from hue to hanoi: bodily functions, hacky sackin' and street smarts

we are spending a couple of nights in hanoi before heading to ha long bay early tomorrow morning for a three day boat trip. i had started to formulate a theory that the smaller the city we were in, the more anarchic the traffic. now that we are back in big-city territory - hanoi has a population of 4 million - i am revising my theory. we have reinstated the (read: my) rule that we have to hold hands when crossing the street, and i do my best to ensure that brendan is between me and the traffic. the hand holding causes some additional anxiety, since his tendency is to forge ahead through oncoming mopeds, while mine is to hold back and let them do their thing. we're working through it. making our relationship stronger and all of that.

one of the interesting things that i have been mentally tallying is the evidence of bodily functions that is EVERYWHERE. it's kind of funny to be dressing conservatively, with lots of skin covered in billowy fabrics, and then see all of these things happening on every street corner that are ingrained in me as being private business (though given my proclivities, sometimes i wish they weren't so private and could be discussed openly, maybe at the dinner table). it started with a pee stop on our bus trip from ho chi minh to da lat, where a couple of older gentlemen hopped off and took a pee basically right outside my window on the bus. the display of public urination has since become part of the landscape. then when we were walking around after booking our ha long bay trip, an older man in front of us blew a snot rocket onto the sidewalk. for me, snot rockets conjure up the walking offense that was puck from the san francisco season of the real world, not middle-aged vietnamese men. the frequency and non-chalance with which people hock lugies (how do you encapsulate that act in a way that does not require high school slang?) has also been striking. my favorite, though, has to be the few occasions where we have seen one person - who has typically been either a friend or mother figure - popping a zit (zits?) on the face of a disinterested teenage girl on the sidewalk as they sell their fruit or baguettes or whatever. now this is a practice i can get behind. we'll see how i fare with importing such sensible cultural idiosyncracies.

we are going to spend the day in hanoi, which is pretty chaotic and in some subtle and unidentifiable way completely different from ho chi minh city in the south. we left hue on a high note to then get off to a rough start in hanoi. it was raining off and on all day yesterday in hue, and during one of the downpours, we found ourselves making calls to hanoi hotels at a post office in hue. brendan checked his email while we were there, and as i waited for him outside under the cover of the post office entrance way. soon enough a boy of about 8 came along with the vietnamese spin on a hacky sack that we have seen everywhere -- basically a plastic base with multi-colored feathers coming out of it -- and started kicking it around on his own. brendan had noticed kids playing with them all over the place, and obviously has had an inner longing to join in. when he came out of the post office to meet me, he met his golden opportunity when the kid accidentally kicked it in his direction and brendan kicked it back. within five minutes, brendan was leading a hackey sack circle with five or six elementary school-aged kids. i got plenty of photo documentation, with brendan getting lots of giggly high-five's as we finally set off on our way.

when we got to hanoi, we were to be picked up by someone sent by our hotel. sure enough, when we came out of baggage claim, there was our sign proclaiming "prendan posworth" (the p/b distinction is apparently a difficult one, as we have noticed on other occasions; one person at a hotel had to say "passport" at least 5 times before i understood what they were saying). the guy holding it said he was waiting on one other passenger who was getting in on an international flight and should be there in 10-15 minutes. fine. we sit down and wait, and sooner or later 30 minutes has passed and brendan has done plenty of research into how we could get to the hotel on our own -- it was 11pm so a good 3 hours passed our usual bed time and we were exhausted. we tell the guy we are going to take a cab on our own. he tries to get us to wait, but we don't go for it. we go out to the long line of taxis where various companies are trying to flag us down, and go with the one with the seemingly reputable name of "airport taxi". we climb into a big, comfy cab that i quickly notice has no meter. the driver - who seemed potentially high and/or drunk, or maybe just sleazy - gets in and as soon as i broach the topic of price, he starts pulling out of the parking spot. we are slowly pulling away as he says it's going to be "very cheap"... "how much?"... "20 dollars"... no way. brendan had seen signs for $12 to the city center. we open the doors and jump out (in retrospect, i pretend that the car was still moving, but *perhaps* it was at a standstill) grab our bags and go see the friendly driver down the way with another cab company, who jauntily puts our bags in his car and has classical music playing all the way to our hotel. it was all very james bond meets the get along gang.

so the adventures continue. we are starting to plot out our trip to thailand. we have to decide if it makes sense to go all the way north to chiang mai when there don't appear to be any convenient travel options to get there. we'll have our summit today and try to plan out the rest of our trip so we can coast until the end with travel and lodging reservations in place. gotta say i am looking forward to the grand finale flop on the beach.