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.