Hello lovelies,
We're in communist Vietnam, and its capital city - Hanoi. It feels even hotter than Hong Kong and everywhere you look and try to walk there's a motorbike or a car. Crossing the road is definitely a leap of faith.
As befits our first visit to a communist country, we spent our first night swanking around the 5 star Metropole Hotel, a very generous wedding gift from Trev. It's got to be the poshest hotel we've ever stayed in...staff on every corner bowing and wishing us good day in French, slippers being laid out next to the bed in the evening and a whole host of complimentary items available in the room for the use of patrons (if it wasn't nailed down, it came with us). On my first day in Hanoi I also tried Pho Bo for the first time and it was amazing, think I could eat noodle soup everyday and looks like I will be for the next few weeks. Something I won't be having on a regular basis though is Chrysanthemum juice - yes, that's right - the juice of a flower in a can and it tastes really bad. Banana chewing gum and banana ice cream on the other hand, amazing.
Spent our first afternoon lounging around at the hotel pool with the other residents of the Metropole, a group of people who spend thousands of pounds travelling to Vietnam to lounge around a pool like they're in the Costa Del Sol, apart from that it's overcast and humid. In the evening it poured with rain and I slipped off a curb whilst walking out for some food and managed to bash my arm up pretty badly on a railing - got a huge unslightly bruise on my arm. Looking good! Needed a strong drink to get over the pain and the shock of my accident, so we had some cocktails at the hotel bar and Sam managed to visit a Bia Hoi (a roadside beer pump where locals gather to drink super cheap beer - it's only 20p a glass) to fill up a 1.5 litre bottle with beer which he then smuggled into our 5 star hotel room for us to drink. We know how to live!
Day two and we depart our luxury abode for the super busy, hawker-ridden, pavement-free streets of the Old Quarter. We had breakfast on the street - a feast of some slightly strange deep fried tofu, noodles, cucumber, nettles, and fish cake. Once we had found a room (a slight shock after the Metropole), it was time to do some sightseeing. Off to The Temple of Literature, Vietnam's first ever university and a temple to Confucius. Also time to sample another weird drink in a can, this time 'Birds Nest' with white fungus...as you can imagine, not hugely refreshing or at all tasty. Just massively sweet with a bitter, lingering, chemical aftertaste. Went on to the Mausoleum of Ho Chi Minh, but it was too late to see the embalmed man himself, so instead, walked around the botanical gardens.
Once we were finished sweating our heads clean off in that part of town we headed to the Water Puppet Theatre. Water puppetry is, according to the pretentious fan of cliches who wrote the Lonely Planet section on this, a "fascinating art form" which "originated in northern Vietnam". It was a bit like Punch and Judy, but in a pond. Oh, and much less violence and no story. Just a series of vignettes of dancing puppets, backed by a full Vietnamese band whose music sounded oddly like it should have come from a western. The puppet show was ok, but there's always a question mark over art forms that are only found in one place - if it was that good, why didn't it catch on everywhere else?
Tomorrow we're off to Ha Long Bay to gaze deeply into one another's eyes whilst cruising the calm and picturesque waters of this corner of the far east. Speak soon, noodle soup time...
xxx
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