September 21st, 2025
- 191 reviews on WaniKani
- 15 lessons on WaniKani
- 24 reviews on Bunpro
- 3 stories on Satori Reader
- 6h7m of an Autumn Marathon, including things like:
- Book: 響け！ ユーフォニアム 北宇治高校吹奏楽部へようこそ, 80%->100%
- Game: ファミコン探偵倶楽部笑み笑み男 (full 第７章)
- Magazine: 百合姫２０２５年９月号 (until page 220something)
haaaa xdd
I didn’t properly catch on the forum today because I’ve ended up spending something like 7.5 hours today learning Japanese alone, tomorrow might be a bit of catching up ^^
So rapid fire Japanese:
- Hibike novel: great, learned a ton of Japanese over the process, pacing at the end is becoming really fast compared to anime and I was fully convinced the final few episodes were cut out from the first book to the second one, but noo, something like 10 things happens in the last 10% of the book, we stan xdd
- Emio, very laughing, very man, I’m so happy with how fast I read and how much I understand, might be my next language goal!
- Yurihime: this issue feels special, it’s longer than usual, it celebrates 20th anniversary and some of the comics feel longer than usual, so I want to appreciate it’s specialness as well ^^
Life
I still had a great day in Vietnam over the 16.5 hours (minus sleep) that I had left xddd
We booked a trip from a local tourist office to take us to three different activities: an incense factory, a conical hat factory and a lacquer factory, and each one of those three had its own mini-workshops!
Let’s start with the incense factory then, we went through the whole process of cutting down a bamboo all the way until it’s a stick, wet in paint, and covered in easily-flammable cinnamon ^^
Look at the amount of sawdust in there, and of course, all refinement is handmade by people 
Aaand paint and cinnamon:
The activity you could try out was that you could put a stick through a machine that coats the stick with easily flammable cinnamon and it would come out as properly coated already, so we ended up making a bit of incense of our own ^^
And they had a really cool garden with sticks where you could take a pic with them C:
Then we went to a family-ran business that was making the conical hats in Vietnam, and here’s the materials you can use: a frame, and the bamboo you put on the frame, before you start sewing thread together to make a hat 
Apparently it takes multiple hours to make a single hat, and they only get 50.000 dong for one (something like <$2 for a piece , terrible rate )
The activity here was to paint your own hat, but we’ve got some really cheap quality brushes and paints and the paints were leaky, so here is my worst shot at painting a hat xddd (pls dont hate)
I chose a tiny one because luggage space constaints, aaaa xd
And yep, you could take the hats home! Because it was a family business, they invited us for a lunch together and they let us play some badminton together, so we did so ^^
Then, laquer factory! Really high effort and high quality art, I was really surprised
A group of 9th grade girls came in to take camera interviews with the tourists, and they did one with me (hey, interviews, a trend xddd), I could tell from their faces that they didn’t get what I was saying in some of the places, but for taking part in an interview, they gave me a tiny Vietnam hairpin! And also, their English was good enough for some casual conversations, and they told me that I’m beautiful and that I’m, eee, “very tall”, as if xdd
You don’t often hear those things from strangers in Germany, so that was fun xdd
Anyway, the workshop that me and my mom and the 9th grader Vietnamese girls did was using eggshells to decorate a lacquor piece, and here’s how it looked like!
Aaand then we went back to Hanoi ^^
Another train, also almost losing my legs, it literally is like one feet away xdd
Stir-fried noodles and a bit more western food, because my mom started missing it already xdd
Aaand I found a bookstore that had both manga and textbooks to learn Japanese, including at a C1 level, which you can’t find anywhere in Berlin xdd
Had some fried squid and liquid nitrogen-cooled ice cream, fried squid was great, nitrogen-cooled ice cream was really, PAINFULLY cold, I think I got frostbitten on my tongue in like three places xdd
And yeah, that’s it, final night in Hanoi, by tomorrow, the next update should be from Kuala Lumpur! I hope it’ll also be fun, and see you tomorrow! C:
(Also, stan Tiredcity, it’s my absolute favorite store in Vietnam so far, does indie art on shirts, postcards and artprints ^^)
How’s the Hanoi coverage @rentalfish? Did I miss any essentials? ^^