Good Afternoon, Vietnam

"Someday this trip's gonna end..."

Yep, but I still got 10 days or so in Vietnam, so I guess it's, Good Afternoon, Vietnam and Bon Voyage, Malaysia. It was about time, anyways, since there wasn't much to report following our climb up Mt. Kinabalu and Kuala Lumpur was kind of a get-over after our mountain-climbing exhaustion. It's now well in the rearview and Vietnam is the country du jour.

Which is cool in a lot of ways—the food is better here, it's hotter (nice change of pace), it's way easier to walk around then KL (KL is almost like Asia's LA version of urban sprawl, absolutely painful when your legs are putty).

Also, Vietnam's way more lively (motorbikes honking literally every 0.002 seconds) and has a way cheaper cost of living, which is obviously great. That said, no one really speaks English here (if they do, it's pretty broken) and people are friendly, but not quite as much as the Malays. All and all, though, we are pumped to be here for something new and Vietnamese-y, especially because they have Pho, which is like one of the top 3 reasons we came for this:


Goin on Day No. 3 here in Hanoi. It's about 5pm, pretty much the usual time the heat catches up to you and forces you back into somewhere aircon. 3 of Logan's friends from the States got in this morning—they've been past out for the last few hours, a lot of their tiredness attributed to hot, hot, heat.

Right now I'm sitting in our luxurious room drowning out the insanely loud sounds of construction at our hotel. Even with headphones, I'd say the ratio is about 70-30 construction noise-to-music, but that's really the only complaint we have, we're paying $9 bucks a night for a full on hotel with aircon, TV, balcony, whatever. It's pretty posh, minus the renovations goin on right now.

This city is weird, super compact considering it is made up of 3.5 million Hanoiers. The streets are small and blend together, making it nearly impossible to walk around without getting lost (getting lost has been our main tourist pasttime here). After 3 days, we really haven't done all that much short of walking around and getting lost. This morning, we tried to make it to Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum (where the big guy was mummified), leaving at 945am to make the 1030am closing. 45 minutes = not nearly enough. We're too stingy to go the taxi/motorbike route, so the byproduct is walking, walking some more and not actually accomplishing anything besides getting lost (which we've been more than happy doing).

(The closest we will probably ever get to Ho Chi Minh, maybe next time)

Life in Hanoi on the whole for us has been super low-key, partly because of the weather, too. The average high is probably 40 celsius, which is like 160-degrees fahrenheit. At night, things don't get much cooler—and we just get lazier to really see things because the World Cup games start at 6pm. It's led to a lot of pit stops at our hotel to get a little AC time (and the only place we kinda know how to get to) and a lot of hanging out and watching soccer at half-empty restaurants. No complaints at all.

Perhaps most interestingly (to us, anyways) because of the heat, we've also taken to walking around without our shirts a good percentage of the time and get absolutely startled looks from locals (even though 1 out of 5 Vietnamese is sitting around doing nothing without their shirts). People laugh or point, stare or look away, some people motioning and telling me in Vietnamese to put our shirts back on, others tell their friends and then point, stare, etc. It's weird and awesome. I'm not sure if it's because they are offended (a ginormous urban city, you think they've seen some white guys without shirts) or what, but either way, it's hilarious.

Our general consensus is that they are totally confused/appalled by our chest hair. In the last two days since we started goin shirtless, one guy blatantly tried to yank and pull on my chest hair before I jumped away. And then this afternoon, some dude patted Logan on the stomach as he walked by him on the street. Between the pulling, patting, staring, laughing, etc, something is definitely up, we just don't know what it is yet. Gotta be the chest hair, though—really, that's the only difference between us shirtless Americans and shirtless Hanoiese.

(Put a shirt on white guys or get the hell out of Vietnam)

As you can tell from that anecdote, our time really has been spent super leisurely here. We did make it to one touristy-type thing—the Hanoi Hilton, which was a French colonial prison in the late 19th century for uppity, revolutionary Viets and then became a POW hangout for US soldiers during our happy stay in Vietnam in the 60s and 70s.

The whole thing was about a 45 minute trip with some OK relics, most notably a couple cells (pretty boring) and a guillotine that the French used in Vietnam after they were outlawed in France (pretty awesome) along with the prerequisite pictures of 3 heads in a basket of Viets that the French were just not that into (pretty gruesome).

Other highlights: a bunch of pro-Viet propoganda and pictures about how nice living conditions were for US POWs, with the pictures to prove it, from Xmas celebrations, to playing basketball and volleyball, to raising chickens and writing poetry. Basically, they make it out to be paradise, or at the very least, Club Med, Hanoi Edition.

And if that's not enough...John McCain's military uniform has been preserved and put up there, too! Which is totally crap, by the way---there's no way they held onto it for 30 years when he was just some schmuck Senator from Arizona, banking on him running for President and becoming famous. Nice try, Vietnam Tourism people. There are, though, a couple of super sick phot/action shots of McCain, too, looking deathly ill on a POW cot. McCain is everywhere! Basically, if you are a John McCain junky, make sure you make the pilgrimage to the Hanoi Hilton.

(McCain Doin Work)

Other than that, our time is spent walking and avoiding getting hit by the 40 billion motorbikes (every walk across the street is an awesome game of Frogger come to life), which is a fun skill to hone. Motorbikes are like water just flowing out of a faucet on every street. To sum up, two nights ago, I took a picture of a hunched over 50-something year old crossing the street...I looked back 2 seconds later and he was on the ground, after a motorbike clipped him. He was not happy and was still yelling Viet obsencities are we walked away a few minutes later.

(Pretty much an off-day at the Old Quarter roundabout, which is like a 1 minute walk from our Hotel and where we get our Frogger real-life fix)

Eating is our other true pasttime. Food here is like $1-3 a meal, so I've just taken to eating a couple of entrees at most meals and just wracking up bills. Thankfully, I haven't gotten fat yet. Anyways, that's Hanoi in a nutshell so far. We'll probably be here for one more day until we head to Halong Bay for a 3 day boat/island hopping trip 2 hours north of here that is supposedly legendary/must do tourist stuff for the region. You sleep on a boat for a night, too I'm amped about.

(Supposedly Halong Bay and the sleeper boats you crash on)

Check in soon, will throw up some KL pictures soon.

Til Next time, Go Celtics but mostly, Go USA (tomorrow vs. Slovenia!)
Love,
Jack