Daily breakfast in Hanoi: The open air balcony of the executive floor dining room at the Melia Hotel. Fresh fruit, nice smoked salmon, good eggs, steaming pho bo, decent tea. The view is lovely and misty this early, the ant-sized traffic below still barely humming - Good Morning Vietnam:) I'd visited Saigon a few years ago. Fleetingly. Stopping off with Sprog on the way to the beaches farther north. Hanoi is prettier. Full of sleepy FrenchColonial character. You can almost see Catherine Deneuve et Vincent Perez se sont promenent sur les wide and leafy boulevards. There are wooden-shuttered windows and wrought-ironed balconies, wide classical colonial facades, mystical lakes with weeping willows and multi-tiered pagodas. Yet a block or two away - it's all buzzing commerce and tooting traffic - bicycles, more bicycles, bazaars with endless rows
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