Day Zero in Hanoi

So today was a good day. I arrived in Hanoi about noon and proceeded to take a ~20 minute taxi ride to the Hanoi Youth Hostel, where I set up shop, got my lock box key (eventually), and took a nap until the afternoon.

Starting in the afternoon, I'm fairly confident every single one of my bunkmates drank and smoked almost every hour for the next eight hours. I mainly had water, and am slowly getting used to the smell of cigarettes in the night.

We visited Hanoi Rocks bar, and weren't enjoying it a whole bunch, so then we ventured out into the night to Beer Corner, where my compatriots proceeded to buy some vodka and soft drinks to mix.

The shower...is the bathroom. Imagine a compactish bathroom that is already lacking in some respects, put some nice, slippery tile flooring down, a shower head up on the wall, a drain SOMEWHERE, and there you have it. They offer you a towel for free during your stay, which I without any delay forgot existed.

My feet were exceedingly stinky after the nearly 40 hours I'd been in airports or on planes. I didn't really get an opportunity to clean up much except on the Singapore Airlines flights, where I washed my face a couple times and also brushed my teeth once; I have yet to find toothpaste on the ground, so tomorrow I will probably brush my teeth for the first time.

I hope to see the sun rise tomorrow, but where we are in Hanoi may or may not have a good view of the sun as it rises. I'll see if I even get up early enough and go from there.

My compatriots for today's adventures were three Brit girls, a French lass, a fellow from Germany, and a chap from Ukraine. Some of these actually are bunking with me at the Hanoi Youth Hostel, and others are in nearby hostels/hotels.

I tried to take some pictures, but unfortunately not many of them were very good or impressive. I'll keep shooting.

Today I also met a Minnesotan, hailing from St. Cloud. He asked me to affirm for him that there were rodeos in Minnesota, which I've never seen. One of the ladies was dubious that such a thing could be true.

It's slightly chilly here, so wearing just my T-shirt leaves me slightly shivery when I go out.

Allegedly the gang hung out at the Beer Corner a night ago all the way until about 7 AM.

I have yet to convert my money to dong, and had to pay for a meal in US dollars today. The meal consisted of a rather thin (but delicious) potato soup, some toast to go with it, a very thin crust pizza, which tasted good despite being rather insufficient, and finally I had some vanilla ice cream, which was actually excellently flavored, in my opinion. I may not be the best judge of these things, but I place it above any other vanilla ice cream I've ever tasted as relates to sheer vanilla flavor. Mint leaves were included, but I proffered them to the frog and the frog ate them up.

Driving in Vietnam is hilarious; if someone's where you want to be, honk. If you're thinking about turning right, no need to signal. If you're not planning to turn at all for the next fifteen seconds, be sure to turn on your signal, AND honk at that moron who left his turn signal on, all in the same fifteen seconds.

Have a tree you need to move? Strap it to the back of a motorcycle and be on your way. I saw this at LEAST two times.

Need to get across the street? Well, you'd better start walking, because it's not like anyone's going to stop for you if you're just standing there. I'm pretty confident it's impossible to get across a street during the daytime without half a dozen motorcycles whizzing around you, seemingly without care for life and limb.

The motorcycles (heck, the entire traffic situation in Vietnam) seems to operate a lot like bicyclers operate in the US. You don't necessarily have to yield to us or slow down for us, we'll generally be able to make our way around you.

It's interesting to learn what's interesting to others in far away countries when you talk about yourself or where you're from. The pronunciation of lavender was thrown around a bit, and the either the German or the Ukranian among us pronounced it with the accent on the -ven- part of the word. luh-VENN-dur. I believe the French iteration was rather interesting as well, but I don't remember it.

Everything's thousands of dong, usually tens of thousands. A beer is 25,000 dong, and a dollar comes to roughly 21,000 dong. My meal tonight amounted to about $3.75 USD. If I'd drunk a beer or two, it would still have been under $5 USD, I believe.

I am well, and thankfully haven't been robbed, gotten drunk, or done drugs as of yet.


!Noah!