Back from Vietnam! We had an amazing 4 days!! Oh my gosh..where to begin. Hanoi is now my favorite place in Asia. It's a ridiculously cute city with an old quarter surrounding a lake. The city is constantly filled with motorbikes and honking. I've never been anywhere with so much honking! Everyone honks. It's not an angry honk it's a "I'm right behind you" honk...maybe sometimes an angry honk. All the honks are different pitches and rhythms. Pretty annoying but incredible that a city functions with no almost no traffic lights. Walking through the traffic is just as crazy. You just have to go and not hesitate or you'll get hit. It's totally nuts!
The food...ahhh. Sooo different that Thai food! It's all veggies and healthy soups. Oh..the food was ridic. We also went to a famous bar that serves Son Tinh...various rice liquors. We sampled 7 different shots flavored from Apricot to sticky rice and one that has a famous saying.." drink this 5 times a night and be blessed with 4 sons." haha That was my favorite, actually.
We stayed in the old quarter and had plenty of time to shop and walk around. Most of the souvenirs are made in China so they're real cheap. I think we bought 40-50 classical/jazz concert DVD's and maybe 15 CD's. Pretty amazing! We also met some new friends and had a traditional dinner with a family in their home. Dave sat in at the famous jazz club (Minh's) and was well received by the club owner and audience.
One day was spent on a day tour to Halong Bay. If you ever get a chance to see Halong..go! It's similar to Krabi in the formation of the limestone cliffs but there's WAAAAY more of them in Halong. We were fully surrounded by cliffs for as far as we could see. Since tourism is really new (only since 1994) everything is booming around Halong. Soo booming that families move onto the water and live in water villages! I guess the larger communities even have schools for the water kids!
From our tour guide we learned that Dave and I are both golden monkeys! This year is the year of the golden pig, which we know only happens once every 60 years, so we asked when the year of the golden monkey was....and it was 1980! She said that makes us extra intelligent. hahaha..that's right..respect the golden monkey!
Conversations about the war were quite informative. The friends we met were okay to talk about it and we got an overwhelming sense that there is way more resentment towards the Chinese than Americans. Guess that makes sense. One of our friends told stories about remembering the planes flying over Hanoi to bomb the roads outside of town. I'm interested to go the big war museums in Ho Chi Minh in May.
We went on cave walks, lots of Vietnamese coffee runs, and even made it to a show of their ancient tradition of water puppets! Instead of a stage, there's a big murky water pool where the puppets do amazing movements. The puppeteers are behind a screen so that the audience can't see them and do all the movements without being able to see clearly. I guess they train for 3 years to be in the show! Dave and I were really impressed with the show and read that the puppets have to be replaced every 2-3 months since they're made of Sycamore and are submerged in water every night. We also read that there's a town that only makes water puppets....so we tried to figure out if we could find the town to buy a couple. I can't even believe this but we just kind of hung around after the show asking people about it. Finally, they said "come back on Friday morning at 9am." OK..so we went back this morning and they were really resistant to let us buy but finally took us into a back room where dozens of old water puppets were lying around, not being taken care of! Yeah..we went nuts and found 4 that we really like. It was a pretty amazing experience.
That kind of touches upon our experience. It's a cool time to visit Vietnam since it's only been open for tourism for about a decade. How amazing is that! It's soo beautiful and NO McDonald's or Starbucks...that's how remote it is! Anyway, we have a day to recover before we head off to Singapore. I'll upload pics now from our trip....
