Today was an epic day. I went to the local pool, which I thought would just be a pool but it had a children’s play area, bar, deck chairs and palm trees round the outside and was very nice and spacious. The water was a great temperature (though cold when you first got in!) and other than the locals insisting on playing some very annoying bass music, very loudly, it was very relaxing.
I then met my new friend Connor in town but as I got off the xe om I leant on the exhaust and now have a massive scar on my leg. They call that the Hanoi Tatoo… everyone who rides a bike gets one at some point. It was extremely painful and burned for hours, giving me a blister. I walked around with my towel from the pool attached to my leg.
Getting on the back of a xe om with Connor was an experience, he was definitely not as good as the Vietnamese and I could feel he was nervous, which made me nervous, and it didn’t help that it was rush hour… More to the point, I’m meant to be spending three hours on the back of a bike with him when we go to Cuc Phuong National Park! Hmmm….
We went to the botanical gardens, which were stunning, so we sat by the lake and chatted for ages, enjoying watching the fountains on the lake and the dove houses. We saw a guinea pig attached to a lead, which was a bit odd but it was very cute, then when we turned around the boy had lifted it up by the lead, so it was hanging from its neck, nearly choking to death, and the boy was running, so the lead was bouncing up and down with the guinea pig hanging off the end…. Not so cute. The Vietnamese are not big on animal welfare…
We then went to dinner with Lam, my pen friend who I made before coming to Vietnam because I was scared I wouldn’t make any friends! We were very excited to see each other, to the point where Connor was embarrassed by how much noise we were making, until he realised everyone in the restaurant happened to be deaf. I’m not joking, five tables out of six were using sign language!
Lam gave us a lift to hers on her xe om and like most locals she is a superb rider, much better than Connor, to the point where he got a bit jealous… she even rode the bike all the way through a maze of alleyways that was only big enough for one bike. We were not on the back at this point!
We then went to a music festival which was good, but stupidly overpriced. There were of course two prices, 300 vnd for westerners and 100 for “Asian passports”. This is very expensive. The music was OK but the atmosphere was great, we met up with some friends of Vi’s and it was nice chatting to different people. The beers however, were five times the price of the street beer, which I have come to love.
The night club we went to after was amazing, one of the best nights I’ve ever had, the DJ was awesome, he played drum and bass, electro, dirty house, RNB, dubstep, all re-mixed over classic western tunes. I had an amazing night!
