It’s hot, it’s humid, it’s Hanoi. And it’s like we’ve never been away. The only thing we’d forgotten is the complete absence of tuk tuks. We never gave it a thought last time we were here, but having come to rely on them, we were amazed to find no sign of them here. Apparently they were outlawed, in 2008. Who knew.
The city is of course as wonderful as ever – a mad frenzy of noise, smells, scooters coming at you from all directions, crazy haphazard architecture, more trees than you might expect, but above all the people, coming, going, rushing about, everyone busily on the way from somewhere to somewhere else, with something urgent on their mind. This is not a relaxing place!
Virle decided she wanted to get her hair done – she’s been talking about it at intervals for weeks – so she found a place on google, before the sim card crapped out again, and I wandered off to take a few photos, and hopefully find out what the hell was going on with our new sim, which seemed to work, but only when it was in the mood.
As luck would have it, one of the main branches of Viettel – the sim card people – turned out to be just round the corner from the salon, so I went to query the flakey performance. A very nice young woman did a lot of fiddling about, before telling me that the problem was I only had a gig and a half a day, and I’d used it all up. Weird – I thought that would be plenty, with plenty to spare – but apparently, so it was. (Virle later told me that navigating using google maps absolutely gobbles up data, and since we’d been doing a lot of that since getting the card, that was doubtless it.) I upgraded the package to 5gb a day – that’s another four quid I’ll never see again – and hopefully that should sort it. And it does at least make sense. Before that, the whole ‘sometimes’ thing was really doing my head in.
After V’s haircut (they did a lovely job, BTW) we went for another little wander through the crazy before Virle suggested stopping off somewhere for a drink. Seconds later I spotted a sign saying Hanoi Coffee Station UPSTAIRS, and pointing up some rickety old stairs. Looks interesting, I thought, and we decided to check it out. And found ourselves entering a place positively heaving with young groovers, where we got the astonishingly beautiful egg coffee in the pic (Ellie having insisted an egg coffee would be a good move, offputting name notwithstanding), which proved to be as delicious as it was lovely, a pineapple, orange and carrot juice for Virle, which was equally good, and a French toast (with fried banana and mango) after we we saw some girls on the next table tucking into one. Oh yum!
Then back here to catch up on a bit of kip (Virle) and bloggery (that would be me).
Oh, one other thing, in the picture above of a statue near The Huc Bridge, is it just me or do these presumably stalwarts of the Viet Cong not look more like Hans, Heinrich and Hilda of the Wehrmacht?