Thailand to Vietnam
It's been about four days since my last post and I'm now in Hanoi, Vietnam. Our plan all along has been to travel Vietnam from top to bottom in about 10 or so days and this is the first leg of our journey. First though, I'll detail my last days in Thailand.
My last day on Koh Samet was a bit nice. After making the last post, I immediately left with Oscar and we headed back to our bungallow and parked our motorbikes out front. Darcy and Letisha joined us and we headed out for breakfast to the west side of the island that we had gone to the night before for the massages. This time of day the tide was really high so there wasn't much beach but we found a nice place to eat breakfast on the far end of the beach. It couldn't have been more scenic - we were sitting in whicker and bamboo bench chairs over a bamboo and whicker table sitting in the sand with the tide of clear blue water washing up just to our feet. Just after placing our order, we realized the tide was in fact rising and the table would soon be under water so we had to move under the main roof of the bamboo thatched roof open-air restaurant. I also bought a nice large silk cloth from a guy wandering around selling his wares to foreigners. I believe it cost me about $3 for a silk cloth with a Thai elephant print about four feet by six feet. Our breakfast of kings cost about $3 each and Darcy and Oscar descided it was time to shoot a short film.
We headed out to an open area of trails that ran in a circle around a reservoir and began filming. Some background: Darcy is the vainest guy ever to roam the earth. He's not that bad of a guy, just really vain. He is, however, in all honesty a very large guy who is confident and does have a good record with the ladies, in the short term anyway. I'm sure anyone would be able to glean that from the contents of the 'movie' we shot that day. It was basically Darcy trying to look cool on a motorcycle - a few shots of me, Darcy, and Oscar revving our engines and then speeding off. Then a few with Darcy blaring past the camera, then a few with Darcy sliding his bike to a stop. It also ate up about half our day, which sucked. After this we had to return the bikes so we dropped them off and headed to the beach where we ran into Wijit again. Letisha got a butterfly on her back left shoulder and a flowery vine down her right wrist/hand ending on her middle finger. Now when she flips us off constantly for making black or women jokes it has a nice touch to it. :) I got a nice cliche symbol on my back - 'ohm' meaning 'home' in a Buddhist sense but I mainly liked the design. Darcy cheesily enough asked to get 'I am handsome' in Thai on his back, which Wijit did for him freehand and it was freaking awesome. In fact, Wijit did everything extremely fast and it looked really good - he even made up some of Letisha's hand one as he went and it looks very professional.
After this we checked out a 'restaurant' we had noticed the other night. There was an area about 20 feet from the ocean where there was no beach but just large rocks with grassy areas between them large enough for a table about 3 feet by 6 feet. On these tables were candles and lanterns and there were bamboo mats placed over the grassy area with cushions to sit on and drammatic lighting placed among the rocks. Our meals included my 'porklion' steak and two strawberry lassies (shakes) and banana fritters, Darcy's t-bone steak with strawberry shake, Letisha's seabass with rice and two shakes, and Oscar's fillet mignon with two shakes. The final bill came out to about $5 per person for this feast among the rocks on the beach of a tropical paradice :) After this we headed down the beach but most people had gone home to the mainland since it was a Sunday night and we stopped at a place with absolutely no people but it had the same low table with bamboo mats and cushions on the sand about 20 feet from the waves. Me and Oscar shared a Thai whiskey mix bucket and Letisha had an 'orgasm' while Darcy the dry guy had just a kiwi shake. After this we headed back and slept, boarding the boat for the mainland the next morning.
Once on mainland, we took the four hour vanride back to Bangkok and we all hit up an internet cafe to check email while Oscar scouted for places to stay on Kawzan road. We ended up at a semi-alright place for about $2 per night, but it was right over the street and loud all night long. Basically, the places we usually stayed at in the city were 'hostels' - really just a hallway of rooms that were just large enough for two single beds and a ceiling fan and the ceilings were usually open at the top so you could totally hear and be heard throughout the hallway. We also got our passports back from the travel agency on Kawzan road that had sent them out to get visa's for Vietnam. Travelling back to M.B.K. mall, everyone but me got cheap sheets for the beds while I got one long cloth made of something like silk but more like cotton, I forget the name but it's super smooth and warm...starts with a 'p'. Me and Oscar decided to crash once we got back to the hostel, while Darcy and Letisha hit the local club scene which was later recounted as not that great.
