First Full Day Hanoi - Feb 7th, 2010

Hi Guys,

M and I had quite the full day today - I went to bed at 8pm last night, took some Tylenol PM last night, put in my ear plugs and my eye mask and slept till 8am. So, although the time between San Francisco and Vietnam are completely switched 12 hrs I had decent energy today.

We had breakfast at the hostel - the room we're in is very basic, not nice, but has a bed and a light and a TV with some bootlegged DVDs we can watch. Ha. Today we went to see the mausoleum where Ho Chi Minh himself is embalmed and on display. They take it very seriously, have guards all around, don't let you take in cameras and don't let you stop walking. Look while you are walking then get out. We went to see his house when he lived here and then stopped to have lunch at a nearby Bia Hoi - basically a local beer garden with fresh brewed daily beer. It's local and unfiltered, nothing added and they drink it all pretty much the day they make it. It was super tasty, mostly men in the place all with their buddys getting drunk on a Sunday afternoon, they looked at us kinda weird but I don't mind! We got lemongrass beef and a few other things too. Tastiness.

After lunch we went to a few other museums, nothing monumental - also nothing air conditioned and it was super hot and muggy. That's right, the museums we went to, except for the mausoleum, were not air conditioned. Our room at the hostel has an air conditioner, but we've learned that "air conditioner" does not equal "working air conditioner" here. Oh well.

In the afternoon, we went to get massages, best decision so far. Maybe 2nd best decision after the beef noodle soup we had yesterday. Massage was pretty good, and we got to take nice steamy showers in the bathrooms which was nice. We actually went to a spa-looking place rather than getting the shady massages since the language barrier can be difficult. Even then the "expensive" massage was only about $30us after tax and tip, etc. Beers here are on average 20,000VND which is about $1us. The beef soup we had yesterday was the same price. Very low prices and kind of funny hyper inflation because everything is in the hundreds of thousands.

Tomorrow we leave at 8am for our overnight tour of ha long bay so won't have internet for a short while.

A