Hanoi City Tour

We decided to spend a day doing a city tour. Our bus driver was craaaazy. Not only was he obsessive about honking that horn, but he would go through those intersections as if he were the only car in the road instead of one of hundreds trying to make their way in every direction. There were many times when all the passengers gasped in unison, our lives flashing before our eyes as we went hurtling through an intersection with a wall of motorbikes screeching to a halt as our driver completely disregarded traffic going in the cross street. I think even for Hanoi standards, our driver was one of the more dangerous, erratic ones, which is just who you would want driving a bunch of tourists.

First stop was Tran Quoc Pagoda that was built in the sixth century.

Next, we visited Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. No pictures were allowed inside. Ho Chi Minh was nicely preserved inside.

We visited the museum of ethnology, which features various ethnic minorities in Vietnam. There was also a water puppet show.

Lastly, we visited the Temple of Literature, which is the first national university of Vietnam. It was built in 1076.

After the tour we celebrated surviving another day of Hanoi traffic with ice cream. Drew got coconut, and I got taro.

We made to it Vietnam.

We survived Vietnam and have made it back to Singapore. Vietnam was such a different experience. Hanoi is one crazy city. Coming from Singapore made the comparative chaos of Hanoi even more striking. It also didn't help that we did almost no research and planning for this trip so we didn't know what to expect. Sounds pretty stupid, you say? Yeah, it was. 

Part of the craziness is that it seems like everyone's life is centered around the streets of Hanoi from tiny, compact shops selling anything and everything to food stands and food areas where people sit shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalks on tiny plastic stools slurping pho or drinking whatever alcoholic concoction. 

Everyone is trying to sell you something, or trying to get you to ride in their taxi, motorbike, or bicycle taxi. One guy even came right up to Drew, crouched down and tried to pull off a piece of the rubber from Drew's shoe so that he can glue it back on for him for some money. It was so strange and it took us a bit to realize what was going on.

Hanoi is also known as the city of motorbikes with roughly 4million motorbikes on the road zipping around with only a skeleton of driving laws and guidelines to direct them. If you want to cross the street, you won't ever find a good moment unless you're at one of the very large intersections with stoplights. Otherwise since there is never a good time to cross with the steady stream of motorbikes and cars you basically just start walking, very slowly, and the motorbikes will zip around you. An example from youtube:

It is absolutely terrifying the first couple of times you do it. Drew caught on a lot quicker than I did and a couple of times we'd start crossing, but then I'd hesitate and stop in the middle of the road (which is never a good idea,) and Drew would basically abandon me there as he continued to cross despite my frantically grabbing for his arm. Drew argued that I was going to get him killed too. We don't need to go into what kind of response that got from me.

We survived our first exciting day, and the next day we booked a city tour followed by a two day cruise around Halong Bay. So, there's more to come!

Didn't make it to Vietnam

Hello from Singapore!! Yes, we are still in Singapore. So, Drew booked our tickets to Hanoi, Vietnam for an 8:30am flight. We woke up at 4:30am. Got a taxi at 5:30am and drove into the airport. Everything sounds like it's going well, right? Well, this is as close as we ever got to Vietnam:

We are newbie travelers and so we make mistakes along the way. Apparently if you're flying into Vietnam you need to either get your Visa beforehand from the embassy or  you have to apply for a "Visa on arrival" in which case you need to get a letter from a travel agency that says you're legit or something like that, and then you get your Visa when you arrive. It takes money and time to set this all up, so we've delayed the trip for one day. We held our breaths as we set up our Visas on arrival via the super sketchy looking website http://vietnamvisapro.com/. It turned out ok, and the service was very prompt. So hopefully everything will work out when we make attempt #2 to Hanoi. 

Wish us luck!

Heat Stroke and Clarke Quay

Because I unleash my stress and frustration on google, these past couple of days I've been angrily googling "WHY IS SINGAPORE SO HUMID?" "WHY IS SINGAPORE SO HOT" "HOW DO PEOPLE SURVIVE IN SINGAPORE" "WHY AM I THE ONLY ONE SWEATING?" Let me tell you, it's pretty unbearable here. Anyway, it is what it is, and so again I took my delicate pale, Boston winter conditioned skin out into the sun and played chicken with heat stroke.

We continue our gastronomical tour with some Pao. I had the veggie and Drew had the mystery meat topped with boiled egg. He's become a lot of more adventurous with his food, which deserves a lot of kudos. 

We walked around some shops and tried on new glasses for me. I thought maybe being in Asia would help in finding glasses better suited for my asian features but Singapore also doesn't seem to have that magical pair of glasses that makes me 10000x prettier, so we came up empty handed. Their $350 price tag also doesn't help. (Google: "WHY IS EVERYTHING IN SINGAPORE SO EXPENSIVE?" "WHY AM I SO POOR?")

