After a cute, traditional Water Puppet show in Hanoi, we get on the VIP train to Hue. Or should we say shit train.
Looks like she really enjoyed the show
13 hours later, we arrive at Hue City Hostel. A guy knocks on our door, thinking we are two Danish girls he has met earlier that day, which we obviously aren’t. We run into him at the restaurant next door for breakfast and decide we will take a walk around Imperial City with him and a German girl, Edda, who has a bad sunburn. Halfway there, her skin starts blistering, so she has to go back. The guy, whose name is Laurence, is about to catch a bus, so he can’t stay too long either. So basically we barely see anything but the outside of the war museum.
For dinner we go to Nina’s café, and I have the egg noodles with vegetables and mushrooms. SO delicious.
Wow, many yum, such delish, so food
The next day, we do a daytrip around Hue, where we meeta woman we were walking to on the train. We sail on the Perfume river, see tombs and temples, and check out the Purple Forbidden City. Exhausting, to say the least. Hue’s the warmest place I’ve ever been to. It’s constantly around 40 degrees, and the humidity!!! But it’s beautiful, and people are so kind here.
I’m really bored of uploading pictures, because honestly, they’re just buildings. But they’re so beautiful!
I feel like a greater power is trying to warn us. First, there was the earthquake while we were in Chiang Mai. Then, we decided against taking the 30 hour bus ride from Vang Vieng to Hanoi as we had planned, and Sara told me one of those busses had driven off a cliff. We had decided to just fly to Hanoi, and less than 12 hours before our flight, there was a plane crash in Laos. Jeez.
After we arrive at Hanoi Hostel, it starts raining for the first time in two weeks. As we’re out looking for an ATM. The ATM we find is out of order. We feel like the bad weather is just following us around! We take a cab to a mall with a cinema, thinking that Maleficent has come out. It hasn’t. So we watch Godzilla instead, and I once again think that God is trying to kill us, because I am almost bored to death. People around us are on Facebook during the movie, or have brought their 6 year old kid to this thing. It’s just odd.
After the movie, it’s still raining, so we get another cab home. We have a map and an address, which we have to show the driver several times, but he tries to drop us off at two hostels that are nowhere near ours – and of course he wants us to pay for his mistake. We end up getting our receptionist, because the driver doesn’t speak english, and they argue for like half an hour before we convince him to get the price down just a bit.
The next day we are supposed to do some sightseeing. Supposed to. Apparently, everything is closed on Mondays – except the Hoa Lo Prison Museum, also known as the Hanoi Hilton. Since I enjoy that kind of stuff, we go there.
One of the big cells
I guess we should have bought the guidebook, because this is confusing. What were the prisoner’s crimes? There isn’t much information to find here. The death cells are super creepy, and there is a room dedicated to stuff about American prisoners during the Vietnam war – they even have John McCain’s uniform that he wore when he was shot down. So yeah, I guess you could say it’s sort of interesting, but nothing like I expected. We are there for like an hour.
We do some walking for hours around town, trying to find a decent brashop, but give up and go for a brazilian wax at a spa, that has hard, green wax, and Sara and I get to lie right next to each other, admiring our Shrek vaginas. That’s always fun. Then, we go for cheap sushi. The chef doesn’t speak english, so the waiter tells me that the chef think I am “vewy biootifull“, and he makes me an extra piece of sushi – yep, a heart! Sweet. And awkward.
We go back to the hostel and enjoy an hour of free beer on the roof with out kiwi roommate Jenna, before we head to Purple Cherry to get pho.
It’s a much nicer restaurant than we thought, on the roof of a nice hotel. And in a pretty bad neighbourhood. We can’t finish our huge portions and hurry home to relax.
Two of our roommates (we are a total of 8 in the room) are Danish, and they are super talkative when we come back. Honestly, I don’t really like Danish people when I’m travelling, but also the conversation can get really weird when you are both from the same place, so I see if I can get away with pretending to be Californian (since I’ve only been to LA). And it works, and of course they are being totally Danish and bragging about free education and healthcare and how they don’t even have to think about what they want to do for the rest of their lives, they can just get as many free degrees as they want. See, this is why I hate Danish people. I want to brag about that!
So now we’re just chilling until we catch a night bus or train to Hue. That’s going to be fun.