The next day we rocked up to the airport early for our 10:20am flights to Hanoi, Vietnam. We flew Air Asia and it was a small but very comfortable plane. From experience and what I've heard, asian airlines tend to be much more comfortable with much nicer and cuter stewardesses so it was a great change from the norm I'm used to now. Landing in Hanoi, it was immediately obvious we were in a communist country - guards in those funny German WWII'ish uniforms holding AK47's on just about every block. The airport was as bland as they come so we quickly headed out by taxi, with Oscar telling the man we wanted to go to The Backpackers' Hostel in Hanoi and showed him the address. Just before getting in the taxi we pulled money out of the ATM's in the airport. It turns out that the Vietnamese currency is the 'Dong' and many jokes were made, which I won't repeat here bc they are oh so numerous and you can probably work a bit of them out on your own. It also turns out that about 16,000 dong is one dollar so we decided to pull out about a million dong each. The only problem is, things usually cost about 5 to 10 thousand dong and the 100,000 and 50,000 dong bills we received from the machine were about useless in daily life. One quick quote made by Letisha that was mostly unintentional: "Oscar, hurry up and pull your dong out of the machine and let's get out of here".
One thing immediately became apparent about the differences between Vietnam and Thailand - Vietnam has a very French style in the architecture and the drivers pretty much just lean on the horn the entire time they are driving. Mostly to let the people around them know that they're still there. Also, there were a ton of the cliche 'cone hat' people working in the fields and carrying those poles of balanced baskets over their shoulders. When we landed in Hanoi, a guy shook my hand as I got out of the cab and welcomed me to The Backpackers' Hotel and quickly ushered us all four inside and to a room. He was being suspiciously nice and in a rush to book us when Oscar mentioned that his brother Max had left some items a month ago and he had come to pick them up. The guy didn't speak English that well and tried to play it off but Oscar looked carefully and noticed that not only was this The Backpackers' Hotel and not The Backpackers' Hostel, but the address was completely wrong, which the man entirely refused was true. Oscar ended up convincing the man (which was difficult) to use the phone to call "someone about his brother" and the place we really wanted to stay at sent us a man over on a motorbike with a map. Evidently this kind of copy-cat hustle happens all the time and the cabbie makes a cut from it by bringing people to the wrong place. This was the first of many times getting ripped off in Hanoi so far.
We decided to walk to the hostel so we could check out the city and also it wasn't but like one mile and he had given us a map. On the way we got ripped off like three times by street venders because we don't know the expected price of local goods and foods as well as the phrase 'hell no, you said it was 5,000 Dong and I gave you 10,000 so I want my change back!' Walking around here is insane - crossing streets is basically just a 'use the force' method. You literally have to just start walking and the motorcycle traffic that zooms by will whizz around you as you cross so long as you stay at a slow and steady pace. And honking is used so constantly it sounds almost like freaky deaky music.
The hostel was nice - hot water shower and very clean with sheets and owned and operated by Autralians and Englishmen. We then hit the town for a bit and ended up at the lake in the middle of the Old Quarter section of Hanoi. There was a temple there but it was closed for the night so we headed back out and met up with a man who was selling books. Like every other street vendor, he approached us and tried to sell us everything he had to which we less and less politely declined. Oscar said that because the prices are so fluid and unset in Asian countries, it's best to say that you're from a poor country so they don't rip you off so bad - his first sentence to the guy was 'oh, i'm from Polland...very poor country.' The man did speak surprisingly good English, however, and we got to chatting and he introduced himself as Hue from the countryside outside of Hanoi. He said he was a student taking English and studying to become a tourguide. The books he and every other vendor sells are photocopies of the real books and aren't that great of quality so we got the price down a bit on some postcards and a phrasebook that Oscar wanted. He then said he'd give us a tour around Hanoi for cheap because he wanted to become a tourgiude, and we accepted and set the time for 3pm the next day. After this we were walking back and ran into a group of people playing a game in the street. It was like hackey-sack but the 'sack' looked more like a shuttlecock from badmitton and these guys were kicking it around like they were throwing karate kicks. We played with them for about 15 minutes until one of them accidentally kicked a motorcycly that pulled up behind him. We were literally playing *in* the street after all. By the time we got back home, I was so tired I was falling over asleep so I stripped and crawled into bed.
