Eek. I had not intended to go nearly two months without a post - since the last time I posted, we saw lots of early blooming cherry blossoms, entertained out of town guests, finished our contracts, said goodbye to all our friends and students, and packed up and moved out of Japan two weeks ago. Though we felt the earthquake on March 11 - and many of the aftershocks - we were very far removed from the all the hard hit areas, with no more than the occasional rolling blackout to contend with, and so were just glued to the news with everyone else.
From Japan, we flew back to Vietnam, where first we stopped here to relax a bit:
... before heading back to our old onetime home Hanoi:
Hanoi hasn't changed much since we left two years ago, and it feels awesome to be here - I am as happy to be back in Vietnam as I am sad to be out of Japan. It also feels awesome to *finally* have free time again - all of March was so disgustingly busy, I didn't even have time to think about knitting. Unfortunately, because there's so much traveling ahead, I have a very limited amount of yarn with me to last until I get to Iain's house in Scotland in early June (where I managed to tuck a ridiculous amount of yarn into a box of books he was already sending back): just two skeins of madtosh prairie and a ball of malabrigo silky merino, to be specific. I started with much, much more, but my backpacker pack couldn't handle it, and so I had to reluctantly mail most of the stuff I wanted to work on back to my mother's house. It feels a bit ridiculous to have little stockpiles of yarn waiting all over the world, but in the meantime I was finally able to shake off the awesome food - lazy beaches - motorbikes everywhere! stupor that has been our two weeks back in VN and wind half a ball of prairie to get started on an Ishbel shawl. So hopefully there'll be more knitting soon...
