Our visit to Vietnam is already drawing to an end after four days. It's been a rather busy time and quite a bit different from Singapore (but probably more similar to the rest of Asia). The traffic (80% of it scooters and motor bikes), and the exhaust pollution coming with it, was simply amazing and even at night you could hardly get away from the constant noise. Every single house in Hanoi and on the outskirts seems to have a little shop on the ground floor selling everything from spare parts for motor bikes to wedding dresses. Food is served on every street corner and offers to tourists for motor bike transportation, guided tours or postcards are abundant. The people are very very friendly and have shown a certain degree of curiosity towards us "foreigners" in the sense that we get quite a few looks walking on the street (more so in the countryside) and even the occasional question of "Where are you from?" or "How old are you?" or a request for a photograph together (on OUR camera....?!?!).


So what have we done with our time here? Well, we "hit town" the first night we were here with our host Melissa for some food and a few drinks. By the way, the food's been great! Except for a couple of occasions, we've had Vietnamese Food the whole way and we've thoroughly enjoyed it. Now that didn't include any dog meat, intestines or snake wine (and no fish for me either), but I think we got an okay sampling of the local cuisine and I would rate our chop stick skills as "Intermediate" at this point.


So on our second day we went to the Hanoi Int'l Fellowship for church with Melissa and in the afternoon got a tour through Hanoi by one of Lissa's former students, Aaron (he had worked as a tour guide for four years), visiting Uncle Ho's (Ho Chi Minh that is) mausoleum, his residence and a major Confucian temple. Transportation was by scooter which proved to be a great experience!

 

Days 3 and 4 were spent on a tour to Halong Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The bay and its more than 3,000 islands were a sight to behold (even though we probably only saw 5-10 islands at a time due to the haziness), but the tour organization was a bit haphazard. Oh well, we made the best of it and had some good times of connection with people from our tour group, especially with Ralf from China who actually had attended HIF (see above) - what a coincidence!