This is our hotel - The Golden Sun Palace. It's quite a lovely little haven - smack bang in the middle of the Old Quarter chaos. This morning we had a lovely western brekky including banana pancakes and we learned the Vietnamese word for 'delicious' and no matter how hard we tried to pronounce it, we just couldn't get it right.
Apparently repeating it in the exact same way doesn't help you learn.
(Marie and I have decided on wearing a uniform today)
Chris had drawn us up a map of all the shopping streets so today, that was our mission.... to find said streets - this, I will have you know is no easy feat. We had 3 different maps with us and they all differed from one another according to street names and actual placement of the street.
So here are some highlights of today's adventures....
At first I thought they were chickens, but it turns out that this lady is there for all your duster needs ⬇
These were such lovely old buildings. The view was only slightly hindered by this tangle of power lines.
Ever since I turned bón-múói, I have needed to wear reading glasses as my eyesight slowly, but surely deteriorates. It's been a long time since I have needed to get glasses in and out of my bag and as I had been nominated chief map reader today, I was needing the glasses to be on and off and on and off, so when we happened to pass "Optician Street" (not a real street, but this particular street was lined with little stalls selling sunglasses) I thought I would purchase one of these very handy little glasses strings so I could hang them around my neck - nanna style. As I walked along wondering which stall I would give my business to I was faced with one lady eating her lunch, one man was cleaning his one long fingernail and another lady was picking her nose, so that left the last shop..... It doesn't take much to get my business.
Our plan was to meander around half of the lake to an area where their might have been some 'international' shops. The Hoan Kiem Lake has a legend that says...
According to local legend, an ancient emperor was once floating along the lake when the Golden Turtle God requested his magic sword. It’s an age-old story that locals still tell to curious tourists who wander the lake’s scenic shores. It marks the divide between Hanoi’s Old Quarter and French Quarter and is also home to an endangered species of massive soft-shell turtles that gave nearby Turtle Temple its name.
There's probably bit more to this story, as this one doesn't sound interesting or plausible..... I'll see what I can find out for you.
Anyway, we got about 100 metres into our walk when we were stopped by some young people asking we would sign their poster. It was a petition to 'save the lake'. I'm not sure what they were saving it from, but we signed up, like good Hanoian citizens.
And will now probably become poster children for the "Save the Lake" campaign.
We were able to take about 10 more steps when a young man (the one on the far right of the pic below) walked along side me and started to chat. (He probably saw my new glasses string and thought 'she looks like a smart cookie' I'll chat to her) It turns out that he was part of a bigger group of students who had come to the lake - a bit tourist location to practice their English. My new best friend was studying be a civil engineer and hoped to one day live and work in Australia but wanted to be fluent in English before he did that. Good on him, I say. So we all stopped for about 15 minutes and made small talk - in the rain.
Jenny made the best of all our new best friends.
Then about 100 more metres down our path we were stopped by another group of young ladies. I was the only one who stopped though as Jen, Marie and Chris powered through the eager learners, Jenny was heard to say "No, I've said everything I know."
I chatted for about 4-5 minutes. I told them I was a teacher of small children and they stated, "oh, you must love children", when I replied, "Yeah..... not so much. There's some I like, but there's some I'm not so keen on." They didn't know what else to ask me, so it seemed that my statement was the conversation killer I needed to move on.
And move on we did.
This chap was spotted, just sitting watching the world go by. We tried to think of how we might caption this photo.....
Please submit your ideas.
Just as Chris and I were discussing how many products in Vietnam would be fake we came across a window display with these super heros hanging. I can't be sure, but I wonder if Superman's face has just been hand drawn on?
This was a wedding that had been set up on the footpath - right to the road, so pedestrians had to walk out onto the road to get around it, which is nothing really here as generally the parking of motorbikes get right of way on the footpaths before people.
This is where you come to get your bike fixed. Or you can just pull up on the corner there and pump up your tyres.
We stumbled upon Starbucks on our travels and I know there will be some of you out there who poo poo Starbucks as a fine caffeine serving establishment, but I'll just have you know that in the Asian Starbucks, they serve Green Tea Frappaccinos...... so, the joke is on you!
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