I awoke at 9am the next morning and took my first long hot shower in a long time. Oscar and Letisha were up by this time so we headed out for a bit - deciding to first see Ho Chi Mihn's body at the mauseleum. Evidently the only real way to get around out here is to walk to the street and wait about half a second for a man on a motorcycle to ride up and offer you a ride. The standard price is about $1 (which is really good for them) and we hopped on the backs and headed off to the mauseluem.
I'm now in Hoi An, Vietnam and it took me a while to find an internet cafe so I'll finish this post finally.
So when I first heard about riding random motorcycles around town I was pretty unsure about it. First of all, my parents are insanely paranoid about motorcycles and have tried to pass that down to me. But you know what they say - when in Rome, ride motorcycles. So now I don't hesitate to jump on the back of some Vietnamese guy's bike at 2am and speed down the old bumpy streets of Vietnam wearing only jeans, a t-shirt, and flipflops. After seeing the things that the people here do (such as a full four-person family on a bike) I have some pretty good faith in their skills.
Anyway, the commie museum is where we sped off towards. We actually wanted to see the mauseleum where they keep Ho Chi Minh's body on display, but the guy dropped us off in front of the museum instead. After taking many pictures and commenting on how communist the building looked, we began to once again be hassled by the locals. In Hanoi, you can't walk five feet without someone trying to scam you so you really just have to ignore them or give them a really steely 'no' and then ignore them. This guy wasn't having any of it. One popular scam is to offer you a tour of the city. Oscar had fallen prey to this a few times before and on his advice we all believe him. After shaking the guy off, we continued towards the actual mauseleum which was across the road and stopped by some nice little pagodas and temples on the way.
On reaching the mauseleum, I realized my huge mistake. The museum was in fact *not* the most communist/fugly building ever - the mauseleum proudly takes that medal home. Nothing could be more fugly than the Ho Chi Minh mauseleum - it's made of giant cubes of granite or something and it's entirely two bland colors without a curve in the entire building and the area in front of it: a large strip of communist parade road with flood lighting and bullhorns. The mauseleum too was sadly closed because the body was sent off to Moscow or something for annual retouching. But we did get to see the changing of the guards and that was pretty cool but really short. Just like communists - everything is really functional and non-stylized.
So we walked to the end of the area and like always, some guys ride up in bikes asking if we need a ride. In Thailand, the game is called haggling and it's acceptable for the seller to offer an insanely high price followed by your insanely low price until you meet somewhere in the middle. In Vietnam the game is called patience, because they offer an insanely high price and you keep insisting on a reasonable price until they give in. At times, it requires walking away in disgust followed quickly by them realizing they're losing out on a lot of money (for them) and they drastically lower the price. It's a hassle because then they don't leave you alone the entire trip about 'you want hotel?' or 'you want tour of city?' or 'you want massage?' or 'this road no take bike' or 'i take you to restaurant' and you just have to keep firm and so 'no you bastard, take me to where i asked'.
After a bit of this, we ended up at the old prison, now museum, and accidentally double paid the guy because we weren't paying attention to one another...that's like a full day's wages for these guys too. The prison was cool but exactly what you'd expect from a communist museum - their version of history revolves around the liberation of the people from the clutches of foreign invaders. They even talked about how the American army inflicted 'untold attrocities' to the Vietnamese people and that the American POW's were not taken revenge upon and were treated like kings in the prison, along with pictures that looked pretty contrived. Oh well.
The food in Vietnam is really dirty for the most part by the way. Oscar is much more adventurous than I am on this as I refuse to eat in a sketchy stall on the side of the road in a city where they literally just throw all their garbage into the gutter and it stinks like vomit. Uggh, it's completely inedible. And the bad thing is that most people in Hanoi can't make change for the bills that you get out of the ATM. For instance, pho soup may cost 8,000 Vietnamese Dong and the ATM gives us money in 50,000 dong notes. The stall lady doesn't have change for 50,000 notes let alone from two different people. So we went to the bank to split them and generally give the tellers a headache. Also, I don't know if they just never see black people here or not, but Letisha gets stared at unashamedly almost constantly. It's almost as if she were painted green with purple hair and umbrellas growing out of her ass because they don't even attempt to hide their stares.
After a bit we decided to hit the outdoor market area to check out what Hanoi markets are like. Bad idea. Getting there was like playing a human game of Frogger and the market was the biggest insane communist mess I've ever laid eyes on. I can't even explain the mess - large crowded stalls all looking like one another, selling the same things, narrow walkways, people carting goods all over the place, and just a general mess. Speaking of communism, all shops look exactly same and sell exactly the same things and it's really weird.
