Hanoi

My first time traveling alone to another country for tourism, I went to visit Huong in Hanoi, Vietnam. Just before getting on the flight, my Airbnb host cancelled last minute due to some time misunderstanding and I had to ask Huong to book me a place. I had some of her important things with me from her time in Japan that I offered to help give back. I arrived pretty late and had a taxi driver approach me. Huong talked to the driver through my phone and I ended up in a taxi with him and got dropped me off in some shady area. I ended up in a car with two guys that were pretty suspicious looking as well. I thought I got tangled up in some Vietnamese gangsters, heck they probably were. We communicated via Google Translate and had some fun conversations and they helped me find my hostel and knocked hard on the locked gate for me. The hostel started to get noisy around early morning because of the construction since 5AM. Huong arrived around 9 and I stepped foot outside to see Hanoi for the first time in daylight.

It was beautiful, morning air was fresh and there was still some fog around and I rode behind Huong on her scooter as she took me to eat pho for breakfast. It was pretty good, afterwards, I went ahead and booked a very nice hotel for myself and we transferred there as I do not want to spend another night in the hostel. I do remember getting scammed some money from the taxi driver but doesn’t really matter. We had a very good Vietnamese lunch, different types of food, all delicious. We went to see some sights including the lake, the library, the folk museum and I think the national museum. It had these huge giant houses. I tried to ride the scooter but failed. Afterwards, we went to try bun, some kind of beef pho. We tried to go to this good restaurant but I think it was closed down. Riding around Hanoi with the scooter was very frightening and wild but it was also very fun to see how traffic flowed. To end the night, we watched the water puppet show, it was really unique even though I didn’t understand anything.Read more