Hanoi

Notre Dame

Not gonna lie—didn’t love Hanoi. I was disappointed because I was really excited to see the capital city and explore the old and French quarters. It was the end of our Vietnam stint though, and it ended up being a jumping off point to Halong Bay and Sapa. It also didn’t help that we saw a man dying in the street as a result of a motorbike accident on our ride into the city from the airport (we opted for a $60, 1 hour flight instead of a $25 15 hour bus ride). It also probably didn’t really help that it was cloudy the first day we had in Hanoi and that we arrived to our hotel at 5 AM from Sapa and couldn’t check into our hotel to sleep. Lots of factors here. The odds were not in our favor to enjoy Hanoi.

After getting off a bus for 12 hours, Kate and I vegged out in front of the TV of the lounge in our strange hotel/hostel. We were apprehensive to leave because of the tiny, crowded, and traffic-ridden streets of the Old Quarter. This was also the day I decided to get more pages in my passport, which should have been an oh-so-exciting day, but of course I got lost on my way to the consulate, ripped off by taxi drivers, and found out that I had to come back because apparently it takes 6 hours for them to tape in more pages into my passport.

the bicycle hat basket man

a narrow Old Quarter street

street-side dining

Even though I had a rough day, our night in Hanoi was really fun because some of our friends from our TESOL course were in town. We also ran into some friends that we had made earlier in our travels in Vietnam. The funniest part of our Saturday night was when the Communist police came into the clubs at midnight to shut them all down. We had been hanging out with people who had been in Hanoi for 8 days though, and they knew the after-hours spots to go to. The club we went to was called Funky Monkey. The outside is completely black and the curtains were pulled tight so no one would suspect that there was actually a nightclub inside.

The next day I decided to do some sight seeing, mainly to see Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed body.  In my hotel lobby I got hooked up with two people from Hong Kong and went to what we thought was the Mausoleum, but was actually the museum about the great man Ho was and how he brought Vietnam to a successful Communist revolution. Though there were no dead bodies, the museum itself was very entertaining because of its abstract nature. My favorite room was the red room, which represented the volcano of revolution. I also liked the large fruits on abstract furniture that were meant to remind the communist people of nature amid the great industry of the country. As we were exiting the museum, we saw a slew of school children, all in their uniforms. The Chinese woman I was with informed me that the red scarves of their uniform were a communist thing, and she remembered being a young girl and could not wait to turn 8, when she could wear the red scarf as part of her uniform.

me and the giant fruit

After disappointedly leaving the museum without a dead body in sight, my new friends and I began to walk towards the temple of literature. We THEN found the mausoleum, which closes at 11, and since we were a mere 10 minutes late, we were unable to see Ho. The temple of  literature is Vietnam’s first university and is actually pretty cool. The woman I was with

was able to read the Chinese around the temple, telling me that the names on the stone tablets above turtles represented all of the people who passed a very difficult exam to become a politician or some other important person in Vietnam.

My day ended by being ushered around the corner from our hotel to a travel agency, where our friends from the night before also were. We ended up waiting for our minibus for about an hour, then were taken outside the city center and dropped off in a random parking lot. We all felt as if we were in the middle of a horror movie as we were ushered off (again) to what was a proper bus station. Before even boarding the bus we all joked that we were going to be on the rave bus (due to Kate and my extensive supply of  pills for sleeping, motion sickness, and anything else that might go awry) and it would be a bus ride to remember. We could have not been more right: we got on to the bus, which had multi colored lights, and a rave video playing. Literally, it was the video of a dj

The Road to Laos

playing a massive stadium show.  And as for the memorable part of our bus ride? Halfway through our 24 hour journey our bus broke down for 3 hours just before the Laos border. Once we got to the border, we were told to get off and go through immigration. Per usual, the white people all got left behind. We wandered down a road for about a kilometer after being cleared through Vietnamese customs and before the Laos border. It was a very cool way to enter Laos, though we were very concerned that our bus had left us since we saw no one else until we cleared the Laos border.

turtles with the names of people who had
passed the exams on their backs in the
Temple of Literature

This same species of turtle lives in the lake in Hanoi.
It is extremely sacred.