We barely made it in time to meet Hue for our tour. We had met him yesterday when he tried to sell us books and he said he would give us a tour around Hanoi. Oscar is wise to this kind of trick and warned us but we hoped he had good intentions so we went anyway. He really just took us walking around the city and to markets and things and basically didn't do jack shit. We're almost sure he gets commission from what he convinces us to buy from venders, and he tries to convince us that he can get lower prices than we can bc he's a native. Later we discussed when he wasn't looking and decided to force him to take us to a temple where he was impatient and kept wanting us to leave. Basically, we were being scammed and he just wanted to cart us around town so we can buy shit from people he gets commission from so we decided to pay him $5 for his few hours of hard, hard work and parted ways back for the hostel.
As if five million scams per day aren't enough, while on the way back to the hostel I stopped to check out a pair of shoes through a shop window and instantly a woman runs up from behind me and throws her bamboo balance carrier thingy over my shoulder. She tells us to take a picture and then holds out her hand and says "50,000!" as if we're supposed to pay her to take pictures of her (a constant theme here). We settled on just being overcharged for her fruit and tried to scuttle away.
When we got home, the Australian owner of the hostel was having a cookout on the roof so we enjoyed grilled hotdogs and beer while watching a Chinese pirated version of The Anchorman. We also booked a sleeper train for Hoi An for the following night and a trip to a place called The Perfume Pagoda for the next day and then headed off to a place called "Beer Junction" by the local foreigners. Beer Junction was awesome, you walk up and it's really just an intersection where three of the corners are the same bar and you just sit on plastic little tiny chairs out on the sidewalk. And the beer - ten cents per glass. It wasn't entirely foul swill but it wasn't the best of brews around. We really just hit it for a warm up and the idea sounded interesting.
The hostel owner dude also owns a bar called Baracuda on the wrong side of town. We rocked it up and I finally got some decent rum and cokes and foosball. Sadly, while singing and fun abilities go up with drinking... hand eye coordination and reflexes do not so I lost many a foosball game. But it was cool bc we then hit up a dance club which I forgot the name of but was expensive as junk for Vietnam. Highlights include... well nothing really but about when we were going to leave some dudes just started handing us glasses of Hennessy so we toasted many a time and then walked home to sleep it all off.
My last day on Koh Samet was a bit nice. After making the last post, I immediately left with Oscar and we headed back to our bungallow and parked our motorbikes out front. Darcy and Letisha joined us and we headed out for breakfast to the west side of the island that we had gone to the night before for the massages. This time of day the tide was really high so there wasn't much beach but we found a nice place to eat breakfast on the far end of the beach. It couldn't have been more scenic - we were sitting in whicker and bamboo bench chairs over a bamboo and whicker table sitting in the sand with the tide of clear blue water washing up just to our feet. Just after placing our order, we realized the tide was in fact rising and the table would soon be under water so we had to move under the main roof of the bamboo thatched roof open-air restaurant. I also bought a nice large silk cloth from a guy wandering around selling his wares to foreigners. I believe it cost me about $3 for a silk cloth with a Thai elephant print about four feet by six feet. Our breakfast of kings cost about $3 each and Darcy and Oscar descided it was time to shoot a short film.
We headed out to an open area of trails that ran in a circle around a reservoir and began filming. Some background: Darcy is the vainest guy ever to roam the earth. He's not that bad of a guy, just really vain. He is, however, in all honesty a very large guy who is confident and does have a good record with the ladies, in the short term anyway. I'm sure anyone would be able to glean that from the contents of the 'movie' we shot that day. It was basically Darcy trying to look cool on a motorcycle - a few shots of me, Darcy, and Oscar revving our engines and then speeding off. Then a few with Darcy blaring past the camera, then a few with Darcy sliding his bike to a stop. It also ate up about half our day, which sucked. After this we had to return the bikes so we dropped them off and headed to the beach where we ran into Wijit again. Letisha got a butterfly on her back left shoulder and a flowery vine down her right wrist/hand ending on her middle finger. Now when she flips us off constantly for making black or women jokes it has a nice touch to it. :) I got a nice cliche symbol on my back - 'ohm' meaning 'home' in a Buddhist sense but I mainly liked the design. Darcy cheesily enough asked to get 'I am handsome' in Thai on his back, which Wijit did for him freehand and it was freaking awesome. In fact, Wijit did everything extremely fast and it looked really good - he even made up some of Letisha's hand one as he went and it looks very professional.
