Hanoi, Vietnam

It's 5am and we just got back to Hanoi from Sapa on the night train. Our room won't be available for several more hours so I'm going to catch up on my writing.

On Monday as I walked around Hoan Kiem Lake watching people practice Tai Chi and stretch on the benches, my lungs began to feel like crap from all the fumes. If most of the people living in the city ride or walk around with Michael Jackson/SARS/surgery face covers, you know the air is bad. However, a couple things I can't complain about are Hanoi's cooler weather and drivers' use of traffic signals...but of course traffic signals only exist in few areas.

From the lake we walked to the Old Quarter, an area with cramped streets lined with coffee shops and stores that sell random things on the ground level and people's homes on the above levels. The buildings are a bit older with French colonial influences. We can't walk on the sidewalks because parked motorbikes, merchandise and street kitchens take up all the space, so we dodged bicycles, cars, and motorbikes on the street. My map is useless in the Old Quarter because every few blocks, the street names change.

Dong Xuan market is in the northern part of the Old Quarter and it's pure chaos. Old women walk by with baskets of fruit hanging from a stick that rests over their shoulders. People pedal on their bikes with five huge bags of rice stacked on the bike. Motorbikes weave in and out of traffic. Cars bully their way through. Pedestrians (me) carefully cross the street and manage not to get run over. Men lounging on their motorbikes and pedaling on their cyclo offer rides. Women sit on the ground sell fruits and pots of food. People squat on tiny plastic chairs, eating food in the street kitchens.

After we escaped the madness, we visited the 900 year-old Temple of Literature. (It had to do something with Confucius.) I felt like I was in a back-in-the-day Chinese movie with the old architecture and gardens.

Ho Chi Minh's Masoleum was around the corner but we didn't feel like paying homage to him or seeing his embalmed body. I was over Hanoi and couldn't wait to go to Ha Long Bay.