I have arrived!! Not in the social, socialite snobby sense, but I made it through the nights (2) and got to Hanoi after just 34 hours of bus journeying, although to be fair I did stop off in Hue to get lost for a bit. I got very lost, and for not much good purpose other than to write that abortion of a photo post last seen here.
Anyway, the hostel looks cool, the managers and owner are great guys, and sharing with 9 strangers isn't anywhere as weird as I thought - half were asleep when I got in about 6am, then when I came back half an hour ago only the solitary female was still there, packing up stuff and doing the futile administration tasks that all short-tern travellers seem to insist upon.
Frankly I smell like a dead camel and don't myself mind in the slightest; I'm not here to make friends with snobs and real travellers don't wash every damn day and I couldn't give two figs what any girls think of me, because I'm just not into that at the moment. So sod it: I'll do as little as I like for as long as I can stand, all in the spirit of supreme, unadulterated laziness :D

Mind you I do seem able to achieve a lot more than most of these lazy tykes and drunkards (and I do it WHILE I'm drunk, so there :P ) - in the few hours while my `roomies` were staggering into consciousness, I had hunted down various camping, electronic and headwear shops, and have bought myself a new knife, and a new camera! I came ever so close to buying a trilby/fedora hat too, but it just wasn't quite Indiana Jones enough for my liking.
The knife and camera however I did buy, as well as some better quality karabiners and stuff from the camping store.
Being a great one for gadgets I spent half an hour examining and thumb-testing (with appropriate horrific shuddering memories) knives, then spent a full hour and a half going to three camera shops and choosing the model I really. wanted

Having discarded one of their forerunners after the misdeeds it did me (turning my left thumb into sushi, I felt it was time to leave the relationship and I believe I threw that lovely old knife of mine into a deep lake) and being involuntairly relieved of the other; yes, I was robbed, someone saw and told me about it later; I felt it time to replenish my travelling stock and get myself into a full ale, capable position for some hardcore tourism.
I'll start all that tomorrow, I promise ;)

So I have a cool new knife (and I wont be cutting towards my hand ever again, oh no) and the coolest of cool new cameras.

It is an 18.12 Overture Overexposure by Tchaikovsky-Panasonic inc. with a million and 8 megaschnitzels and a wide-loaded zoom anus.
Actually it is a Panasonic DMC TZ2, but the first description was better I thought. Anyway it HAS got (without getting too geeky, and I'll tell you just why I CAN'T do that in a minute) a 10x optical zoom, which means a 10-times magnification real zoom, withoout using digital lies and frippery to distort the image so you may as well have taken a regular distance photo anyway, like all `digital zoom` features actually deliver - the whole concept of a digital zoom is basically a lie because all you would do is enlarge the picture on your computer to get the same, lower detailed picture.
I mean, like, duuuhh.

But my shiny new beast has a real 10-times zoom, and a wide angle lens which means I can probably get a self-portrait of my stomach without standing across the room :D

There is one slight problem with it, though.

The instruction manual written by the devil sits before me. I feel a little like I should be calling a priest. Having bought this shiny new toy, I try to learn how to use it (pretty natural, wouldn'tcha say?) but like all makers of electronics gizmos, devices and semi-specialised equipment it simply has not ocurred to them - not to a single one - that normal people might like some of the benefits of these technological masterpieces without having the need of a fucking babelfish to get through even the opening paragraphs of the instruction manual.

I mean I know this is a popular theme among, for good example, Bill Bryson who seems unable to operate even a VCR, and they are a decade out of date. But honestly; just listen to this:

`Using the maximum zoom ratio (max T*1), focus can be aligned for subjects as close as 1M from the lens`
(So far all I have understood are the words "from the lens")
`Useful for taking close-up pictures from more distant locations of small flowers blooming close to the ground, or insects that may run away if you attempt to get closer.`

Now this is a good piece of advice - useful for the insects, at any rate, although a more realistic wording might be "that may fly away" for almost no insect worth photographing is either incapable of flight, or faster than an eager human being with a high-end camera.
Plus If you can get to within a metre (No closer! No further away!) then you are capable of getting a lot closer to a blooming flower, which is unlikely to run, even lesss likely to fly away from your attentive lens.

The problem I have with this simple paragraph is not that it is difficult to understand (they have the main manual for that) but that it appears on a seperate sheet of paper with no reference or relevanceto anything else, and with no pre-amble as to what it is trying to confuse you about, and most crucially NOWHERE is it explained what the fuck (max*1) is or how you get there with your obtuser than obtuse instruction manual, which is, let me say, reassuringly bulky, but 50% written in cyrillic or arabic languages, and of the remaining portion only one tenth is in English, and I am being generous, even, in calling it that.

Suffice to say, I shall not be getting full use from my camera just yet. I'll just need another 34 hour bus trip to get through the mangled terror of instructionalese in order to work out how to, say, take a picture in normal lighting conditions.
A brief perusal through the camera itself (always more instructive than trying to read what the makers have to say about their own product, after all) it tells me in its own cruel way that it will never be my friend either, for there are options upon options and none of them explained.
It appears I can pre-set my camera to take pictures of fireworks, of beaches, of soft skin (as opposed to Popeye's skin, for example, I suppose) of food and of two kinds of babies. Why there are two settings for apparently two different species of young child is something I will never get an answer to, no matter how many more of these gigantic cocktails I drink, and I have only had one so far so you can't blame my bewilderment on that. Yet.

Also the nice lady in the shop chucked in a free camera case with my new camera - and, yes, it had an instruction booklet: with pictures of how to insert camera into case.
Now I'm sorry, but when a camera case needs pictorial instructions it is either time to seriously worry about the future of the human race, or just uo your medication.

Anyway I plan severe bewilderment before the day is out, but it is all good; I have been in Hanoi, a brand new city, for less than 5 hours and I have already found good company, spent around £165 and drunk part of - I jest ye not - a whole fishbowl full of vodka, blue curacao and 7-up. If there is one thing the Southeast Asians know how to do, it is to sell large drinks to white people in amusingly big containers.

Things are looking up :)