Hanoi By Day

This is a mid-day post as I don't know if I will get to another one today.

We all slept until about 5:30am Hanoi time. That was pretty good given that it was 4:30 in the afternoon Denver time and we seem to be going strong this afternoon at about 3:00 as I write this.

After the morning breakfast, I practiced some oral hygiene with the complimentary paste and brush provided with the room. The paste/soap had the wrong taste. My Mother only once washed my mouth with soap, by jamming a bar into it, I must really have said something nasty. Anyway, this paste tasted and looked as much like Palmolive as I can imagine, yuck.

It was a rainy start to the day so we wandered the market streets and stayed under the awnings and poked our heads into a few little shops. What a variety in product, quantity and quality. Some of these shops are just tiny and appear to have just some old items from about 10 years ago.

Riley was once again overwhelmed by the smells and commented "Ugh, I just lost my appetite. What I need is a proper face mask". There are a number of face-masked folks here, but China still had more.

Oh, the nice quiet flashing lights on the road last night have been replaced with horns, horns, and more horns. There are many mopeds and crossing the street is a fun challenge. Stay calm, stay predictable, and hold the line and you will be fine. One advantage the pedestrian has here over China is that the mo's here have internal combustion engines rather the being electric powered. At least now you can here it before it runs you down.

From one of these shops the girls found a bar of Milka Chocolate (their favorite as they discovered in Europe) for a mere 138,000. Now, we did wait until we were just outside the door before cracking it open only to find that it just did not taste right. As far as we can tell it is not fake, but just a little past the expiration date. Bummer!

The rain subsided and we walked around Hoan Kiem Lake on our way to the Hanoi Hilton.

The 'Hilton' was built by the French to imprison and torture the Vietnamese who threatened their colonialist rule. Later, the Vietnamese imprisoned and tortured American military men who fought against the unification of Vietnam under Communism.

Given what I know, I cannot find the Vietnam war to be Biblically justifiable for U.S. involvement. This prison is yet another example of mans cruelty towards his brothers who are also image bearers of God. Riley is shown here in front of a mass stockade where men would be locked by one leg and forced to live their lives for years in such a position.

We will soon depart our coffee shop hangout and walk the streets again. We checked out of our accommodations this morning as we have a night train to Sa Pa tonight. Sa Pa is a mountain region NW of Hanoi and has many tribal people there living lives in a way similar to their distant ancestors. We sped our travel to Sa Pa by a day in order to catch the famed Sunday market which is reported to be quite the spectacle.

Check out the pics in the 2014 Hanoi folder linked on the right hand side of the blog.

I also linked the kids blogs as well.