Greetings from noisy, sticky and honking Hanoi. I have spent many days walking the city with my parents looking for the old places where they used to live, but really, the Vietnam of today has little to do with the Vietnam that they left back in the fifties. Even the accents are different!
It's quite something being here. Hanoi is a developing city, full of motorbikes, no traffic lights, and narrow streets full of noisy shops. The sensorial overload is staggering. My friend C from Belgium who is hosting me and who used to live in China tells me that it's very similar to the China that she knew: polluted, noisy, and in full development. My parents barely recognize the place, and it is changing so fast that in five years it will be so different. My vietnamese sucks, and I look so westernized that at all the cyclo's and the shopowners speak to me in English!! Thank God for my mum who will rightfully lower the prices :)
We did the obligatory ride to Halong Bay with my parents and another bunch of their friends who are Viet Kieu - expat Vietnamese. It was quite interesting to walk in the grottoes hidden within the beautful islands of the bay. Unfortunately, I was too late to catch a picture with a junk boat - they are now forbidden as many junk boats owners used to sail to the tourist boat, sell goods and sail away quite fast before the client noticed that he didn't get his change back. So for the sake of commercial honesty now the boats are forbidden! We still got to see the little floating villages of the fishermen in the bay, and they sold us some extremely fresh seafood which we enjoyed on the boat. Quite the ride, in the end.
My favourite part of the trip so far (aside from Halong Bay) is to take the xe om ie. the taxi-motorcycles to go home to C's place every evening, and every morning to meet my parents at their hotel. Aside from that I did some major shopping and indulged in many pirated DVD's (for the price of 1$ us each!!!) and some silk stuff including a traditional
Vietnamese outfit (an ao giai) made to measure in local Ha Dong silk. Quite nice.
Anyways, my time is running out at this internet cafe so I must go. I will write more the next time. Tomorrow and the day after I'm going on day trips with my parents again to areas outside Hanoi, and then Saturday I am heading off to see more friends in Kuala Lumpur and dive Malaysian Borneo. I am soooo thankful for having all these great friends scattered around the planet - just finding excuses to come visit them :)
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