I just wrote a really long e-mail to the list. I was almost done and then I hit something which caused me to lose the whole thing. I’m really mad.
In summary: Our bus ride sucked. I think Ian has written about it elsewhere. Suffice it to say that the guy who ran the second bus (van) that we were stuffed into was a complete ass. He wouldn’t stop to let this one girl pee even though she was crying because she had to go so bad and had been asking for so long.
Hanoi is nice. Each street in the old quarter is dedicated to a different product. There are streets for blacksmiths and silk and towels and tin boxes and spices and so on.
We walked through a food market that had lots of live animals for sale. We saw this amazing machine. It looked like a small steel washing machine and it was just sitting on the street. They guy turned it on and it rocked like a washing machine in the spin cycle. He dropped in two chickens, which we hope very much were already dead. About 20 seconds later, they came out and had absolutely no feathers on them, but their skin was unmarred. Gross, but a feat of engineering all the same.
Tomorrow we’ll do a day excursion to the Perfume Pagoda, which is supposedly a pagoda carved into a cliff face.
On Thursday, we’ll start a 3-day trip to Halong Bay and Cat Ba Island. We’ll hve two nights there, one on our boat and one in a hotel. We’re hopeful that we’ll actually get the bus that we were promised. Supposedly there will be 16 people in a bus for 24. Hard to believe in Vietnam, but we’ll see.
That’s all for now.