First week in Hanoi

Got into Hanoi last Monday and after finding the airline had lost my luggage and the hotel couldn't find my booking, Monday was pretty much wasted. Went to a mall to buy enough clothes to make it through the next day - found out I need to buy men's pants here as the women are way too small! The luggage arrived the next day:)

Most of the week was spent in the office and doing more work in the hotel. Doing two jobs at once isn't really the best idea. I finally started going out and seeing some stuff this weekend. The people at the office are lovely - we went to get a manicure/pedicure (the picture is of me and my colleague) and lunch most days. The food here is amazing! They seem to do all types of food well and obviously the vietnamese food is so yummy. Good coffee, not fried - not spicy - well seasoned - not living in oil food! I'm in heaven.

But really Hanoi is nothing like I imagined. I was imagining Cambodia or Laos (as they both border Vietnam) but it's really more of a combination of Thailand and China. Life is high-tech, huge skyscrapers, not much english and definitely wordly. Most of the traffic is motorbikes. They have kept the pointed bamboo hats and over the should baskets but there's not much in the way of "traditional" dress or anything in the city anyway. I hear the countryside is totally different and hope I get to see some of it.

On Saturday my colleague Leah (american) and I went out and explored Old Quarter. Typical tourist world with tons of little shops (many selling war propaganda w Che Guevara imagery). The design stuff is so much more appealing to me - hard not to buy it all. All I bought was a coffee filter so I can make my own coffee at the office (they have nescafe!). When it got misty we took in a show of water puppets - puppets attached to long sticks and the performers are also standing in water (behind a curtain). It was actually really interesting. The guy next to me was, I think, a vietnamese man in his 50s who came by himself and was completely amused - laughing aloud. It was really enjoyable.

Sunday I spent the morning walking around the hotel neighborhood with a mission of getting the pants I bought here hemmed (seriously, I'm short even here) and buying some coffee. The pants mission was surprisingly easy. I found a dry cleaner who wrote down in very clear english the address of a tailor. Went to the tailor and a nice customer helped translate for me. 10 minutes and less than a dollar later, I had my pants. I also thought I solved the coffee mission but upon further inspection I didn't buy coffee beans or grounds - I bought those coffee packs with fake milk and sugar already mixed in. So I'll have to go back to the drawing board on that one. In the afternoon we went to the Museum of Ethnology which did give me a sense of life outside of the major cities. The thing that struck me most is how similar the Thai tribes (ethnic, not country) are to the groups of Thai Buddhists we met in Assam a few years ago. Same houses, dress, etc.

Traveling to the beach on Tuesday (it's a holiday) so will have more then