Visiting Hanoi

On my first Saturday here we had a tour of Hanoi. Volunteers for Peace runs a club for locals. These are mostly university students hoping to improve their english. We had 5 or 6 "local supporters" taking us on a tour of the city. The first thing they took us to was the museum of ethnography. There were explanations about the whole variety of ethnicities in Vietnam, over 50 I think, with fairly major differences between them. We had to rush through the inside part since we were told we only had a limited amount of time to doo the whole tour. The museum also had an outside part which had different types of traditional Vietnamese houses. These were quite beautiful, simple with some lovely wood carvings on some of them.

There was also a small water puppet theatre. There is a basin of water and the puppets appear just above the water. They are manipulated by pupeteers standing in the water at the back of the stage. They usually perform traditional stories and integrate music into the performance. Unfortunately we didn't get to stay for the performance because there wasn't sufficient time.

Next we had Pho in a small restaurant in the old quarter. It was pretty good, it was also pretty loud as we were around 20 (mostly students) in a very small space.

After lunch the local supporters took us to a market. This was an overwhelming experience. Coming from Canada I thought I had a pretty extensive experience with being surrounded by "stuff" all the time, being endlessly sold things, but this was a whole new ball game. There were piles and piles (or sometimes large bags) of objects of every description; from small stuffed toys to shoes to a wide variety of plastic goods. I think we were able to withstand about 10 or so minutes of this assault to the senses. It was impressive.

Seeing that we weren't going to browse the market for the planned 2 hours the local supporters took us Hoan Kiem lake which is right next to the old quarter. This lake is home to a very large turtle which we heard about but did not see. We also visited a temple which was on an island in the lake.

We also had a really good ice-cream near the lake in a sort of mall-like place. You walked up to a booth and they sold you an ice-cream in a cone, the whole freezer was already filled up rows and rows of cones. People were lined up to buy them. Actually when I say lined up I mean people were crowding around the booth attempting to buy some (peope do not line up in Vietnam). The ice-cream was delicious though. I wasn't sure what I was eating but it tasted a bit like coconut. One of the girls who was showing us around surprised me by asking me how many I could eat, I was perplexed and answered "I don't know, one?". To which she answered (proudly) "I can eat five!".