'sbeen something of a rough week. Getting ripped off in my local shop, having my wallet disappear within a matter of minutes on a quiet(er) street the following night (I'll never know what really happened),realising I'm almost maxed out on my credit card and that my first proper pay check will only just cover the repayments, leaving nothing left for a deposit on an apartment... financially, it's not been a great time for me lately! But tonight, Friday, 'teacher's day' (which is actually on Sunday although kids and schools have been celebrating all week),I'm post five-course dinner at the school for the gifted where I work in which I could only eat sticky rice and lettuce, drink beer and represent the pasty faced teachers in the karaoke, and I'm actually feelin' okay! (They tell me the deer, squid and other meaty delicacies were delicious. Pretty amazing treatment in a third world country, don't you think?!)

This leads me to wonder if my problem with Saigon up until now has, in fact, been not enough beer?! For, two nights ago, after all my financial woes were woven, I went for a beer with a workmate in the same restaurant that saved my ass after my wallet went missing on Tuesday (they took me in, made me drink iced tea, waited for my hysteria to calm the hell down). As we walked home afterwards, I noticed that the traffic didn't even make me flinch. Oh, the numbing beer factor... so good at the time, although within an hour I'd lost my sense of taste and smell and wanted to fall asleep by 8.30 - just can't drink very much these days. It's a good thing.

Anyway, tonight I feel some sort of majesty and sense of the mystery of it all returning to my life. I ate my favourite dish of vermicilli noodles with spring rolls (rice and lettuce not really cutting it to be honest...) and stared at the lizards climbing the peeling walls, looked out at the makeshift kitchen twenty metres from where I sat with crates of local produce hanging in baskets form the bamboo ceiling, and realised that actually, life's not too bad after all... Even though I love to complain about this place - and wouldn't choose to live here again given the chance - I look around me and see xe om (motorbike) drivers earning a few dollars per day, children going to school for ten hours a day, six days a week without a complaint, and Vietnamese teachers earning a tenth of what I earn. It all kinda puts things into perspective and all of a sudden I feel ashamed for my hysterical rants about the polluted, maniacal motorcycling nature of this place. Yeah, it's true that it isn't really the place for me, and that I should have known better before buying a ticket here, but the truth is that I can't really afford to leave just yet, having got myself into this rather crap financial situation by choosing to have the year of a lifetime and gallavanting around the world until the very last minute (and cent), credit card be damned...

So, I suppose I'm learning to live with the consequence of my actions just now. And, slowly slowly, learning to deal with the noise of 10,000 motorbikes screaming around the streets at 2 a.m when Vietnam has won the football, learning to cope with the corruption of this place and the sleazy backpacker scene - learning to ADAPT, really... It really is the best thing one can do.

I'm excited about possible future ventures. Working in Jordan or Lebanon or another part of the Middle East.. or even India (just caught the end of a documentary on Indian private schools)... and visiting my homeland sometime after May next year for a while... There are definitely things to work towards at the moment, while I learn to live IN the moment and ENJOY the moment more... it has been so easy all year to do this and it is only now, when I am struggling again for the first time in a long while, that I remember how easy it is to preach presence and peace and harmony, but how much harder it is to practise these things in times of despair. BUT... I know I am strong enough to do so.

SO, I'm off to sleep off this beer haze and dream of brighter and more positive futures... and to do my best to appreciate what I do have rather than moan about what I'm missing. All very humbling stuff.

Enough said. It's bedtime. Time to climb the stairs back up to my fourth floor hotel room and earplug out the nighttime concerto of bikes, dogs and hawkers. Night night everyone xx