Hanoi Day 2

Entree

We ended up having a late dinner at the hotel restaurant last night, starting with a cocktail (ginger margarita? Don’t mind if I do!) and a mixed entrée platter (fresh spring rolls, crispy fried rice paper spring rolls and a chicken herb salad). Then we moved onto soups – I had the famous Vietnamese soup Pho, which was fabulous! Then dessert – sweet potato fritters with a floral-tasting icecream. Yum!

Pho!

This morning, after a leisurely breakfast in the Hilton, with a mix of Asian and Western breakfast foods and amazing fruit, we headed off for a walk to the Temple of Literature.

Temple of Literature

This place was beautiful, with fish ponds and grassed areas, and full of thousands of tourists! The temple has huge stone memorials to each of the scholars who finished their studies there (doctorates?) I reckon after all that study, a great stone marker on top of a turtle is the least the school can do, huh?

That’s a *real* acknowledgement of study!

When we were leaving, we were sidetracked by three teenaged girls who wanted a photo with us – of course they could see our celebrity status! B)

Fish pond at the Temple

We walked a slightly different way back, and stopped for frozen yoghurt on the way – chai latte for me, and durian flavour for R! Hmm…

We said goodbye to the Hilton and moved to the Hong Ngoc hotel where we were meeting the tour group.

I think (no, I know…) we were spoiled by going to the Hilton first. The second hotel has a bunch of building work going on, so there’s continuous hammering happening, in concert with the ever-beeping traffic noise from outside. The bathroom has the tiniest bathtub I’ve ever seen, and to fit in the loo, they’ve had to carve out a chunk of the benchtop around the basin! Ah well, at least the aircon is cold, and they do cheap laundry ($3/kg, rather than the $5/shirt price at the H!)

We stopped for lunch at a place around the corner, and had some delicious juices to start off with, and then noodles afterwards. I think it might be safer to stick to the soups, since my noodles were of the “two minute” wheat variety, so I picked out the chicken and vegies. R’s soup looked great, and contained rice noodles, like all the others I’ve seen so far.

Since we hadn’t been as far north in our wanderings yesterday, we did a bit of an exploration of the area before meeting the group.

Tour groups are always something to anticipate, but our group seems pretty good! Mainly Aussies, with a few of Brits, a Kiwi and a couple from Germany. Dinner and the meeting went swimmingly, so things bode well for the next 12 days.