Home, sweet home (well, almost)

Saturday 9th November 2013
(Alfred: so here we are in the Land of an-unspecified-but-large-number-of-elephants which we are learning to call 'home'. And so far there isn't a lot to report except that house-hunting here is not quite the smooth operation it is at home! The best results so far have come from wandering up and down streets looking for little signs on streetlight posts or in windows. Apparently the idea of keeping real estate websites up-to-date hasn't really caught on here, so all the lovely houses Martine and Ruairí saw were long gone!! More of that anon.)

TRAFFIC
After three days, part of the fun has been in appreciating some of the differences between life in Vietnam and Lao. And easily the first thing is .... traffic!  There is just no comparison between the 24/7 cacophonic inferno of decibels that passes for air in Ha Noi and the blessed peace of Vientiane. And it is not just a question of noise. Traffic here is mainly cars, believe it or not, or at least in the centre. We have seen big motorbike parks - especially near the markets - but the ratio of cars to bikes and motorbikes seems much higher here than in Ha Noi.

But above all, there is the question of attitude. We alluded in previous posts to the somewhat ambivalent attitude residents of Ha Noi have towards traffic lights (Alfred: That phrase alone shows that a great career in the diplomatic corps could have been Ruairí's). Last night while walking home, I came to the junction near my hotel, a crossroads with traffic lights. A lone motorbike sat there, patiently waiting for the lights to change and watching me, as I was the only other moving object in the vicinity. I'm not sure how long he waited but he was still sitting there as I wandered off. If he did that in Ha Noi, he would run the risk of being detained and sent for psychiatric evaluation.

HOUSE-HUNTING
We are looking for a house: two, or if possible three, bedrooms and a little bit of greenery and/or privacy/balcony reasonably near the centre. Price negotiable but our upper limit is $800 (and that would be for something quite exceptional). So we saw four houses today, none of which is quite right but all of which were interesting for different reasons. The second one was a veritable mansion for only $700, four doors up from the Prime Minister's residence (Alfred: Exaggeration! Six doors up AND on the other side of the street). So security not a problem! Three huge bedrooms, sittingroom, kitchen, a few extra rooms that didn't seem to have any specified purpose - the only problem really was that is was just TOO BIG.



We also saw this house out towards the east of the city and a Laotian-style house beside it. They were $600and $400 per month respectively. A bit out of the way, however. Basically, we just want to look at a bunch of stuff to get an idea of what is out there and at what price.But we are not getting a car so it needs to be central!! (Alfred: And why won't the text wrap around that photo when it wraps around the others? Eh? Hello, have you even NOTICED?)

We were shown around two of the houses by Barry, an Australian man living here for eleven years and married for nine of them. Barry was a mine of fascinating information on dealing with the police, attitudes towards sexuality, medical facilities and other aspects of Lao life that would not be immediately apparent to an outsider. He also very kindly offered his phone number in case of any emergencies (Alfred: Now THAT is real thoughtfulness! And remember - if we get sick, it's the French Clinic!!!)

DETECTIVE FICTION
Another exciting discovery has been of a series of detective novels set in 1970s Lao written by Colin Cotterill. They feature Dr Siri, Lao's one and only coroner, a role he is forced to adopt instead of retirement when the Pathet Lao come to power. I am halfway through the first one and it is really really good!  And there are almost a dozen of them! Strongly recommended. (Alfred: As the more perceptive, or even just the perceptive, among you will notice, he has just strongly recommended the entire series based on the first hundred pages of the first volume. Maybe hold on for more updates before committing to buying the entire series, eh?)

(Alfred: And for those of you too inept to do this yourselves, here is a picture of the cover and a link to Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/The-Coroners-Lunch-Colin-Cotterill/dp/1569474184)  


FOOD
OK, I am going to get this off my chest. Maybe it was a mistake to have devoted myself so intensively to cooking Vietnamese and Lao dishes back in Ireland because it has slightly taken the shine off the food here now that we have arrived. The grilled fish is marvellous but the pho and larb/lap/lab (Alfred: there are SO many ways of spelling that one) are ... well, fine. But I want to cook  my own and I have this little voice in my head (not Alfred - my head is full of voices) that says 'Well, not bad, but yours is better'. Which is the height of hubris .... but maybe also true!!

