Hanoi - home of the water puppets!

Chess with bottlecaps. Budweiser is the King.
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Hanoi is a great city!  We arrived at 5am fresh off the sleeper train and stumbled around a bit until we found a Vietnamese coffee shop that was open.  It was fun to see the city before the tourists woke up...Vietnamese chatting, opening shops and a huge calisthenics session in a park involving probably 200 women.  We struggled a bit to find a guesthouse (no one was open yet) but finally settled on the Family Guesthouse, located in one of the famous "matchbox" buildings, very narrow but deep and tall.

Hanoi street scene
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We booked a few tours through the guesthouse then set about wandering Hanoi.  Michelle decided to wear the Ao Dai she'd had tailored in Saigon, and it got generally good results.  Lots of stares, and usually smiles and a "Very beautiful!  Very Vietnamese."  We'd ended up staying in the old quarter which branches out from a beautiful lake whose name neither of us can pronounce properly.  The old quarter is home to a maze of small streets, each of which specialises in a particular product...each block is basically a sales district.  We saw the obvious ones, like the silk, shoe, wood carving and tombstone districts as well as the less common glass cabinet, sheet metal, coffin and wood-stamp districts!

Michelle in Ao Dai with a statue. Of somebody.
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We were turned off cyclos (a bike with a chariot seat attached to the front driven by a wiry old guy) forever when we took one around the area and he encouraged us to pay "whatever we wanted".  What we wanted was regular taxi fare, about $2 for the fifteen minute trip.  Of course, he acted as though this was a massive insult and would prevent him from feeding his family and blah, blah, blah...we'd heard all the pitches and better before.  Susan handed over the $2 and we hid in a shop until he went away.  We later found out that what we'd paid was more than fair (fare HAHAHAHA) but we were pretty much done with cyclos.  Besides being a favorite of con-artist drivers, they are bumpy, slow and too small for two Canadian women...especially when one has especially well-endowed hips!

Our last stop in Hanoi was the world-famous water puppet show which really has to be experienced.  Though the show was all in Vietnamese we managed to gather that a guest artist was present in the orchestra who gave a gorgeous solo performance on a traditional stringed instrument.  The instrument is really haunting and totally unlike anything in Western music...kind of like a harp mixed with a saw...she would pluck the soundboard with one hand and manipulate the resonance with a metal rod in the other hand.  So neat!  The puppets were also really interesting, all hand-carved and operated from behind a screen.  They dance on the surface of the water, which is intentionally murky to disguise the levers and wires that are used by the pupeteers behind the screen.  It was a great show, though much of the cultural meaning was lost on us...especially the part about returning the sword to the sea turtle...though that did explain all the carvings of turtles carrying swords in their mouths!