The GF and I met at the baggage claim in Hanoi after rather a long time apart. Our flights came together, as did our luggage, and so we left for our flat together.
The flat is in an old workers’ dormitory on the edge of the French Quarter. It is just by a busy road and is quite an old, rather damp and miserable feeling place. Horror of horror, it has a separate toilet and bath adn the sink is on the bath side. I’m not sure it will be the most comfortable place I’ve ever stayed, it reminds me above all of the place we had in Beirut, though it is much cleaner. But the area is very polluted, the building has that feeling of crumbling age and it is incredibly humid.
This was added to this morning when I woke up and wandered into the living room to stare at the motorcycle wash on the other side of the road, when I heard the sound of water flowing. Following the sound was appalled to see water gushing out of a cabinet by the front door. I opened the cabinet door and inside was a pipe with a bit of torn rubber hanging from it like a ripped condom, and water just belching out as though from a small fire hydrant. There seemed no way to turn it off, the rubber had clearly been keeping it in place, and meanwhile there were several milimeters of water on the floor. I woke the GF with some difficulty to ring the owners for help, then dashed to a neighbour’s. This was an elderly woman who seemed annoyed and reluctant, as though Airbnb guests often come and bang on her door and she’s fed up (it reminded me of our building WhatsApp group in Istanbul) but I mimed and mimed until she came to pop her head around our door and immediately got into gear. She and I used our slippers to sweep the gushing water down the corridor and into the bathroom and down the drain, though it was fast enough that there was a good couple of centimeters all through the flat (not the bedroom, happily, which was raised), and the bathroom itself, which was a lowered, was full as the drain could not handle it.
Eventually a plumber arrived and turned it off. I would quite like to leave this flat as the thought of the mould that will be growing under the old floor tiles makes me uncomfortable and it feels like a good excuse to leave a place that has a separate toilet and bath. But we will stay.