Last day in Hanoi

Today we went to the museum of Ethnology to see how different cultures live in Vietnam, this was really interesting. they had life size huts and houses for the tourists to look through, different clothing items & tools that look about 12 billion years old but are apparently still widely used today in Vietnam.
whilst at the museum some japanese girls got very excited by me and ewen and insited on having their photo taken with us, we like to think that we look all fashionable and famous but it was probably our pasty white skin and my blonde hair... people keep commenting how white my skin is, im not sure if this is a compliment or an insult....
after exhausting the displays at the museum we went to the restaurant there (only because i was hungry, we were expecting an expensive, un-Vietnamese meal) which turned out to be the nicest, cheapest meals we have had so far. the resturant was a learning center for disadvantaged youths to complete their schooling and gain qualificiations in the food industry.

  here is a water puppet they had on display, im fairly sure this is Vietnam's version of the joker

altthough we haven't yet seen a bike piled this high on the street some have come pretty dam close! there was actually a photo behind this showing a man riding the bike down the street piled up this high

ewen on a seat in the museum, a lot of furniture in Hanoi is child sized, all of the streetside cafes have locals sitting in the footpaths on child sized plastic furniture like its the most normal thing to do in the world. i think thats why everyone is so skinny over here, put on even a little bit too much weight and you have to sit on the floor

the museum had a fairly large room dedicated to Australian Aboriginal artwork that had been loaned to them for their 1000th anniversary year... ewen found this very exciting!!

Piet hard at work in the fields

ewen been a monkey with one of the more G-rated statutes (if your not sure what i mean have a look at ewens blog from today)

me posing at the museum

one of the huts on display, we climbed up here & went inside, it was huge, definitely the most impressive hut we saw at the museum. the floor was made from bamboo and had a lot of cracks in it, i was a little worried when a big tour group came in after us, the floor creaked enough just from me and ewen walking on it let alone 20 wendy wu tourists

After the museum we got a taxi to the Ho Chi Minh Museum (which ended up costing us nearly a third more than the ride to the musem despite this ride been less than half the distance) once out of the taxi we realised we didnt have enough cash to go to the museum so set off in search of an atm.

atms here look like phone booths so we both crammed in, figuring that way it would be harder for someone else to get in and steal our money.

the atm gave us two 500,000VND notes which turned out to be useless because once we walked back to the museum that wouldnt accept our notes saying they were too high, i felt like yelling at her that the currency here is ridiculous!!! who ever heard of a country where the smallest note is 1000VND (ok i just googled that and thats not correct but i dont care). the only useable notes here are between 1000 & 100,000 here anything outside of that is useless.

we were both tired & grumpy and my feet were killing me so we decided to go back to the hotel room for a rest. we managed to bargain a cyclo driver down from 100,000VND (each)  to $1USD (for both of us) which we were pretty proud of. 

after a hour or so of internet research on halong bay we ventured out to Hoan Kiem Lake and went and looked at a giant embalmed turtle... they sure like embalming things over here.

we had a nice dinner over looking a busy Hanoi street, i got ice in my drink again which i sculled again so as not to be impolite.

tomorrow morning we are leaving Hanoi for Halong Bay, i'm really looking forward to a break from the busy city here. will be nice to relax on a beach for a few days.

Day 2 in Hanoi

so we have now survived two days in crazy Hanoi without been run over by cyclos (bikes with seats at the front for tourists), taxis, trucks or motorbikes. ewen says he wants to take a video of me crossing the street because he thinks i look so funny, i pretty much do what the books tell you not to do, i run!!! hehe
today we slept in till 8.30 (i slept 13 hours last night & ewen slept 12 so we have caught up now). had a bit of a problem with the toilet not flushing but after calling recpetion they sent a guy up within 5 minutes to fix it, he used the weirdest contraption iv ever seen to fix a toilet.
then we went and had our free breakfast upstairs, it was ok, watery eggs, bread, ham and bananas.
after this we went outside and got a cyclo to the other side of town, in our travel book a cyclo is supposed to cost $1USD for about an hours ride so when we only needed it for 10 minutes and the guy said 1000 VND (5 cents australian) we thought it was awesome! when we got to the end of our ride and tried to give our driver 5000VND (30 cents) and he wouldnt take it we thought he was been polite and didnt want to be overpaid, how naive we were! he wanted 100,000VND from each of us which is $5.75 which doesnt sound like much but over here that is a RIP OFF!! we tried to tell him that 5000VND was all we had but he wouldnt agree with us, in the end we paid him the 200,000VND and told ourselves we would be tougher from now on and not get robbed!!!!

  anyway, we got the cyclo to the Ho Chi Minh Moseleum which is this very large, very ugly, very grey building that has Ho Chi Minh's body in it for tourists to gawk at. we got there too late though so could only look at the outside of the building (it's only open 7.30-10.30 each day) 

 we then walked to a pagoda which took about 15 minutes to walk to, on arrival we realised we couldnt even go in becuase i was ''inappropriatly'' dressed in shorts so we walked all the way back deciding to go to a different more accepting pagoda. we went to ''one pillar pagoda'' which is one thousand years old!!

 outside the pagoda we brought some postcards but dont be suprised if you dont get them (this to to my family & Pat). the place we got them from was an icecream stand with an umbrella over it and on the umbrella was printed 'post office' the post box to put the cards in was attached to a tree but oh well!! maybe vietnam post service will suprise us.
we then tried to go to the Ho Chi Minh museum which is supposed to have lots of kitsch things of Ho Chi's and be a bit of a laugh (not to the Vietnamese though, they take it all very serisouly) but it was closed!!! they close for 3 hours for lunch... pity australia hasn't jumped on that bandwagon.
from there we walked to the Temple of Literature which we both loved. it was a lovely garden with high walls to block out the noise of the city, the grass was green, they had bushes in the shape of monkeys, dogs and birds and little gift shops where i got some playing cards and we got a phrase book and a lonely planet book of vietnam (because at the last minute of leaving Aus i stupidly decided to bring my other vietnam book and it sucks, no info on hostels, restaurants, travel, etc) the lonely planet book only cost us $7AUS which was a bargain considering in Australia they are approx $30. we spent a while walking around the gardens and watching a group of school kids there on an excursion, the kids got very excited waving and yelling '''hello'' to us.