After this we checked out a 'restaurant' we had noticed the other night. There was an area about 20 feet from the ocean where there was no beach but just large rocks with grassy areas between them large enough for a table about 3 feet by 6 feet. On these tables were candles and lanterns and there were bamboo mats placed over the grassy area with cushions to sit on and drammatic lighting placed among the rocks. Our meals included my 'porklion' steak and two strawberry lassies (shakes) and banana fritters, Darcy's t-bone steak with strawberry shake, Letisha's seabass with rice and two shakes, and Oscar's fillet mignon with two shakes. The final bill came out to about $5 per person for this feast among the rocks on the beach of a tropical paradice :) After this we headed down the beach but most people had gone home to the mainland since it was a Sunday night and we stopped at a place with absolutely no people but it had the same low table with bamboo mats and cushions on the sand about 20 feet from the waves. Me and Oscar shared a Thai whiskey mix bucket and Letisha had an 'orgasm' while Darcy the dry guy had just a kiwi shake. After this we headed back and slept, boarding the boat for the mainland the next morning.
Once on mainland, we took the four hour vanride back to Bangkok and we all hit up an internet cafe to check email while Oscar scouted for places to stay on Kawzan road. We ended up at a semi-alright place for about $2 per night, but it was right over the street and loud all night long. Basically, the places we usually stayed at in the city were 'hostels' - really just a hallway of rooms that were just large enough for two single beds and a ceiling fan and the ceilings were usually open at the top so you could totally hear and be heard throughout the hallway. We also got our passports back from the travel agency on Kawzan road that had sent them out to get visa's for Vietnam. Travelling back to M.B.K. mall, everyone but me got cheap sheets for the beds while I got one long cloth made of something like silk but more like cotton, I forget the name but it's super smooth and warm...starts with a 'p'. Me and Oscar decided to crash once we got back to the hostel, while Darcy and Letisha hit the local club scene which was later recounted as not that great.
The next day we rocked up to the airport early for our 10:20am flights to Hanoi, Vietnam. We flew Air Asia and it was a small but very comfortable plane. From experience and what I've heard, asian airlines tend to be much more comfortable with much nicer and cuter stewardesses so it was a great change from the norm I'm used to now. Landing in Hanoi, it was immediately obvious we were in a communist country - guards in those funny German WWII'ish uniforms holding AK47's on just about every block. The airport was as bland as they come so we quickly headed out by taxi, with Oscar telling the man we wanted to go to The Backpackers' Hostel in Hanoi and showed him the address. Just before getting in the taxi we pulled money out of the ATM's in the airport. It turns out that the Vietnamese currency is the 'Dong' and many jokes were made, which I won't repeat here bc they are oh so numerous and you can probably work a bit of them out on your own. It also turns out that about 16,000 dong is one dollar so we decided to pull out about a million dong each. The only problem is, things usually cost about 5 to 10 thousand dong and the 100,000 and 50,000 dong bills we received from the machine were about useless in daily life. One quick quote made by Letisha that was mostly unintentional: "Oscar, hurry up and pull your dong out of the machine and let's get out of here".
One thing immediately became apparent about the differences between Vietnam and Thailand - Vietnam has a very French style in the architecture and the drivers pretty much just lean on the horn the entire time they are driving. Mostly to let the people around them know that they're still there. Also, there were a ton of the cliche 'cone hat' people working in the fields and carrying those poles of balanced baskets over their shoulders. When we landed in Hanoi, a guy shook my hand as I got out of the cab and welcomed me to The Backpackers' Hotel and quickly ushered us all four inside and to a room. He was being suspiciously nice and in a rush to book us when Oscar mentioned that his brother Max had left some items a month ago and he had come to pick them up. The guy didn't speak English that well and tried to play it off but Oscar looked carefully and noticed that not only was this The Backpackers' Hotel and not The Backpackers' Hostel, but the address was completely wrong, which the man entirely refused was true. Oscar ended up convincing the man (which was difficult) to use the phone to call "someone about his brother" and the place we really wanted to stay at sent us a man over on a motorbike with a map. Evidently this kind of copy-cat hustle happens all the time and the cabbie makes a cut from it by bringing people to the wrong place. This was the first of many times getting ripped off in Hanoi so far.