 And I want to experiment with water beetle dipping sauces (Alfred: Make sure you only buy male water beetles, they are the one with the musk glands that give the sauce its special taste when you toast them and grind them up) and herb dressings .... and all the stuff in the Lao cookbook I brought with me (Alfred: And - other than his vast electronic library - that is the ONLY book Ruairí brought to Lao. Which, if you know Ruairí, really says something. And it also says something about his cousin, Ronnie Malone, who bought him and Martine the book as an engagement present!! Nice one, Ronnie, nail firmly struck on head there!). So whatever else our new house will have, it better have a good kitchen!
http://www.amazon.com/Food-From-Northern-Laos-Cookbook/dp/0473172364


Next installment: Ruairí and Martine learn Lao!!!! Not to be missed!!

Wednesday 6th November
My chest infection having finally started to respond to the combination of amoxycillin and paracetemol, I am now coughing like the chorus of a nineteenth-century workhouse. This should make the plane trip fun!

As we prepared to pack, I remembered I needed to get some dollars to pay for my Lao visa. Surprise, surprise - the banks don't sell dollars! But when I explained my predicament, the hotel manager said to follow him and we scooted off down alleyways and into what looked like a little shop but turned out to be a huge, marble-clad all-purpose money shop, where people were coming in with bags of notes to have them counted and sorted or changed into higher or lower denominations. Then the manager asked me for my euros and I handed him two fifty-euro notes. The expression on his face changed somewhat but I couldn't interpret it! Anyway, after five minutes he came back with $134 and 10,000 dong, the exact rate quoted on www.xe.com half an hour previously.  On the way back to the hotel he apologised (Alfred: HE apologised!)  saying he thought I was going to change a serious amount of money and he could have changed the 100 euro in the hotel!!

Anyway, time to say a temporary goodbye to Ha Noi. One last nice breakfast, one last smiling conversation with the staff. And one last interesting thing to learn. Having agreed the final bill (an extra $273 for room upgrade, two tours, two taxis, laundry and minibar) I said I was going upstairs to write a review on TripAdvisor. 'Oh no' said the manager immediately. What? I thought to myself, why not? He explained:  because of recent allegations that hotels were planting reviews, TripAdvisor will normally not allow a review to be posted if it has been received from the hotel's own IP address, especially if it is a very positive review! So, if it was OK with me, maybe I could wait until I was in Vientiane!

So, next stop Vientiane!!

Monday 4th November
Ha Long Bay
Wow!  Having been boggled by our excursion to Tam Coc (see previous entry) (Alfred: Think they could have figured that out for themselves) we were a bit worried that Ha Long Bay would turn out to be a bit of an anticlimax. But it wasn't. The pictures speak for themselves (Alfred: But that won't stop you, I'm sure)! The only problem was taking pictures of the enormous cave complex which is lit internally by coloured spotlights which play havoc with any attempt to take photographs!

Ha Long Bay has a total of 1969 islands in it and was voted one of the seven natural wonders of the world by some internet survey or other (Alfred: And fair enough too).  We had a mixed group of Germans, Swedes, Chinese, Australians, Dutch,  Russians and Portugese as well as our own French and Irish/Swiss addition. They asked us to fill in forms with our ages and nationalities. They said it was for the boat. Ages?  Martine had an appallingly bad taste explanation for this which I won't share, youa re welcome to come up with your own theories. (Alfred: Well, OK but there were a few other observations one might make, like it takes about four hours each way on quite bad roads and with a bus driver that immediately reminded us of many Rwandan trips we had taken in years gone by. And the air-conditioning gave Ruairí a massive head cold and the perfect excuse for moaning and sniffling and being 'brave'! At least he sleeps at night - I just sit here on the dressing table watching him grunt and snuffle and imitate a dyspeptic hippo ... OK, I may have stepped over the line there).

