We went to the hotel after dinner and were greeted by two little bell hops at the door. Immediately one of them grabbed my bags asking my room number and pulled a group of us into the elevator. We rode up and he got off on each of our floors telling us to wait on him at our doors. My room was last and he ran in put my bags down, grabbed a remote to the air conditioner turned it on, and lastly turned on the tv. He smiled and since I didn't have any money on me Hillary and I waited until later to tip our friend which we found out his name was Phulan.
The next day we headed out to see a small village of Cu chi where there is an outdoor museum about the Vietnam War. It was crazy to see all of the battle sites that were preserved as well as the tunnels the Vietnamese had dug to live in during the day. I even crawled through a one hundred foot long piece of the tunnel... which was super scary since it was an even smaller space than the underground city in Cappadocia.
After leaving the museum we headed back into the city to visit the architectural firm of a Ball State Landscape Architecture Alumn. On the way to the office the bus stood out on the streets because it was one of a few cars in a sea of mopeds and motorcycles. Six million of the residents of Hanoi drive motorcycles and mopeds which is over half of the population of the city.
The architecture firm was neat to see but due to the fact that it was just after the Chinese New Year not many people were around working on projects. We left the office to head back to the hotel where we were going to be let go for dinner.
The next day we headed for North Vietnam to Hanoi. We arrived early and were greeted by our guide Pi and some old landscape architecture alumni from Ball State. They took us straight into touring the oldest university in the city. The temples were really pretty but it was starting to rain so we went to grab some food in a noodles restaurant nearby. We then drove to see a bridge nearby with a small garden known in Hanois history. Loading the bus, we drove for fifteen minutes where we made one of the quickest visits to a good landscape architecture college.
We then ran out in time to reach the famous Water Puppet show in the downtown. The show was different than anything I'd ever seen but was really cute to experience. We had a little trouble staying awake during the show just from having a full day but we enjoyed it a lot.
After the show we stopped at a coffee shop to buy some time before our dinner reservations at a local restaurant. The restaurant was really cute and had really good food. We then left for the hotel while it began to rain and that's where it all went downhill. The bus pulled up a street away from the hotel and instead of putting bags in our hands the bus driver began to throw the bags onto the ground in piles of what we realized later were wet chicken poop. Running into the hotel we were given our room assignments and walked up to find our rooms. The rooms seemed a little dirty but we didn't know how bad it was until looking a little.
We found bed bugs in our shared bed and had to carry our chicken poop covered bags down to another room where our bathtub drained by coming out of the bottom of our tub onto the bathroom floor and into a drain behind the toilet. It was DISGUSTING! We slept that night on the rock hard bed without covers, showering in our neighbors rooms to find a small lizard climbing on our walls in the morning. Everyone hated the hotel... It made us feel like we couldn't clean off any dirt.
Our next day we took a four hour drive to Ha Long Bay which is a site kept natural by Unesco. It is a bay where these landforms come out of the water in really dramatic slopes which was super pretty. We enjoyed the day riding a boat through to bay to a small cave we walked through and then back to shore. After our four hour drive back we enjoyed dinner at a restaurant where we sat on the floor on pillows and had to endure one more night in the worst hotel so far. We left the next day ready to find our next bed... Hopefully a cleaner one.
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