We decided to walk to the hostel so we could check out the city and also it wasn't but like one mile and he had given us a map. On the way we got ripped off like three times by street venders because we don't know the expected price of local goods and foods as well as the phrase 'hell no, you said it was 5,000 Dong and I gave you 10,000 so I want my change back!' Walking around here is insane - crossing streets is basically just a 'use the force' method. You literally have to just start walking and the motorcycle traffic that zooms by will whizz around you as you cross so long as you stay at a slow and steady pace. And honking is used so constantly it sounds almost like freaky deaky music.
The hostel was nice - hot water shower and very clean with sheets and owned and operated by Autralians and Englishmen. We then hit the town for a bit and ended up at the lake in the middle of the Old Quarter section of Hanoi. There was a temple there but it was closed for the night so we headed back out and met up with a man who was selling books. Like every other street vendor, he approached us and tried to sell us everything he had to which we less and less politely declined. Oscar said that because the prices are so fluid and unset in Asian countries, it's best to say that you're from a poor country so they don't rip you off so bad - his first sentence to the guy was 'oh, i'm from Polland...very poor country.' The man did speak surprisingly good English, however, and we got to chatting and he introduced himself as Hue from the countryside outside of Hanoi. He said he was a student taking English and studying to become a tourguide. The books he and every other vendor sells are photocopies of the real books and aren't that great of quality so we got the price down a bit on some postcards and a phrasebook that Oscar wanted. He then said he'd give us a tour around Hanoi for cheap because he wanted to become a tourgiude, and we accepted and set the time for 3pm the next day. After this we were walking back and ran into a group of people playing a game in the street. It was like hackey-sack but the 'sack' looked more like a shuttlecock from badmitton and these guys were kicking it around like they were throwing karate kicks. We played with them for about 15 minutes until one of them accidentally kicked a motorcycly that pulled up behind him. We were literally playing *in* the street after all. By the time we got back home, I was so tired I was falling over asleep so I stripped and crawled into bed.
I awoke at 9am the next morning and took my first long hot shower in a long time. Oscar and Letisha were up by this time so we headed out for a bit - deciding to first see Ho Chi Mihn's body at the mauseleum. Evidently the only real way to get around out here is to walk to the street and wait about half a second for a man on a motorcycle to ride up and offer you a ride. The standard price is about $1 (which is really good for them) and we hopped on the backs and headed off to the mauseluem.
I'm now in Hoi An, Vietnam and it took me a while to find an internet cafe so I'll finish this post finally.
So when I first heard about riding random motorcycles around town I was pretty unsure about it. First of all, my parents are insanely paranoid about motorcycles and have tried to pass that down to me. But you know what they say - when in Rome, ride motorcycles. So now I don't hesitate to jump on the back of some Vietnamese guy's bike at 2am and speed down the old bumpy streets of Vietnam wearing only jeans, a t-shirt, and flipflops. After seeing the things that the people here do (such as a full four-person family on a bike) I have some pretty good faith in their skills.
Anyway, the commie museum is where we sped off towards. We actually wanted to see the mauseleum where they keep Ho Chi Minh's body on display, but the guy dropped us off in front of the museum instead. After taking many pictures and commenting on how communist the building looked, we began to once again be hassled by the locals. In Hanoi, you can't walk five feet without someone trying to scam you so you really just have to ignore them or give them a really steely 'no' and then ignore them. This guy wasn't having any of it. One popular scam is to offer you a tour of the city. Oscar had fallen prey to this a few times before and on his advice we all believe him. After shaking the guy off, we continued towards the actual mauseleum which was across the road and stopped by some nice little pagodas and temples on the way.
On reaching the mauseleum, I realized my huge mistake. The museum was in fact *not* the most communist/fugly building ever - the mauseleum proudly takes that medal home. Nothing could be more fugly than the Ho Chi Minh mauseleum - it's made of giant cubes of granite or something and it's entirely two bland colors without a curve in the entire building and the area in front of it: a large strip of communist parade road with flood lighting and bullhorns. The mauseleum too was sadly closed because the body was sent off to Moscow or something for annual retouching. But we did get to see the changing of the guards and that was pretty cool but really short. Just like communists - everything is really functional and non-stylized.
