Hanoi

Well I think this will be my last update...for a few weeks, anyways! Haven;t been doing a ton of stuff (since I am in Hanoi for 4 days), just shopping and eating edible food!

Wednesday: In the morning we left our boat on Halong Bay and took a bus to Hanoi, which took about 4 hours. After checking in to the hotel I went to Koto for lunch, which is a restaurant similar to Friends in Phnom Penh (teaches street kids how to work in the hospitality industry). Not quite as good as Friends, but still nice to eat at. Then I spent the afternoon shopping (Hanoi has the best shopping in Vietnam, along with Hoi An!) and in the evening the group went on a cyclo ride through the old town to the water puppet theatre. The water puppets are kind of hard to explain...it's in an indoor theatre and there is a big tank of water, and behind it is a screen (covering the puppeteers). The puppets are wooden and do all kinds of stuff on the water, there's dragons (fire breathing!), fishermen trying to catch fish, kids playing, etc. It's all really well done and set to traditional music. Cool to see, but we were all glad it was only an hour. After that we went to a restaurant where I had my first pretty good Vietnamese food- a green papaya salad. Hanoi is big with it's copycat restaurant and hotels- someone picks a popular restaurant or hotel and makes their own version of it! Example: Little Hanoi is a popular restaurant in all the guidebooks. So there's Little Hanoi 1, Little Hanoi 2, Little taste of Italy in Hanoi (the taste of italy part is in tiny letters). It's bad when they do that to a hotel, because the taxi driver might take you to the fake one where it's terrible and they charge you tons of money. So many scams to watch out for!

Thursday:In the morning we walked to the Ho Chi Minh complex, with has his house, museum and mausoleum. First we stood in a looong line to see his preserved body! It goes to Russia ever year for 3 months for maintenance. It's a very 1960s communist looking building (the big grey stone one in the pictures) and you can't talk or bring anything inside. The line goes into the building and finally into the room where his body is kept (it's very cold in there!). There are tons of soldiers around (all quite tall and large for Vietnamese people!). As for Ho's body, it looks pretty...waxy. Wonder what they use to preserve it! We also saw his house (a simple stilt house, he didn't like anything fancy) and his museum which was WEIRD. Very very weird. Very creepy, post-modernist, I can't explain it! For lunch I went to Koto again (and we also went there for breakfast as a group...) and went shopping in the afternoon. In the evening we had our final meal together as a group at Cafe Smile, which is similar to Koto but cheaper! Oh yeah and my funny story of the day...we were standing outside the mausoleum and our leader Bao was talking about Ho Chi Minh (obviously he doesn't say anything negative about the man, or about communism, regardless of his personal views) and one woman in our group chose that moment to go off on a rant about communism and how soon the Vietnamese will wake up and realize that they need democracy...well whether or not she was right was irrelevant, as our poor leader was clearly not up for this debate, especially when there were tons of guards around! So I broke in and made a comment about their being "microphones in the trees" and started loudly saying (jokingly) into the microphones that I totally did not agree with that woman, and I would help to spread communism to Canada as long as they would let me out of their country. That seemed to do the trick and she stopped talking!

Friday: Changed hotels. My new hotel is in a better area (closer to the interesting stuff) but it's in a back lane so you can't actually drive to it! The taxi let me out a block over so I was a bit confused. Hope my ride to the airport can find me. There's lots of signs pointing to the hotel, so it should be okay. The hotel is more expensive than the ones I've been staying in ($35usd/night) but is recently remodeled, has nice linen and pillows, the room is a bit bigger, and the bathrooms has less thin towels (I still wouldn't call them "fluffy"). Nice to have for a couple nights, anyways. The HK hotel is going to seem super luxurious after everything I've seen here, though! Walked around buying more stuff (since I weighed my luggage and was only at 15kg), had lunch at Highlands Coffee again, continued buying stuff. Then came back to the hotel to relax and work on all the stuff I must accomplish when I'm home.

Saturday: Decided to try to have a big walking day (haven't done a lot of walking since being in Asia, due to lack of sidewalks and abundance of motorbikes...) so I started by walking to the Hanoi Hilton. They demolished most of the prison to build some luxury apartment towers but a bit is left and was turned into a museum. Most of it is about how the French used it to house Vietnamese political prisoners, with a bit about the Americans held there thrown in. It was really funny, because all the displays and videos talked about how well they treated the Americans and how they all loved their stay there. There were photos of the captured pilots playing sports, decorating a Christmas tree, receiving gifts from home, oh and they all received nice leather shoes, bags and other "gifts" when they were released! Looks like they had it pretty good- not sure what John McCain was talking about when he mentioned all that torture he went through... Then I walked to Koto for lunch, and then continued to walk and walk through the old quarter and around the lake. However after a while I got annoyed because all the things I don't like about Vietnam kept coming up....
1. motorbikes trying to run me over
2. cyclo drivers asking if i want a ride
3. moto drivers asking if i want a ride
4. people ripping off tourists (yes...a used paperback book should definetely cost $6 in Vietnam...)
5. random people pretending to be nice and trying to talk to me (obviously they want something from me....do I look stupid enough to fall for that?)
6. grocery stores forcing people to put their purses in lockers before entering the store. No not backpacks, PURSES! Like you can only walk in with a wallet. Yeah, I sure trust that they won't steal the rest of the stuff in my purse while I'm shopping! Sorry, I won't be shopping there.
7,. Not being able to walk on the sidewalk because it's cover with motorbikes, broken pavement, or groups of people eating. It's hard to walk on the street when it's being used by motorbikes, cars, bikes and cyclos.
8. People trying to sell me useless shit. Do I look like I need postcards? Why don't you sell me something useful, like an ice cream.

Tomorrow I leave for HK in the morning. I don't plan on doing much there other than going to McDonalds and going to a shopping mall to look for some cute wedding sandals for myself. And they have a Sees chocolates store there so I will be buying those for my parents! Then on Monday afternoon I leave for Winnipeg, amazingly enough arriving late Monday evening.

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