Cities used to be my favorite places to be, but now I’m reconsidering if I’m a city-girl or not. Walking down the streets of Hanoi is so stressful to me with the incessant and mostly-unnecessary horn-honking. The sidewalks are full of motorbikes or squatting people having a chat, so pedestrians are mostly forced to walk on the street. So, it’s not really fun to walk the city – though it is still infinitely better than Ho Chi Minh.
We set off to see “Hanoi Hilton” or Hoa Lo Prison in the morning. In my junior high gym class, my teacher – an Army reserve person – would make us do obstacle courses and called it Hanoi Hilton. So, for some reason I imagined some sort of obstacle course for the real place…of course, it wasn’t quite the same. The prison was pretty interesting. The pictures showed soldiers having a “good” time during their captivity and made it seem less terrible as a prison should seem. Makes you wonder about the truth as is true with all historical places. In any case, it was nice to read some descriptions that didn’t include the evil Americans, but rather the evil French! ha ha.
From the prison, we made a short rest stop and then headed out to the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology. This was definitely worth the trip out. The inside of the museum was pretty good with representation and explanations of the various tribes and ethnic groups in Vietnam throughout history. There were exhibits of the usual cultural artefacts and such. However, the best part, I thought, was the outside exhibits showing the life-size houses/dwellings and replication of the lifestyles. We also saw a water puppet show that can “only be seen in Vietnam”. It was humorous, but overall not so interesting to watch. I think seeing how the puppet-masters worked would have been more worth it, but what can you do? π
All this was done pre-lunch, though we ended up having a fairly late lunch and thus a ridiculous amount of food at the Hanoi Garden. The food was excellent and tided us over for the rest of the night. So, we found a pub from the Lonely Planet called “Polite Pub”, which was quiet and nice. Then, we decided to wander to another venue and found “Avalon” overlooking the lake. It was a middle-class bar for the young Vietnamese folk, which made it a bit more interesting.
Overall, our last day and night in Hanoi was pretty good despite originally thinking it would be too much time in the noise-polluted city! Our trip to Halong Bay is going to be soooo good with some peace and quiet!
More to come,
T
