Jessica didn't get in until later that night, so we didn't want to do anything in Hanoi that she might also be interested in. We decided to just spend the day walking around the city. Breakfast was complementary at our hostel, including a selection of fruit, juice, coffee and your choice of entree. Since I couldn't see myself eating beef noodle soup for breakfast, I went with "pancake with banana and chocolate" which was basically a little crepe.
We ventured out into the city and began by walking around the lake. As we walked, I was still shocked by the sheer number of motorcycles in Hanoi. It is clearly their main form of transportation and we saw people carrying furniture, families and fully decorated Christmas trees on the back of their bikes.
The lake itself is really pretty and has a little pagoda in the middle that lights up at night. It's a nice green space in the middle of the city and you can tell that people go there just to hang out.
Next, we walked down to the opera house to see if anything was playing while we were in town. Unfortunately we were going to miss the only interesting things playing, but the opera house was still nice to look at.
The city was definitely dressed up for Christmas which was much different from Australia where there were no decorations at all.
We stopped at a local ice cream shop because Alyssa had read about some cinnamon ice cream that Hanoi is famous for and after watching a few people order, we figured we could do it despite the language barrier. The ice cream was pretty good and definitely cheap!
We continued walking around the city, looking for interesting buildings and stores. We wandered through an very upscale mall for a while where I bought some new sunglasses since my frames had been broken in half for over two weeks. We then passed a Catholic Church that had a nice manger set up in front of it. Tons of people were outside wanting to check it out, but they had put a big gate up so that no one could get near it. I was really surprised by how much Christmas was being celebrated despite the fact that we were told only 25% of Vietnamese people are Christian.
We decided to stop and get rice bowls at a place we had walked by near the opera house. The pictures looked good but since we speak no Vietnamese and the waiter spoke no English, we had no idea what we were actually getting. We ended up with some very fatty pork and rice and a pork rice bowl (we thought we were getting a tofu rice bowl and chicken with rice). We didn't really like either one, which was ironic because it was much more expensive than if we had just gotten street food which is always delicious.
When we got back to the hostel, the maid had added an additional bed to our room. We assumed that it was because Jessica was arriving but we had thought a queen bed and a double was perfectly sufficient for three people. Now we had essentially four beds and could barely walk into the room- it was hilarious!
We ventured back out into the city in search of a grocery store. We got a big bottle of water and then decided we should also get some wine. We found Vietnamese wine and decided we had to try it, even though we were scared because it was only $2.00/bottle and 14.5%. It turned out to be pretty good and definitely an amazing bottle for the price! Jessica's flight was not getting in until 10:00pm and we had set up a car to pick her up from the airport, so we had nothing to do but wait. Alyssa looked up an Indian restaurant with good reviews so we headed down there for some tikka masala and Tiger beer- delicious!
Back at the hostel, we were beginning to worry because it was after midnight and Jessica still hadn't arrived. Finally we heard her voice and ran down to the lobby to greet her. She had made it there with no issues and we settled in to get some sleep sine we had a tour early the next morning and she was bound to be jet lagged.
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