1-03-10: Last Day in Hanoi

Today we ate our way through the city, waiting for our evening bus
ride to Hue. Since we had Internet in our room last night, we looked
at for recommended sights to see and foods to eat in Hanoi. We were
excited to find several highly recommended places to eat that we
hadn't found or read of in Lonely Planet. When it comes to SEA,
Travelfish vastly outshines Lonely Planet. I wonder how it would
compare to Rough Guides.

We started the morning with Vietnamese sticky rice at Xoi Yen. (I am
bummed that my pad doesn't support vietnamese characters so I can
accurately capture names in vietnamese. ----Correction. It seems to
support it if I can update my operating system, but I cant figure out
how to do that abroad. Hmm...) Robert had high hopes for the sticky
rice, but it was quite different than that of Thailand and Laos. (We
heard that the "s" in Laos is silent. Fact or fiction?) Enough
questions, we had glutinous rice, as "sticky rice" is called here.
Mine was topped with Chinese braised pork and Robert got two meat
sausage hotdog looking things: cinnamon pork and beef dumpling. We had
a wonderful meal for 44,000d, $2.10 USD. Then we had coffee with sweet
milk at a ca fe joint across the street. (Vietnamese is written with
each syllable as it's own word. Hence, you get signs for Viet Nam and
Ha Noi and ca fe (coffee).)

Since we had to check out of our hotel and stash our bags at
ET-Pumpkin, we had to give up our great Internet connection. Back to
lousy Tamarind to borrow their Internet over a pot of our new
favorite, star anise tea. This time we also had some expensive fruit
and yogurt; we've had better on this trip, but this was tasty enough.
After Internet, we planned to walk pretty far from the Old Quarter to
find "coffee street" and Lenin Park/Bau Mau Lake. First though, we had
to sample "Hanoi's signature dish," as stated by Travelfish. Bun cha.
This is what Robert knew as bun from home, drained pho is how I always
thought of it. We have learned that at a soup place you can order bun
and you will get soup with round rice noodles, but if you go to a bun
cha joint and order "1" (no menu, the only thing you can get is bun
cha), you get: green bits, cold round rice noodles, fried spring
rolls, grilled pork and a sweetened fish sauce to tie the whole dish
together. You eat it all by dipping this and that in the sauce and
stuffing it into your pie hole. It is delightful, granted I just liked
wrapping noodles in lettuce and dipping that in sauce, but Robert said
the pork was good too.

Then, the colossal rip-off happened. We sat on out little plastic
stools, enjoyed our bun cha and then needed to pay. No menus mean we
didn't see prices before we ate, big mistake. The lady told us we each
owed 50,000d. For bun cha on a street corner?! We expected it to be
5,000d, not anywhere near 50,000d, not by an order of magnitude. I
regret to say that we just paid here and walked away, steaming. The
locals eating right behind her laughed at us, at least just their eyes
like something was going on. I am so mad that we didn't put up a
fight, even if we had already eaten and cant speak Vietnamese. We know
better!! Street food is not that expensive. $5 US, but it is the
principal of the thing. Don't overcharge foreigners! It just isn't
nice - especially not by an order of magnitude, twice!!! I'm getting
steamed just thinking about it. It took us most of our cross-town walk
to cool off. On the way, the ATM would only give us 4,000,000 dong and
charged double the standard rate (40,000 instead of 20,000). It seemed
like all of Hanoi was out to get us.

We got to Lenin Park, paid our 4,000d entrance fee (a public park with
an entrance fee?! Maybe I was just still angry about the bun cha
incident), and bee-lined for the bathrooms, which miraculously didn't
charge a fee. The park was buzzing with activity: couples ka'noodling
on most benches, kids riding the dragon kiddiecoaster, teenagers
having boygiband dance practice (a co-Ed boy band), skateboarders,
joggers and lots more wedding photos! #1: why weren't the kids in
school at 2pm on a Monday? #2: why are there so many wedding photo
shoots? Strange. We walked around in the park a bit, but then headed
back towards the Old Quarter so we would have enough time to make our
bus.

Once in the Old Quarter, we went for an excellent bowl of pho/bun at
our favorite place, the red one? I can't even fathom what it's name
actually is, but it was excellent. Back to Tamarind and another pot of
tea, good location, reliable Internet and very bad music. We stayed
there, one of us leaving at a time to acquire supplies for our 14 hour
bus ride. I contributed a bag of chips and a bottle of water. Robert
managed to score two sticky rices to-go, a package of oreos, and two
nice baguettes! He won me.

5:45, time to meet our bus, but the bus didn't show until 6:45! Back
to Thai and Lao time it seems... I will detail the bus trip in the
next post. Too much for one post already.