As well as the Bay itself, you get to visit a massive cave complex crammed with strange formations (follow this link if you want to see some amazing pictures!) though the coloured spotlights rather detract from the visual experience. The cave was used during the War and then forgotten about until in 1998 a fisherman saw a monkey disappear into the cliff-face and decided to investigate. Today, apart from being a major tourist attraction, it is used by villagers to shelter from typhoons a few times a year (Alfred: Hang on. Look at the pictures. Look at them! And then tell me with a straight face that people managed to FORGET about somewhere like this. Seriously, no way, no way).

  

 The high point was probably a twenty-minute ride in a bamboo boat, the two of us and a Canadian couple from Ottawa. Our teenage driver/rower was a little bit scatty and managed to run us aground in the way in to a very narrow cave entrance with boats and kayaks piling up on each side, then jumped off the boat onto land, which worried me slightly until I realised be was either jumping back on to rock the boat and break it free from the mud or was just plain acting the eejit (Alfred: From the comments being shouted at him by the other boat people, I suspect the latter, though it was all very good-humoured!).

Are you sure that is what you want to order, sir?
Probably our favourite Vietnamese food is pho, a noodle soup with either beef (pho bo) or chicken (pho ga). Of course, that isn't how you actually spell them because written Vietnamese has a bewildering array of accents that hugely affect the pronunciation and the meaning of words. Our guide to Ha Long told us that this can cause some hilarious results. The correct pronunciation of phở is  [fəː˧˩˧]  - fah-ah with a slight downtone after the first -ah and a rising tone on the last one . If you pronounce it like the French word feu (which is pretty much what we have been doing) it means something that can be ordered in a massage parlour but only by a man as it would be impossible to do to a woman. I leave it to your imaginations. (Alfred: Or, indeed, he could have been pulling your ... leg.)


Tuesday 5th November
As Alfred mentioned, I did catch a heavy cold and went to bed early with stuffed sinuses, a Lemsip (never leave home without one) and we didn't exactly rise with whatever the Vietnamese equivalent of a lark is. At breakfast I committed a major faux pas. Martine had said that the soup wasn't very spicy and the chopped chillis were sweet rather than hot. She asked the waitress for more chillis and I chipped in 'Or some hot sauce'. I couldn't see the waitress' face from where I was sitting but Martine said it was pretty much the same as if you asked Marco Pierre White for some ketchup to put on your steak.

Or trip today was to Hua Lo prison, better known to history as the Hanoi Hilton. Prisons are never a hoot but are always interesting. What was fascinating here was the extent to which the Vietnamese were maintaining that they had been exceptionally nice to the Americans. And I mean exceptionally.  Propaganda films and photographs showed them playing games, receiving medical attention, getting parcels and messages from their families and so on, a regular party! And the food! Shots of starving Viet Cong and emaciated peasants were intercut with USAF pilots stuffing their faces with bread and rice and the commentator observing that they were living better than the Vietnamese themselves. (Alfred: You can't help but notice how prominently John McCain is featured - I wonder how recent a phemonenon that is!)

Leaving aside the issue of accuracy (Alfred: Oh, yeah, let's) for the moment, I can imagine that, if I were a Vietnamese citizen visiting this exhibit (and there were some) and I was of an age where I had experienced the war and lost friends and family to bombings etc, I would be pretty livid to hear this! Why were these pilots who had bombed schools and hospitals and churches and pagodas having Christmas parties and playing volleyball and getting little poems from Ho Chi Minh to cheer them up? I can only presume the authorities figure the overwhelming majority of visitors will be tourists but even so, come on, guys!

Warders play Xmas music for homesick pilots

So many different kinds of food!!

'the pilots in pyjamas' - ha, ha, ha!!!

Cards, billiards, music, volleyball, running - how did they find time in the day for so much amusement!!!

Receiving messages and parcels from home

Regular medical checks to make sure everyone is in peak health

John McCain receiving medical attention upon arrival at Hua Lo

Christmas Eve service

Preparing Christmas dinner

What will Santa put in YOUR stocking???

OK, I am running out of ideas for captions

Going-away souvenirs are greatly appreciated as they prepare to depart home.

Anyway, the experience prompted me to come up with this.

