Frogger in Hanoi, Vietnam

Activity level: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️

Modes of transportation: 🚗👟🚌 🛫

Sometimes dodging traffic felt like the classic video game Frogger.

We woke up and packed our stuff to check out. We left ourselves a little time to enjoy a quick breakfast back at the brunch restaurant we enjoyed the other day (and Sarah felt much better this time), and then it was off to the airport.

We loved this “eatery and artistry” restaurant A-22.

There was a bit of a line at the check in desk, but we still made check-in on time. A girl (who was having issues because she forgot one of her passports, and she didn’t have the right visas) jumped in front of us, but we figured she was having a worse day than we were. So we let her go.

The flight itself was pretty short, and we applied for our visa when we got in. It only took about 30 minutes to get approved, and we finally made it to Vietnam!

Eric insisted that we take the bus (it’s a great way to experience culture!) so we hopped on and sat down. Unfortunately, it filled up pretty fast, so Eric ended up giving his seat to an older lady (Sarah had no sympathy: “that’s part of taking the bus”).

It took about 2.5 hours to get to downtown via the bus.

It took a while in traffic, but we eventually made it to the old quarter area and walked to our hotel.

We got our first taste of real Hanoi traffic, with motorbikes and tuktuks racing in every direction, barely grazing past as we walked (there are no sidewalks). As our guides later told us, the trick is just to walk at a constant speed to cross roads, and they’ll work their way around you. They don’t even obey traffic lights or anything. It’s true chaos.

Notice the motor bike that went around Eric while recording. The sidewalks are used for vendors, so you have to walk in the streets with the traffic.

We think we got the last room in our hotel, because we were right next to the lobby. It seemed like a room that wasn’t originally planned to be one: it had plugs in weird places (like in the middle of the headboard) and no windows (except for one to the lobby). They did give us a complimentary welcome beer, though, so that was nice!

We got catfished with this hotel. The ad had a beautiful French door balcony overlooking Hanoi. Instead we got a room that was on the ground floor, shared a wall with the lobby, and literally had no window to the outside. And the bathroom was covered in mold. But we were in the heart of Hanoi for $20 USD and there was no roaches, so not the worst. (Editor’s note: the roaches would come at the next hotel)

We wanted to see the city a little since we were staying in the historic old quarter, so we got up and walked around. We tried a few banh mi sandwiches, but overall we weren’t too hungry. We enjoyed the views of the “Returned Sword” lake, with its lit-up museum.

Beware of the candy-cane styled dough on the skewer. It is fried fish, not a sweet treat.

Eric also tried a fruit he had been seeing (sort of a red pear looking thing), but Sarah wasn’t yet ready to be adventurous with food. Sort of. She ordered these strange little candy-looking balls (and there was some misunderstanding there since we asked) from a street vendor, but they ended up being fish balls. Ah well.

Still not sure what this is (or if it was even ripe), but it had cool texture.

The fish balls were not made for our western palates.

We also booked a walking food tour for the next day to hopefully get an entry point into Vietnamese street food and get some local knowledge of the quarter.

We went for a late night stroll around the lake and ran into all sorts of cool monuments and bridges. Hopefully we’ll learn more about them on our tour tomorrow.

It was a week night, so the old quarter was pretty sleepy. We thought there was a cool cultural show (and it was, kind of), but it turned out to be a sort of fashion show. We watched for a little before heading out. We walked around more, but headed back to our hotel to sleep since was surprisingly late.

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