Hanoi

Hanoi is our first planned destination of the trip and is certainly a new face of the world for us to see.  Our flight got in late and after a harrowing taxi ride through the busy and uncontrolled streets of downtown Hanoi, we found ourselves in a quiet room ready to crash.  After a free breakfast at the hotel, we snagged a group shot, stepped out into the rain, and hit the streets (or rather they hit us....)

Not 5 minutes into our excursion we were approached by two very nice vietnamese women and had our first stupid tourist moment. One sold us hats to keep us dry and the other gave us some fruit and let us pretend to be Vietnamese for some pictures. What we didn't know whilst taking these pictures is that we were being a part of the worlds most polite robbery. Not knowing how many zeros were in the exchange rate and trying to be polite to the people of the land ended up costing Hunter $45 USD. We knew this would happen at some point, but we never expected the sneaky old ladies.

Hunter got real sour and stingy with his money so we decided to walk it off and see the rest of the city. The rain soon subsided so we took off our hats and continued on. Most of the touring that we did was the sights and sounds of the street life but we did fine a few interesting landmarks in the city. There are two lakes near the old quarter that each have a pagoda in the middle.  Also, we decided that the corny Hanoi sign was worth a photo.  We were also surprised at finding a large cathedral in the middle of the city, considering we aren't in Europe.

 Around 1, we started to get that rumble in our tummies ad decided to check out some of the street food that we had been smelling all morning.  These street vendors resemble more of a house with a kitchen on the front of the side walk.  There are huge vats of boiling broth and cases filled with whole ducks, noodles, and herbs.  We had pho a total of three times today and realized it was the perfect filling meal to warm us up and get us out of the wet and cold streets for a bit.  Below is our second pho, which was located next door to where we spent the night.  We are all getting exceedingly good at using chopsticks as well.

More of the street life that we saw included crazy street traffic, tons of motorbikes, and the constant noise of beeping horns.   After avoiding traffic on both the street and the side walk we came to the realization that traffic rules here are merely suggestions. The rules we noticed are you only avoid what is in front of you and completely disregard all other directions as well as the bigger vehicle has the right of way no matter the situation. This causes the drivers to honk out of necessity every few moments and with the massive number of scooters and taxis out there we think that whoever runs the car and motorbike horn shop in the city must be doing pretty well. It is a defining feature of everything we hear and look forward to escaping the busy city life tomorrow.

There is also tons of trash and dirt in the city, especially near the lakes.  If you can't tell, the little white things in the water aren't trash, they're dead fish.  It makes us quite skeptical of the water quality and the cleanliness of the lakes overall.  We had seen a man fishing earlier in the morning as well.  Noted to ourselves not to order the fish pho...

If fish are float, do not swim.
-Confucius

 Our night started to close down as we waited to board the night train to Sapa.  One of the last adventures of the night was to find our way to the second lake pagoda.  It turned out to be closed once we got there but we were still able to sneak a peak.  A lot of new experiences and lessons learned, but we survived our first real day in Vietnam and southeast Asia.