A day of walking in Hanoi

Wow. Just came back to the guesthouse after a full day of walking around in Hanoi. Mostly the Old Quarters. Hanoi is crowded, it is intensive, it is dirty, it is colorful and I absolutely love it. After leaving the guesthouse in the morning I did a couple of hours of walking around in the Old Quarters where every street is a market. The streets are filled with dirt, food stalls, vendors and lots of motobikes. Since I didn't know where I started or in which direction it wasn't much of a point worrying about getting lost - to get lost you kind of need to know where you are when you start. The Old Quarters are lovely though. It is a labyrinth of small streets changing direction and name every block, and filled with small shops, cafes, food stalls and so on. There were lots to see and I was so busy taking in all the views that I forgot to take any photos. Might do the same tour tomorrow and try to capture some of the feeling with the markets in the morning. Or I might go for a three-day tour in Halong Bay, sounds really neat actually!

After finding my way down to the lake I had an hour of visiting the temple in the lake and then walking around the lake. I found the St Joseph cathedral which (just as the guidebook said) looked as if though someone had taken it straight from France and put it in the middle of Hanoi. After visiting the church I sat down for an early lunch / late second breakfast in an alley. I'm not sure what I ate, but it was really good. There was deep-fried boiled eggs (strange but nice), some tofu and some sort of meat that I couldn't recognize (might have been dog - what do I know?). Just when I finished my meal and was enjoying my ca phe sau da (iced coffee with milk - but without the ice since the lady thought it was too cold outside for iced coffee) a group of Australians that I recognized from Hue walked by. I ended up following them on their walking tour through Hanoi which got me back to the church again and then to a restaurant which was very nice. I ate some nice spring rolls and had a proper ca phe sau da, which cost me approximately 3 times as much as my whole meal and ca phe in the alley. We decided to meet again tonight, so I'll join them for dinner, after dinner or some other time during the evening. They were going for a water puppet show which sounds like a nice idea. The other idea is to join the Korean guy that I'm staying with for the moment for some cheap local made beers (it's fresh beer - made the same day and costs 8000 dong which is 4 SEK per glass).

Now I'll try to upload some photos to PicasaWeb, so hopefully you can find a couple of new pictures there in a while.