Rainy day and night, out in Hanoi

Rainy day and night, out in Hanoi

Hanoi, Vietnam, Asia

I found out this morning that I was going to have to pay $30 to cancel my trip to Sa Pa, which didn’t make me too thrilled, and I decided to move to a different hotel that was cheaper. Triumphal Hotel has been brilliant, but at $22 a night for just me, it was a bit pricey, so I booked Hoan Kiem Grand Hotel for $9 a night for a single room. Of course right after I booked the room online, the front desk at Triumphal called me to say I only had to pay $15, so would I stay with them instead. Too late!

I moved over to my new hotel at 11:30am and it is really nice. I have a big double bed, TV (with HBO, Cinemax and Star), and wifi. Not bad for $9 a night. I met up with Tilda and Rebecka at their hostel at 1:30pm so we could go check out the Ho Chi Minh Museum. The rain was coming down in buckets the whole day, so the 30 minute walk to the museum was miserable enough, but more so when we got there and found out the museum is not open on a Friday! There was nothing else for us to see over there, so we just started walking back toward our hotels. We stopped in at another Gecko restaurant (that makes three in three days for me), and had some lunch.

I came back to the hotel to escape the rain and rest up for tonight. My friend Katy who I had met in Vientienne got in touch saying she is now in Hanoi, so we could meet up tonight for some drinks. I met the Swedish girls one last time for dinner, before they head off to Laos tomorrow morning. The hostel that the girls are staying at managed to lose all of Tilda’s laundry, so she is left with almost nothing. The worst thing is that they didn’t really want to compensate her. They were going to give her $20 to go out and buy clothes, to replace her $250 of clothes that were lost. Not cool.

We went out for dinner at had some bun cha at a place down the street, and then the girls had to go back and sort out what they were going to do for Tilda’s clothes situation. I went over to Hanoi Backpackers and met up with Katy and her friend Verena. There was a roof bar at the backpackers and it was only opened till 10pm. We moved from there to the other Hanoi Backpackers across town, where their bar was opened will 11pm. It wasn’t much fun walking across town in the rain, but the next bar was pretty good. We stayed there till it closed and then we went to a bar called Hair Of The Dog. It was more of a club than a bar, but it was alright until the police came in at midnight and closed it down.

The group was going to be moving on to another bar on the other side of town, and we didn’t feel like walking around in the rain anymore, so we all just headed back. I don’t know what I’m doing tomorrow, but hopefully it won’t rain. I’m getting a little tired of it now.

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