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.