Walking today in Hanoi

Last night Will and I continued using our new travel Bible, Lonely Planet and went to this amazing little hole in the wall restaurant Little Hanoi. We both had big dinners and drinks for again around a total of $10. I have to say the food here is incredible. I was a bit worried when we started this trip with the food in Taipei but now I couldn't be happier and the great thing is you get amazing food at a great price. Next we had planned on heading to Bar Labrinyth when we realized that it had been replaced with another bar. We decided to check it out anyway and it was actually really cool. We hung out there are had a few Tiger Beers before heading home.


Today we slept in which was nice since from about 6-7 am there is a public service announcement spread through the loud speakers across town and of course our "sound proof" windows don't block that noise out, or most of the other common street noises, so being able to go back to sleep after that was great. Today we had decided to take it easy and do some shopping since we had seen most of the sights the day before. We needed up going to this market that was 2 blocks wide and 6 stories high. It was un-like anything I've ever seen in my life. It would be like North Park full of street vendors instead of stores. And every area of this market was categorized perfectly. They had the food area, the shoes area, the fabric area, the dishware area, etc. They had everything.

After this we went to the Ngoc Son Temple, the one we were supposed to see the day before, and it was very cool. It's set in the middle of the lake and it was so weird walking over that bridge and being met with silence. It seemed that all of the honks and traffic noise disappeared. Inside of the Temple there was a Tortoise display about these huge Tortoises, yes Sherill bigger than Spot, that supposedly live in the lake. And if you see one of these guys you will have good luck. We also walked around the lake and at the other end is a small pagoda on it's on little island.

Before we headed out today I had decided that I wanted to buy some art work so throughout our walk I made Will stop in pretty much every little gallery we saw. The artwork here is very cool and there are a lot of aspiring painters.

After lunch at the Kangaroo Cafe we headed to one of the main attractions here in the Old Quarter, the Water Puppet Show. It was a 45 minute little show with 17 different scenes of these little puppets doing stuff on the water. It was definitely a type of puppet show I had never experienced before and I really enjoyed it. It's a MUST SEE if you come to Hanoi, and oddly enough it is quite hard to get tickets to see these little things.




After the show it was more shopping. We walked and walked and it was kind of disappointing when we realized that we were seeing the same paintings over and over again at every street gallery. It was like the all used the same pictures to create their art. We finally found a unique little place where I got to small oil paintings.

Then it was back to the hotel to rest before dinner. We ended up going to a place that was called El Cyclo and all of their seats are old cyclo chairs which was a very clever idea. We are back at home now and headed to bed. We are up early in the morning on our way to Halong Bay. I am so excited about this and am just praying that we have some nice weather. I can't imagine getting into the water when it's 65 and cloudy outside. Then we are back in Hanoi on Sunday before we board our over night train to Hue. Believe me we will be blogging about that experience. So if you don't here from us over the weekend no need to be alarmed. Hope you have a great Friday and a wonderful weekend.



Pictures of all of the motos and the crazy traffic. No rules at all.