Your meal will be 30,000 dong (Less than 2 dollars)!

After a tedious couple days of travel, we are finally at our first destination: Hanoi, Vietnam.


With absolutely no track of time, I've been wide awake since 5:00am this morning. Ari and I tried to save a little money by spending the night at the Bangkok airport, instead staying at a nearby hotel for the night. Not such a great idea. Fluorescent lights and airport benches made sleeping slightly difficult. After deciding sleeping was hopeless, Ari and I started playing tackle football with his pillow. The Vietnamese workers thought we were pretty ridiculous. As a result by the time our last flight to Hanoi came around, we had only about 2 more hours of sleep under our belt, after 12 hours at the airport.


I'm not sure why, but I've been eating like a cow. About 5 or 6 large meals a day. All the flights serve food and my new trip mantra "Never turn down free food." Soooo, after all the airplane dinners, I still get tempted at every airport restaurant we walk by and have to get a few pieces of sushi or some curry. Ari is convinced it is the Thai girls that always giggle when we walk by and make fun of us in Thai. Pretty frustrating and there's nothing that we can stop them.



Taxi! You want cheap taxi! As expected we were instantly bombarded with taxis after stepping foot in the Hanoi airport. Instead of riding with the sketchy taxi kids, we hopped on a shared van to the old city with some other tourist that were on our plane. They looked as confused as us, so we still weren't 100% sure about this decision. I think we got the fasted van drider in Hanoi. He loved honking for no reason. About 45 minutes into the rollercoaster ride the van lurched to a stop and a Vietnamese boy squeezed into the van next to me. "I am your new driver. Please give me your money now." Along with the rest of the suspicious tourists, we reluctantly handed him the 3 dollars worth of Vietnamese notes, hoping we were not being taking advantage of. Miraculously we were dropped off in the old city of Hanoi about 5 minutes later and pointed in the right direction to the Hanoi Backpackers hotel. "Only 5 minute walk" the new driver assured us.


Even with our handy lonely planet map, finding the hotel took another 20 minutes. The streets are named, but there are no visible street signs. We would just ask tourists and locals every few steps where to go in hopes of staying in the right direction. On our way to the hostel a young boy started talking to us. The conversation went as follows:



"You want books? Travel book, Vietnam War Stories, Key Phrase, etc, etc. No thanks. Do you want maps? Not interested. Do you want marijuana? No thanks. Do you want Opium?" We laughed and walked away. The progression from guidebooks to opium in a matter of seconds was pretty funny.


Our hostel was a palace amongst the nearby hotels ran by locals. Hanoi Backpacker's hostel is run by Australians and has many young tourist willing to provide good travel advice. It was very expensive relatively ($9 a night), but we figured it was worth the extra money to get off to the right start. They even have their own free Internet cafe and rooftop bar. Everyone I've met so far is really nice and they can't wait to share their cool travel stories. We couldn't have chose a better hotel to start at.



After a refreshing shower, I walked down to the main TV room to find that Ari had already made friends with a Texas dude and a couple girls from Ireland. The Irish girls had been in Vietnam a while so they provided many tips to send our trip in the right direction. We went to dinner with them and enjoyed discussing our many cultural differences and how they perceive Americans. They have real funny accents and expressions (actually much different than in Boondock Saints. Hollywood...) It's really quite easy to make friends in this type of environment. Our two new friends took off that night on a sleeper train. Meeting cool people and saying bye, knowing you will never see them again, seems like it will be one of the harder parts of our trip.



I better get off the computer and go wake up Ari. Tonight we head off to Yom Kippur services at "Big Man Beer." Ari contacted the Israeli consulate who was able to point us in the right direction for some Hanoi Judaism. Should be interesting...



By the way, I just set up a Picasa web album and updated a few pictures. Click on the picture on the top left of the page to see them. I think it should work. Let me know if it doesn't.



Email me, and I'll get back to you with the best stories! Also, share some cool places to go, if you've been anywhere I'm going. Thanks.

samfranklin08@comcast.net



Miss you guys,

Sam