Immersed in Vietnam

Since last weekend I have had the luxury of thinking about only one script for a several consecutive days. It has been great. I may have already mentioned that the script is an adaptation of a Vietnamese novel that I am co-writing with another woman who has actually read the novel (which is in Vietnamese.) But during the writing I started to feel like I wanted a little more sense of place than I was finding on travel sites on the web, and stumbled across The House on Dream Street by Dana Sachs. It is the memoir of a woman who spent a cumulative year or so in Hanoi in the early to mid-nineties. This was exactly the kind of thing I needed, since the script is present day--I know the nineties aren't exactly present day, but in that is is a generation post-war, and the story I am working about is NOT about the war--and the first act takes place in the Old Quarter in Hanoi, which is where she stayed as well. On top of that, her book was a real joy to read. About the only time I get to read these days is on the elliptical machine at the gym, and for several days I looked forward to the gym just because it meant I could read this book.