Since being in Egypt, J and I have often tried to determine if Cairo is noisier than Hanoi, Vietnam or Tirana, Albania.  When we arrived in Hanoi a couple of years ago, I dubbed it Hanoi(se) and declared it the noisiest city I had ever been to.  We then spent two months in Albania, our apartment located at a busy intersection, and after rereading ( Read more... )

I was looking through photos today because a friend J and I dined with yesty asked me to gift him with a B&W photograph for his walls.  I haven't found something to share with him yet, but I did enjoy looking at some photos of Halong Bay from Vietnam.   I shared a few when we were actually traveling there, but not many because I was feeling morning ( Read more... )

...if you receive a postcard from Vietnam ( Read more... )

 Didn't count on having the net in the Hanoi Airport.

Just thought I would share:

Before takeoff, on the flight between Hoi An and Hanoi, Vietnam Airlines played a instrumental rendition of "I Surrender All," an old Christian hymn.  I wondered what they were trying to tell me, but we landed in Hanoi without incident.

In the Hanoi airport, in a ( Read more... )

The number one reason we came to Vietnam was to visit the Unesco World Heritage site Halong Bay. With its 1969 islands, the bay is vast, and we only saw a very small part of it on our 3-day cruise. The glimpse was worth it, though. We may not have had blue skies, but the myriad isles and calm water were still lovely. And the lack of rain, a real ( Read more... )

Hanoi is, hands down, the noisiest city I've ever been to. It also has the most daredevil motorists (mostly scooter drivers) of any country I've yet visited ( Read more... )

This may backfire on me since we are only halfway into our Vietnam trip, but the mean things we heard about the Vietnamese ( Read more... )

During my cooking class, the teacher took us out into her garden to show us some typical plants and herbs. She pointed at her pepper plant, thick with bright red chiles that looked like christmas lights, and said, "In English you call these 'bird's eye' chiles. Here in Thailand we call them 'mowshi"Mowshi,' we all repeated faithfully, trying the ( Read more... )

I’m just not that impressed with Laos. Seeing as how everyone else raves about the country, especially how friendly the people are, we can probably just chalk this up to me being jaded ( Read more... )

Which is in Laos, not anywhere in China.

On the morning of the 17th, we crossed from Thailand in Laos. It was chaos at the border as everyone jostled to get their visas or recover their passports, but everyone was goodnatured about it; we were all in the same mess, and most of us were leaving on the same boat.

After the immigration formalities, we ( Read more... )