So we walked to the end of the area and like always, some guys ride up in bikes asking if we need a ride. In Thailand, the game is called haggling and it's acceptable for the seller to offer an insanely high price followed by your insanely low price until you meet somewhere in the middle. In Vietnam the game is called patience, because they offer an insanely high price and you keep insisting on a reasonable price until they give in. At times, it requires walking away in disgust followed quickly by them realizing they're losing out on a lot of money (for them) and they drastically lower the price. It's a hassle because then they don't leave you alone the entire trip about 'you want hotel?' or 'you want tour of city?' or 'you want massage?' or 'this road no take bike' or 'i take you to restaurant' and you just have to keep firm and so 'no you bastard, take me to where i asked'.
After a bit of this, we ended up at the old prison, now museum, and accidentally double paid the guy because we weren't paying attention to one another...that's like a full day's wages for these guys too. The prison was cool but exactly what you'd expect from a communist museum - their version of history revolves around the liberation of the people from the clutches of foreign invaders. They even talked about how the American army inflicted 'untold attrocities' to the Vietnamese people and that the American POW's were not taken revenge upon and were treated like kings in the prison, along with pictures that looked pretty contrived. Oh well.
The food in Vietnam is really dirty for the most part by the way. Oscar is much more adventurous than I am on this as I refuse to eat in a sketchy stall on the side of the road in a city where they literally just throw all their garbage into the gutter and it stinks like vomit. Uggh, it's completely inedible. And the bad thing is that most people in Hanoi can't make change for the bills that you get out of the ATM. For instance, pho soup may cost 8,000 Vietnamese Dong and the ATM gives us money in 50,000 dong notes. The stall lady doesn't have change for 50,000 notes let alone from two different people. So we went to the bank to split them and generally give the tellers a headache. Also, I don't know if they just never see black people here or not, but Letisha gets stared at unashamedly almost constantly. It's almost as if she were painted green with purple hair and umbrellas growing out of her ass because they don't even attempt to hide their stares.
After a bit we decided to hit the outdoor market area to check out what Hanoi markets are like. Bad idea. Getting there was like playing a human game of Frogger and the market was the biggest insane communist mess I've ever laid eyes on. I can't even explain the mess - large crowded stalls all looking like one another, selling the same things, narrow walkways, people carting goods all over the place, and just a general mess. Speaking of communism, all shops look exactly same and sell exactly the same things and it's really weird.
We barely made it in time to meet Hue for our tour. We had met him yesterday when he tried to sell us books and he said he would give us a tour around Hanoi. Oscar is wise to this kind of trick and warned us but we hoped he had good intentions so we went anyway. He really just took us walking around the city and to markets and things and basically didn't do jack shit. We're almost sure he gets commission from what he convinces us to buy from venders, and he tries to convince us that he can get lower prices than we can bc he's a native. Later we discussed when he wasn't looking and decided to force him to take us to a temple where he was impatient and kept wanting us to leave. Basically, we were being scammed and he just wanted to cart us around town so we can buy shit from people he gets commission from so we decided to pay him $5 for his few hours of hard, hard work and parted ways back for the hostel.
As if five million scams per day aren't enough, while on the way back to the hostel I stopped to check out a pair of shoes through a shop window and instantly a woman runs up from behind me and throws her bamboo balance carrier thingy over my shoulder. She tells us to take a picture and then holds out her hand and says "50,000!" as if we're supposed to pay her to take pictures of her (a constant theme here). We settled on just being overcharged for her fruit and tried to scuttle away.
When we got home, the Australian owner of the hostel was having a cookout on the roof so we enjoyed grilled hotdogs and beer while watching a Chinese pirated version of The Anchorman. We also booked a sleeper train for Hoi An for the following night and a trip to a place called The Perfume Pagoda for the next day and then headed off to a place called "Beer Junction" by the local foreigners. Beer Junction was awesome, you walk up and it's really just an intersection where three of the corners are the same bar and you just sit on plastic little tiny chairs out on the sidewalk. And the beer - ten cents per glass. It wasn't entirely foul swill but it wasn't the best of brews around. We really just hit it for a warm up and the idea sounded interesting.
The hostel owner dude also owns a bar called Baracuda on the wrong side of town. We rocked it up and I finally got some decent rum and cokes and foosball. Sadly, while singing and fun abilities go up with drinking... hand eye coordination and reflexes do not so I lost many a foosball game. But it was cool bc we then hit up a dance club which I forgot the name of but was expensive as junk for Vietnam. Highlights include... well nothing really but about when we were going to leave some dudes just started handing us glasses of Hennessy so we toasted many a time and then walked home to sleep it all off.