Hanoi Lucky Hotel, Hanoi

Hanoi is not our favorite place. People are impolite, not very friendly and even rude sometimes (also with their fellow countrymen). The food we had so far was nothing special, in a small village even disgusting and caused diarrhea. Even in Hanoi we did not feel like trying street food, because it did not smell and look good. So it only leaves the expensive restaurants or the tourist restaurants, which are expensive and food id not good (had the worse fried rice here in SA Asia so far). Kaarel is missing his 7-eleven hot dogs from Thailand as they were cheap and good and gave a nice variety to the rice and noodle diet.
In Hanoi the streets are very crowded, there are millions of motorbikes and the drives have no manners, cross the red light, turn everywhere in every possible angle and only use their honks to drive. The prices are much higher than in Laos, but the service is worse. The only interesting thing so far was the water puppet theatre, although the movements and the puppets themselves are not that sophisticated as they were in Thailand. Visited the Temple of Literature, which was not really impressive, neither was the Ho Chi Mihn Museum (did not learn much about uncle Ho, as the displays seemed to be chaotic without temporal order, no information about his ideas and visions or his achievements, only many photographs of him). The old quarter was quite ok, there were some interesting shops: Buddhist shops, herbal medicine shops selling dried sea horse and pangolin (of course illegal) and weight reduction coffee, advertised with leptin on the label (no clue though how the adipocyte hormone would get into the coffee????). We also saw the weasel coffee sold here, although we thought it was a Javan specialty and produced by civet (the idea is that the civet eats the coffee beans and what comes out on the other end is collected -hopefully disinfected- and sold very expensive. The digestion process is supposed to give a special flavor to the coffee and is said to be the best coffee in the world and also the most expensive. En guete!!!).

So after that we are looking forward to leave Hanoi tomorrow. We booked a 3 days trip to Halong Bay. We are just wondering what the hook will be in that trip... Somehow we both have the gut feeling that it will not be perfect, but we let the tour operator surprise us...