Melissa - After all the idyllic villages and rice paddies of Laos and northern Vietnam, I was not mentally prepared for Hanoi, which is basically a big city. The streets were choked with motorbikes and various other vehicles, and crossing streets involved a mixture of wild hope and apathy. You pray that you'll make it to the other side without being clipped by one of the motorbikes, cars, trucks, or busses that whizz by, but you have to cross the street at a steady, even, predictable pace so that the vehicles can anticipate your movements and avoid you. The pace basically belies your fears--your general demeanor must be "I can't even see these cars going by me. I didn't notice that Vespa that almost slammed into me. This is exactly how I would be walking across the street if there weren't anything speeding right towards me."
Our first stop after the hotel (not one of the better hotels on our trip--the bathroom smelled of sewage and I was somehow allergic to the bedsheets) was the Temple of Literature, an incredible complex dedicated to scholarly pursuits. Interestingly, the Temple of Literature is so old that it is nearly all Chinese--Chinese in architecture, Chinese in layout (feng shui is heavily utilized), and all the signs and carved tablets are in Chinese.
Later, we took cyclos (sort of like rickshaws, but the passenger compartment is in front of the bike, rather than behind) to the famed water puppet show. Water puppetry is an art that began in the rice paddies of the countryside, where water resistant wood was carved into puppets and shows were put on to entertain villages. The water puppet show in Hanoi is set in a small theater. Where the stage would be is a tank of murky water. The show was amusing, but also creepy because, well, puppets are creepy.
After the show, we wandered around the Old Quarter of Hanoi, getting used to the traffic and the incessant honking of motorbikes right by your head. After a while, you stop flinching. We made our way to Bar 69, a cute restaurant in a restored colonial house that serves classic Vietnamese food. Dinner was quite tasty--Rich had a Thai-like chicken dish with lemongrass and chilies, and I had a lovely seabass fillet steamed with ginger, onions, and soy. When we left the restaurant, we saw that it was raining, so we hailed a cab back to the hotel.
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