We had ramen and curry rice for lunch. 

The subway system is pretty amazing. Fast, clean, efficienct. There are lots of rules to keep it that way. Note that durian is prohibited. 

We took the subway to Clarke Quay which is the center for their nightlife. 

There were lots of restaurants and clubs sheltered underneath these umbrellas to protect people from the rain.

You can see Marina Bay Sands, which is new hotel and casino topped with Sands skypark. Wiki tells us poor people who can only look at it from afar that it has a "mall, a museum, two large theatres, seven "celebrity chef" restaurants, two floating Crystal Pavilions, an ice skating rink, and the world's largest atrium casino with 500 tables and 1,600 slot machines, an infinity pool set on top of the world's largest public cantilevered platform."

This poor man has succumbed to his heat stroke and has become one of the baked dead forever to run around the city in midday.

Because my grumpiness and complaining directly correlates with the amount of sun exposure, we called it a day pretty early. We also needed to get back to pack, because we're heading to Vietnam for 5 days. I have to admit that I've been somewhat reluctant of this trip for whatever reasons, but I've been told it'll be amazing. Alex reassured me and noted that even his Dad wanted to go there, and he's French, so that should tell me a lot. It really doesn't, but no one argues with Alex, so off we go. Probably no internet in Vietnam, so we'll update when we get back.

Here are more pictures from the past couple of days. The architecture in Singapore is really interesting and reflects a diverse history.

By the way, this is my cancerous hair that is growing on my arm. I noticed it when it was flapping away in the wind. Drew was disgusted and made me pull it out. RIP. 

Walkabout Day

This post is by Drew.

In the morning we headed over to the Botanical gardens to walk around and get some food at one of the small restaurants there.

A pretty flower along the walk, one of many we saw.

SueAnn got very hot so we decided to leave after a half an hour.  SueAnn was very hungry so we thought we'd find a place to eat in Chinatown.

Where we wandered and window shopped minus the windows.  We then found the hawker center ( which is the name for a food court in singapore) and got some Fried Hokkien Mee but just for a snack.

Then we decided it was time to head to little india for a real lunch at the Banana Leaf. where the plates have real banana leaves on them. We got Butter chicken curry, Naan and veg. samosas.

We took the subway to the Harbor Front and Vivo city mall. Which happens to be where you catch the Singapore Cable Car that takes you to Sentosa Island.

Wandering around Sentosa was not that fun and I'll leave it at that.

We did manage to see Phillippe Starck's  $300 million mega yacht. Which we had just read about on the WSJ.  But here is a public link to the same story on gizmodo
http://gizmodo.com/5519914/never-before-seen-look-inside-a-300-million-phillippe-starck-mega+yacht

Then we went for sushi and went home.
 The End.

Away from home, cont.

OH HEY. Look what's being revived from the graveyard of neglected blogs. What better reason to bring back your attention to this embarrassing specimen of silly writing than the exciting news, of which you were already aware, that I decided to make the crazy flight from Boston to Singapore to visit Drew for two weeks. So welcome back!

The Flight

Korean Air is still my favorite airline; however, no excellent airline can overcome the hell that is a 13+ hour flight when sitting in cramped economy class. I could feel the clots building up in my veins despite furiously pumping my legs in that crazy compulsive fashion that made my aisle-mates scooch away from me as I undertook the supposed prevention of what's been termed "economy class syndrome."

DVT prevention exercises. Remember, for that added crazy look, don't stop.

Need I tell you that I broke out in sweats a couple of times thinking about pulmonary embolisms when I would suddenly find myself short of breath and start questioning if the tightening in my chest from my anxiety may actually be pleuritic pain.

Your neighbor will appreciate you even more when you start making this motion on top of your crazy leg dancing.

I was a mess. So when I landed in Seoul, Korea for my layover I was exhausted. I went to go sit in the waiting area for my final flight to Singapore, opened my book, and promptly did this:

.

... except it was even worse because I was dressed like a hobo. But, like a champ I woke up RIGHT when they were making the final call for my flight. Despite wanting to shoot myself for thinking that the flight from Seoul to Singapore would only take 2 hours instead of 6, I nevertheless made it to my final destination with mind and body still intact. 

And yeah, remember when I complained about how Drew looked and smelled after his 24 hour flight back to Boston? Well here's what I looked like when I got off that plane. 

Drew graciously gave me a welcoming hug and helped me with my luggage. It was 1am Singapore time, but he was kind enough to humor me and agree to celebrate my disbelief of making it through alive by agreeing to get ice cream.

Ok, lots of pictures of the trip to come soon!