hanoi

Ever since I broke my phone last week (surprisingly, neither mine nor Violet's fault) I've been getting out my real camera to take pictures. My camera is still full of photos from Eliot's birthday party--while waiting patiently with my fixed 35 mm lens for me to get around to doing her 5 year pictures. Maybe I will get to them sometime before she turns 6. Maybe not. But I can at least try to update here. 

I actually took a grand total of 0 pictures of Hanoi on my camera, these are all from my phone.

Since our phones only work in Thailand, Rocky buys a phone card for every country he goes to, in my phone I have contacts named, Rocky Swiss, Rocky Laos, Rocky Cambodia and the list goes on. I snapped this in the taxi when he changed to his Vietnam card. 

 We spent our first day in Vietnam in Hanoi. Rocky had meetings all day, so I checked into the hotel, changed out of the dress I had spilt hot chocolate all over on the airplane and had my first taste of pho.

Turns out it tastes like water and cilantro. 

 Then I headed to one place I knew Rocky wouldn't mind missing, the Vietnam Women's' Museum. It was ranked on the top 5 on Tripadvisor but neither the hotel concierge nor my taxi driver had any idea what it was. After a few phone calls we figured it out. It was really neat, though the floor on the "American War" was a little jarring. I wasn't prepared to read the bios on the women in the guerrilla forces that included American soldier body counts of over 150. There are two sides to everything and with war, both sides are sad.

After the museum, I sat down in a coffee shop with wifi and realized I was only .73 miles from the 19th century cathedral that I wanted to see. I screen shotted the directions and headed on my way.

I love walking around to explore a new city. In Hanoi, there are A LOT of scooters. I never got a picture that did it justice, so I stole this off the internet. The scooters carry everything and every one. They also don't follow traffic rules. When crossing the street, you just have to dodge them. I was almost hit by a scooter carrying several workers and a 20 foot long ladder--not so easy to dodge.

After about 20 minutes of walking I got a snippet of wifi again, enough to realize I'd been walking in the wrong direction and was now 1.5 miles from the cathedral. Still feeling confident, I readjusted again and walked for another 20 minutes. When I was finally able to get wifi again there were two lakes between me and the cathedral. I caught a taxi back to the hotel and got a facial.


 Anywhere on the streets of Hanoi, you can buy these little loaves of bread. They make fantastic sandwiches.

 When Rocky finished up we went down to the Old Quarter to do some shopping.

 We spent a rather significant amount of time in this quilt shop. Rocky had bought a ABC quilt from them a few months ago and wanted to show me the shop. The shop is part of a NGO that trains and employs women in northern Vietnam and Cambodia. All the quilts are handmade and hand quilted.

Here's a link to their website http://www.mekong-quilts.org/

 The quilts are all so beautiful and well made it was hard to leave.

We came home with a quilt for our newest nephew, baby Ricker, who I keep wanting to call 'Little Ricky" but Rocky has informed me that is absolutely not okay.

ha long bay

We've been wanting to go here for a while but it always seemed to fall through. A couple weeks ago Rocky came home and said he was going to Hanoi on Friday and I immediately decided I was going with him. This was our last chance to go away before the baby comes (6 weeks from last Friday). I did have to visit the airport doctor to get permission to take the flight. Not the first time I've had to do that...

We booked a two day, one night cruise on Ha Long Bay. The drive from Hanoi is only about 100km but it took our bus a solid 4 hours thanks to fantastic road conditions. I was able to observe that everybody in Vietnam owns nicer cars than I ever have. Unfortunately, they only drive them at a maximum speed of 30mph.

Rocky prefers to travel dressed as a local. Which does not explain why we own a cowboy hat and/or canvas fisherman hat from every country in SE Asia.

 It was amazing.

 Ha Long Bay is an area of about 1500 sq km with about 2,000 limestone islets. It took over 500 million years to form. Or was created by a dragon.

A couple of years ago all the junk boats were painted white, apparently to insure no one ever got a picture as good as the postcards from 5 years ago.

 We visited a local floating village.

 This woman is harvesting pearls.

 They take 2 year old oysters, add a ball of plastic and a few years later pull them out again.

Then we drove the four hours back to Hanoi. We were able to break up the drive with a mandatory water puppet show. We both agreed we were glad we saw one, now we never feel the need to see another.