Dad’s last day :( and it was HOT!

Dad’s last day :( and it was HOT!

Hanoi, Vietnam, Asia

We slept a bit later today and didn’t wake up till 8am, which was pretty nice. This hotel room only has a window out into a hallway, and not outside, so it stayed pretty dark, which was excellent for getting some much needed sleep after that long day of travel yesterday. We had breakfast up at the restaurant in the hotel and watched the Red Sox win a pivotal game against the Orioles to stay tied with Tampa Bay for the wild card. Tomorrow is the last game of the regular season, so I’ll be sure to get up and watch that one as well!

We left at about 10:30am and walked over to the Ho Chi Minh Museum in the stinking heat. It must have been 95*F and humidity was about 140%. Seriously, it was crazy how much I sweat today. We got to the museum only to find that it was closed for lunch from 11:30am-2pm. We were there at 11:20am. So we skipped that and checked out the One Pillar Pagoda, which would have been impressive if it was the one built around 1030AD, but this was a recreation, so it was pointless in my eyes. We went over to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, where you can see his preserved body, but that is also closed, for two months. We decided to head north to West Lake and check out the Tran Quoc Pagoda, and you guessed it, that was closed too.

We were really hot and exhausted from walking around for 2.5 hours without actually getting in to see anything. We went for lunch at this nice restaurant right on the lake and had some time to relax for a bit. After lunch we headed back toward our hotel and stopped at the War History Museum, which was actually open! It wasn’t a great museum though as only half of the exhibits had English translations. Most of it was meaningless to us.

We got back to the hotel at about 3pm and I spent the next hour and a half trying to plan my next few steps after Dad leaves. The girl Anna who works at the hotel was very helpful and I was able to book my flight to Hong Kong for next Monday, which gives me time to go to Sa Pa from Friday to Sunday. It’s supposed to be beautiful up there, so I figured it would be a shame to miss it while I’m right here. I got back to the room and took a much needed shower before heading out for tonight.

Dad had bought a CF card reader earlier today so I could take a copy of his pictures he took, in case anything happened to them on his way home. It looks like the new reader might have done something funny to the card, because it wasn’t able to read the card at all, and it now says in his camera that there are no images. Dad is sick to his stomach about it, but I’m pretty confident that when he gets home he’ll be able to recover the pictures. There’s no way they deleted in such a short time, so they’re still on the card, I just hope he can find a way to get to them. A lot of time went into taking all of those, so it would be a sin if they were gone.

We went out for a couple of hours for Dad to get a couple more souvenirs before packing up his bag and catching a taxi to the airport. It was sad to see him go, we have seen so many cool things and crammed so much into a short time. The only good thing is that I’ll be able to take a rest day tomorrow and not really do anything. It turns out a bunch of people that we met in Cat Ba are staying in a hostel next to our hotel, so I met up with a few of the girls for dinner.

We went to a place called Gecko which was really good and cheap ($5 for chicken curry and two beers). Our group was three Swedes (Tilda, Rebecca and Stephanie) and two Americans (me and Melissa). We had a couple of drinks after dinner at Gecko and then Melissa brought us to this little street that has most of the popular bars in Hanoi. We went into Red Lounge and had a couple of drinks in there until we were kicked out by the police at 1am. For such a big city, everything shuts down really early. It reminds me a bit of London in that way. It was a really good night though, and it’s always great when you get to meet new people on the way.

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