The streets of Hanoi

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We went for breakfast downstairs as it's included in our room rate. It was quite good, not quite the standard that we've had at the last 2 places but they were big hotels and resorts and this is a little boutique hotel.

One of the advantages of having crohn's disease is that if something is going to make me sick, it will do so in the first 10-20 minutes and sure enough, something I had at breakfast made me sick. It was probably the coffee but I'm not sure, it doesn't really matter, all that matters is that I then spent some time making friends with the toilet. When I thought I was ok we went for a walk but a few minutes in I decided to go back and get my imodium just in case. I left Brad there and said I'd be back in a minute but when I got back I felt ill again. i wasn't gone long but when I went to get in the lift to go back out, Brad was in the lift coming back to check on me. He had also bought himself a jacket because it's quite cool here. We've gone from really hot weather in Saigon which was 35 degrees, hot and extremely humid to here where it's about 18 degrees and chilly. We didn't exactly bring a lot of clothes that are for this weather so we each bought a jacket.

Once I was feeling a bit better we went back out and walked the streets. It's definitely a lot easier to cross the road here, though the footpaths are full of bikes so you have to walk on the road. The good thing was that certain areas were completely blocked off to bikes.

We stopped for a coffee in one of these areas and realised there were little kids everywhere due to it being a bike free zone. A few people had told us that the Vietnamese coffee is good so I thought I would give it another go and I asked for one with only a little condensed milk (apparently that's the traditional way they have it) but it was still awful. Brad got an Americano (black coffee) and said his was a bit better at least. We saw a Swedish couple that we'd met yesterday who were on our flight from Ho Chi Minh and we waved them over, they stopped to chat and ended up joining us. We chatted for ages about life in Sweden, life in Australia and life in general. They were lovely. After at least an hour they then excused themselves and if the service hadn't been so bad at the place we were at, we would have stayed for lunch but the staff were so damn rude at this place that we decided to leave and won't be returning.

After walking all the way around the lake, we decided we needed to eat as we were both really hungry. We decided to try the place opposite the rude service place, and when we found the entrance the girl offered us a number of different options and one of them was a Vietnamese BBQ which we had been told top try if we got the opportunity so we went with that. She took us up to the 5th floor and we were seated at this little table overlooking the lake and the plaza. You cook the food yourself on the bbq which is in the middle of the table. It was absolutely delicious and I would highly recommend the place, it was called Avalon BBQ.

After that we went back to the hotel to Skype with the 3 little kids and Richard (their Dad/my ex husband). It was quite funny as the internet wasn't that great so it kept glitching out on us and the kids said that it sounded like we were speaking Vietnamese.

We then spent the rest of the afternoon chilling out watching movies.

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