his thrilling adventures, or she is staying with a Vietnamese family and being driven to a different fascinating temple, village, tailor shop, or party every day. One blog is maintained by a couple who live at the Metropole (for the security more than the comfort) and blog about trade shows, opera evenings, and cocktail parties at the American ambassador's home. Aren't there any lonesome expatriates around here with painful hemorrhoids and threadbare pants?

Oh well, I'm going to bed and hope to wake up in a different movie.