The sheets on our beds are flesh-coloured. I only noticed when I saw Mikey's feet sticking out of the end of his bed. Neither of us woke up particularly early this morning, a habit we're going to have to get out of eventually, but because we had no plan for the day it didn't really matter. We'd missed the hotel breakfast, so we went round the corner to the hotel restaurant for lunch instead. We're slowly getting used to Thai food, knowing what's safe (fishless) and what the word for chicken looks like, and we have a few favourites. I chose chicken with chilli and sweet basil leaves as it hasn't let me down yet.

We formulated a minor plan over the rice and decided that we had to get a visa for Vietnam as it's supposed to be a long-winded process and might take a week or so. We organised ourselves, wandered up the road to get some variable-quality passport pictures done (mine truly hideous, with crazy-hair and manic, surprised grin, and Mikey's very respectable and rather cute!) and then flagged down the next passing taxi which took all of five seconds.

All the embassies in the world are on one street, so the Vietnamese one was easy to find. I'd never been into an embassy before and it was quite disappointing - a shabby beige room with three glass-fronted counters at one end, some plastic chairs and a bunch of westerners standing around looking worried or sunburned or both. We filled out the photocopied forms in our best handwriting, panicking over the specific details required (what was the border crossing called?) and then waited at a window in front of an empty desk for ages. A lady came along, took the forms and passports, asked us for almost £100 (which we had to pay at the middle window - we just passed it along) and said that we could pick it all up tomorrow. No hassle. Which was pleasing.

Then we went to Mikey's tailor, who already had the trousers made. He needed to fit the jacket, so we waited for a while and a lady bustled in about ten minutes later with a coat hanger full of jacket templates. She pinned Mikey in all manner of places and I noticed that the tailor man's head barely reached Mikey's elbow. The pinning lady was only slightly taller and it made me think of a picture I saw in Gulliver's travels where the giant is pinned to the ground by all the little people, or something. Literary references aren't really my forte. Ten minutes later we were done, so we went for a doughnut and then tried out a promising lead on an IT shopping centre that was likely to sell iPods. It did, but at prices even greater than Malaysia. Mikey managed to walk past the pirated software and the offers of hard-core pornography and we didn't spend too long there. Back outside we hailed a taxi and headed back to the hotel for an evening of email and reading and chocolate from the corner shop.