                                  (here is a photo of me ating a nut bar all the way from Australia)
after this we wanted lunch but everything that our new book said was good and safe to eat at seemed too far away so we went to the Hoa Lo Prison Museum instead. this cost only 20.000VND for both of us to enter so that was great!! (under $2AUS) it was very interesting and there were a few other tourists in there so that was good to see. it was interesting to see that they talked of all the cruel things the americans did to the vietnamese prisoners but when the Vietnamese ran the prison they made out like they treated the americans like they were on holidays. there were lots of photos of John McCain and ''apparantly'' his uniform, i was a little sceptical that it was actually him in half of the photos though.

This is a paint shop we saw on the way to the prison, here in Hanoi the shops are organised by type, so one street is all shoe stores, one if all rice stores, one is all bamboo stores, one is all gift wrapping, this street was a painting street, every shop (if you can call them that) was designated to painting supplies, thought you'd find this interesting Dad. after this we finally went and got some lunch (it was 3.30 by the time we left the prison) at a resturant called The Green Tangerine it was a really nice old building. i got a bit worried because i drank half my drink before realising there was ice in it, which is a big no no in Vietnam (they use tap water to make the ice and this makes us westerners sick) but i was really thirsty so i sculled the rest before the ice could melt and made sure to request no ice from then on. fingers crossed i dont get sick!!

 

              This was the resturant we had lunch at (well a 4pm lunch so more a mixture of dinner & lunch)
 after lunch we walked around the corner and got tickets for the Water Puppet Theatre (which just happened to have a showing 10 minutes after we got there, very convenient). this was very cheap too, 80,000 for the both of us. ($4.50AUS) this was very interesting although all in Vietnamese so i lost interest after a while and started day dreaming about the rest of our holiday :-)
After this we came back to the hostel, detouring through a night market where we saw slabs of meat on benches for sale, giant fish crammed in small tubs of water, live crabs for sale, lots and lots of flowers, they have really beautiful flowers for sale everywhere here.

For Nita Brown (can someone please show her)

Nan, the toilets were a little cramped but nothing to postpone a trip over. here's a photo for you to inspect, i think the writing on the toilet lid might list things not to put in there.....hope you make it to England soon!!!

Taxi ride

So we arrived into Hanoi and after a little bit of confusion at immigration (we lined up in the vietnamese citizen line, just trying to fit in with the locals) we made it through got our bags and went to find the person who was meant to be transferring us to our hostel, after 15 minutes of searching we went and brought a sim card so we could call the hostel. strangly the unstructions for how to work the sim card were all in Vietnamese which was very inconsiderate i think, but we worked it out in the end, called the hostel but they had no record that they were meant to pick us up.
we went outside and were very quickly ushered into a waiting taxi, a little apprehensive we gave them the address of the hostel. it didnt take long to realise that in Vietnam horns are more favourable than use of the breaks or doing head checks (maybe you should come to Vietnam darc, wouldnt have to do head checks) our driver pretty much beeped the horn the entire 30 minute drive, at one point we went through a 4 way intersection, our driver beeping and dozens of motor bikes coming the other way driving around us, was crazy! i saw too many crazy sites to name on that drive but some included, houses been built been held up by lots of sticks (i'll take a photo of this and post it later), people sitting in the middle of the road with slabs of meat on blankets cutting it up, a little girl on the back of a motorbike tied to her mum with a scarf, a woman carrying a stick behind her neck with large containers hanging from each end (one filled with GOLDFISH and the other filled with flowers), a person riding a motor bike with one hand and holding an umbrella with the other, a person on a motorbike with a TRACTOR tyre attached to the side of it!!! plus many many more crazy things. i wanted to tell the taxi driver to stop every 30 seconds so i could take photos, we;re about to go exploring and get some dinner now so i'll be sure to take lots of photos. its only 2.45pm here but we are just about ready for dinner and bed after only 3 or so hours sleep the past 24 hours.
hopefully i'll keep this updated as frequently as i have so far, fingers crossed the novelty wont wear off :-)
dooooooonnng

Singapore Airport

Made it to Singapore all good, hardly slept on the plane, not for lack of trying! so loud and they kept turning on the lights to bring around food and duty free things. but flight was good, i didnt get sick... we just have 5 hours to kill here then on to Hanoi!!
More updates coming soon
xoxoxox

Stir crazy

Eleven days to go and I'm already in holiday mode. I've got everything i need for the trip and everything that can be booked beforehand has been booked and paid for so I'm left sitting here twiddling my thumbs counting down days, hours, minutes until we leave. this post is a tad pointless... don't worry though guys in less then two weeks I'll be able to post something you might actually be interested in reading!

Packing List

2 pairs of black leggings
3 x dresses
1 x shorts
4 x tops (t-shirts)
3 x singlets
1 x pants
1 x cardi
1 x jumper
2x long sleeved top
1 x board shorts
1 x bathers

These are the clothes i need to survive with for the next 8 months so wish me luck! it's a bit different to what i'm used to, i still can't believe i'm going to live like a turtle for the next 8 months, carrying my life around on my back.