Hanoi

Well. Vietnam is VERY different from Singapore. Singapore, despite being a major Asian economy, clearly has many western influences. There are burger kings and giant skyscrapers and businessmen and financial traders. This is the skyline of Singapore.


Hanoi (and Vietnam in general) has almost zero visible western influence. The society is the most alien of any I've ever been to. It's awesome.


There are very few traffic laws -- on every road, hundreds of people riding motorcycles dart in and out of traffic with larger vehicles going toward or against the flow of traffic.


We had some difficulty getting to the hotel from our airport. Our driver was detained by Vietnamese uniformed officers for about 20 minutes. We have no idea why, but he was clearly distraught afterwards!

Driving from the airport, we saw vast rice fields everywhere with locals working in the heat. Although it's a very poor country, everyone works very hard - the unemployment rate is almost zero.


That's a view of sunset from our hotel. We took a walk around Old Hanoi to find dinner and settled on a good chain restaurant called Pho 24 (pho being the Vietnamese staple of noodle soup). Then we had some icecream


We all are a bit jetlagged still and got exhausted by 10PM so went back to the hotel.


There are thousands of Vietnamese eating on the streets outside of their shops, with motorcycles zooming every which way.


It's truly cool.



Btw, I'm writing this post from the top of a boat in halong bay, one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. We slept on this boat last night. I'll blog about it more later, it's now time for breakfast. But here's a preview!



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Cyrus

What! We were on a layover in Ho Chi Minh city en route to Hanoi when someone knocked my head as I was eating pho. I looked up and it was


How random! Saw dave Koch, megan, and Brennan. Random as anything. Asia is a fairly big place, yet we still ran into each other.

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Singapore Adventures

Day one of SEA:


Buffalo street! I feel right at home.


This is Little India, where our hostel was located. It was bustling.


Pad Thai, my first Asian meal. It wasn't really that good.


Chris


This flower was pretty blue.


A prayerful spot


This was a large public library.


This was a three-building-long giant hotel. The structure on the top is actually a giant rooftop swimming pool.


This is the largest ferris wheel in the entire world.


Chris and Danielle in the ferris wheel


And this was our hostel.
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Arrival

So I'm in Singapore. I decided to take the train to my hostel instead of a taxi because I like adventure. This means that I am riding the train alone. I feel very American here.


And I love it.


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China

Yknow how everyone is afraid of china? I don't wholly understand it, and being here I understand it even less. Guess what the first restaurant I saw was:


The second thing I saw was


God bless america, right?! Spreading our values across the iron curtain.

It is pretty nice here though. The airline gave me a swanky room because my delay was an insult to their sense of honor (they said that).


It was about a 30 minute train to get into actual hong kong. I thought about doing it but it was already midnight (my flight to Singapore is at 8AM) and the currency exchange was closed, so I gave up. Instead I went tithe hotel bar where there were two folks doing karaoke-style American pop songs! Stereotype much? They closed their set with let it be. I had some whiskey.


In closing, yknow how china is supposed to be quite smoggy? Well it is.


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Hong Kong

Well I am in Hong Kong. I'm still on the plane though. It occurs to me that I really have no idea what to do now. I apparently am getting a hotel room provided by Cathay pacific, but I don't know how that is going to work. At all.

Ah time to go.


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Kick Ass

So I'm on like hour 3 of m flight. I honestly have no idea what time it is. West coast time is 8PM but Hong Kong time is
11Am. I think what that means is that even though I left SF in late afternoon and am spending 15 hours in the air, I don't think it will get dark out almost at all my entire time flying. Does that mean if I just stay awake until it gets dark out, I won't be jet lagged? Probably not, but I'm going to attempt it anyway.

So Cathay Pacific Airlines are pretty sweet. They have a huge library of movies. I just finished Kick Ass, which I expected to be pretty bad. It was actually good, in a very sick way! There was lots of blood and guts and murder. I like it. That is my entire review.

Now I am watching clash of the titans and it seems reaaallllly bad. Perseus has a British accent for some reason. I might skip to Kill Bill.

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