Oh, I forgot to mention that he brought with him a beautiful Vaio laptop computer. It just made me more and more eager to get my hands on my new ThinkPad!

Shit, my new laptop will come with built-in wireless Ethernet, but in this country Internet connection is shitty. I don't know anybody who has broadband here, let alone wifi. Incredibly they all work with just a telephone line. I wonder if they truly think that's the way to go into the 21rst century.

As far as I can tell, I won't get to use the wireless Ethernet until my next trip abroad, which will be who knows when. (This week's trip to do my visa paperwork doesn't count!)

I don't want to be offensive, but the place where I'm going to do my paperwork is more like a boring town where there's nothing nothing nothing interesting to see or do. Museums? The only museum in sight is the Revolutionary Museum full of communist decorations. Historic temples? There's one temple about 200 years old perhaps, which is in a pittiful condition, very small, you can see it all very well in 20 minutes (no kidding). The other temples are 20th century reconstructions made with bricks and cement, so they don't feel 'historic' at all. Movie theaters? The only one I found looked as if it had been closed for many years. Shopping centers? None. Road intersections with traffic lights? I saw perhaps two or three in the whole city. Good restaurants? None, only a few smallish, non impressive. I'm not shitting you guys, the previous time I was there I really had a hard time choosing a nice postcard to mail to my friends. They did have many postcards on sale. But it was extremely difficult to find one with a nice picture that you could boast about having visited, something that you could show to people and make them want to visit there too. How sad.