Well it seems like you know your in a communist country when they block facebook! It seems they are not to fond of social networking around here.... So unfortunately I will have to post photos when i get back to thailand. I will say this. I do like Hanoi. It is crazy and busy but has a great charm about it and the food is awesome here. And yes I have been going native all the way. No western food unless you count a baguette with breakfast. There is an amazing restaurant here just down the street that I have been gorging myself at so cheaply that I am almost ashamed to admit it. I met a cool Swiss guy here and we went to dinner the other night. We shared 7 dishes of food ( portions are small, sort of like tapas) and we each had two beers and a little desert. We were just living it up. When the bill came it was 400,000 dong! Holy shit. What have we done! After working it out i realized that was only 10 dollars each. Hahahaha. Vie had steamed snail soup. Crispy crepes with shrimp and sprouts, roasted hens, pho till I drop and great little dumplings galore. I have been here for almost three days and other than my hotel room and a few souvenirs I have only spent something like forty or fifty dollars the entire time I have been here!
So I decided while I was here I had to see some of the big sights. S I got up early and headed of to see ho chi mins mausoleum and the one pillar pagoda. It is funny because in a lot of countries around the world you can approach a police man and even if there not all that friendly they will generally be helpful...... Ummmmmm not here. I walked up to one of the very official police men and asked very politely... It was like looking at a disapproving statue in a green suit. Sooooooo I sort of walked away. As I searched for the entrance I ended up meeting a Swiss guy who turned out to be very cool and we went looking together. When we finally found the line I was blown away. I'm not kidding when I say that about 20 minutes after opening at 8 am the line was approximately 10 to 12 blocks long. So much for the wax museum tour. So we headed off to other sights and decided to leave uncle ho in his final eating place. Well now, whats this here on the map? The single pillar pagoda? Gee that looks cool. I was thinking of some sort of awesome piece of architecture. A beautiful pagoda balancing in all of its glory atop a single giant tree trunk in th sniffle of a pond or lake. Yeah so much for visions of glory and majesty on this one. I almost shit myself laughing when I showed up to the "landmark" it was a pagoda all right. But it was about the size of my living room supported by a round cement column that was more akin to a freeway overpass support. Yes I do have a photo..... After walking around and just exploring for about ten hours we took a break and had dinner. After dinner we decided hey, lets tear it up a little and have a few drinks. What the hell. So we set off in search of some sort of Tom waits esk drinking spot. Little did we know that this was the sleepiest big city around and it was a really tough search indeed. It seems that around here there are still a lot of those old school communist rules in effect. There is a midnight curfew here and while you can eat yourself silly and drink cheap Hanoi beer by the gallon you better do it early. we rapped up drinks at 11 and I started the 15 minute walk back to the hotel. By the time I was half way the doors were all going down lights going off and basically what is a major bustling city was almost deserted by 11:30 I strarted to to hurry a bit and made it back to my hotel. As i walked through the front door the door man was already asleep in his chair head tilted, moments from drooling.
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