I knew I was going to love Vietnam's food, I knew about pho (noodle soup), I knew about bun (cold rice noodles with meat), and I was really exited. The food lived up to my expectations. Restaurant and street food were hard to distinguish by taste alone. Street food however, was served on short little tables, and you sat on munchkin sized plastic benches outdoors. Restaurant food is indoors, on American sized tables and benches.

          Street life in Ha Noi is really interesting. People pray to small shrines on the sidewalk as well as temples highly present in urban areas. Street vendors stroll with bikes or carry baskets of fruit, meat, fish, vegetables, all sorts of stuff. Tourists walk casually down the street. There are a lot of tourists.

          Vietnamese TV is a lot like Honduran TV, but in vietnamese. Weird game shows, tacky music videos, news. Jim and I had a lot of fun trying to find out what people were saying based of their actions and tone of voice. Jetlag was bad. I used to wake up at midnight wanting lunch, and falling asleep at mid day. A trip from Boston to Vietnam causes the worst possible jetlag, 12 hours of it. It was like being turned upside down and shaken.

          Eventually we went to a temple called Ngoc Son. The temple sat on an island in the middle of a lake. The story goes that during the war with the Chinese, a Viet warrior was given a magic sword by a golden turtle. After the war was over however, the turtle demanded the sword and went back to live on the bottom of the lake. This turtle was real, of course it was not golden. It was an endangered soft shelled giant turtle, it still resides on the bottom of the lake.

          One day Susan brought us to a museum. It was called the Vietnamese Museum of Ethnology. We saw a lot of different ethnic traditions. Shaman rituals, weaving, baskets, swords, dove and fish traps, and all sorts of cool stuff. We also looked inside recreated Vietnamese houses. We also saw funny wooden fertility statues around a recreated burial home. Vietnamese homes are tall and skinny. They take up very little surface space but instead stretch up several stories. It is different than what I am used to, Tegucigalpa has small but squat one floor buildings, so, it is pretty interesting visually.

         Ha Noi, Vietnam's capital, is really interesting, everything from the food, to the culture, 

to the smog. Hanoi gave me a really good first impression.