The Ballad of Hua Lo Prison (aka Hanoi Hilton)

The Hanoi Hilton has a special place
In writings on the war in Vietnam
Which John McCain did with his presence grace
Along with other guests from Uncle Sam.

And their accounts did tell -I'm sure you know - 
Of hunger, fear and torturers most cruel.
And so I went to see this Hua Lo
And find out if these tales were really true,

But now the scales have lifted from my eyes
For suffering was not these prisoners' fate,
And I - along with you - can but surmise
That life in prison here was truly great!

Despite the heinous nature of their acts,
The Viet Cong treated them with fondest care.
They dressed their wounds, they treated them with tact
And from revenge they always did forbear.

And as for food! They fed them up like kings
(I know because the film says it's true);
While Viet Cong peasants starved on mouldy rice
They gorged on chicken, bread and hot beef stew.

They played guitar, they played at cards and stuff,
Their team at volleyball was much the best.
And if perchance a pilot should feel rough
A doctor came and listened to his chest.

At Christmas they were made to feel at home
With decorations hung upon a tree.
And Ho Chi Minh sent them a Christmas poem
And warders came with flutes and played with glee.

And as went by the years, the months, the days,
And seeing that their captors were so kind,
They came to see the error of their ways
And wondered why America was blind. 

And when they left they rued the awful day,
Instead of smiles their aspects were of woe;
For if they could, they would have liked to stay
With their friends and bosom pals in Hua Lo.

Friday 1st November
After a lazy start, we decided to do one of our very favourite things - explore the markets! And after a twenty-minute walk in the boiling heat we eventually found it (Ha Noi streets are EXTREMELY confusing). And you know what, it was a bit of an anticlimax, maybe because we have already seen various Asian markets and, to be honest, the market in Da Nang was cleaner, better organised and more interesting.  By the time we left and wandered towards the lake, we were parched and exhausted. Officially, this is the beginning of winter but when it is 29-31 degrees each day, that is a bit hard to believe! (Alfred: Though it does get a LOT colder once winter actually starts, falling as low as a freezing 13 degrees celsius, at which point they start to close schools! Ruairí wants to come back in late January (when it is coldest) and walk around in a t-shirt just to annoy the locals).

Nems

Anyway, we went to a café on top of a big building near the lake and had some beer, water and nems (fresh - not deep-fried - spring rolls and possibly our favourite Asian food) and chilled out. Even here, a complete tourist trap, three beers and a giant bottle of water and a plate of nems was about 7 euro. But the high point was when two German women walked past our table, one of whom was carrying two ski poles. We have still not come up with a good theory to account for this.  Then back to the hotel, booked tours for Saturday and Monday and out for some fast food.

Bun Bo

Vietnamese fast food consisted of one of my favourite dishes, Bun Bo, a dish from Hue. There are restaurants that only serve this, so you go in and sit down at the one long table and they plonk a dish in front of you two minutes later. You eat and leave. The whole process took ten minutes from start to finish and the food was delicious!


Ha Noi traffic lights
There are some traffic lights in Ha Noi but I am puzzled as to what exact purpose they serve. Cars do stop and so do about 80% of motorbikes and bicycles. The other 20% pay no attention and weave their way through the traffic as they do where there are no traffic lights. I could understand if no-one paid attention but there seems no pattern as to the 20% who do their own things - age, gender, vehicle. But the traffic is amazing!! Our guide told us there are 4 million motorbikes in Ha Noi, 6 million in Ho Chi Minh City and a total of 40 million in a country of 90 million. That seems like a lot but maybe so (Alfred: Maybe it is like Facebook accounts - there are that many of them out there but how many of them are actually in active use??)

Food and Drink
I knew the food was going to be good from our last visit and I have been cooking Vietnamese and Laotian food since I got back from the last holiday. The beer is good too, though Bia Sai Gon is to be avoided - bland and tasteless. Bia Ha Noi or Bia La Rue are my favourites (Alfred: And yes, the Vietnamese word for 'beer' IS the same as the Irish word for 'food')

Towers of Ha Noi

Ha Noi City Palace Hotel

The style of architecture here in Ha Noi (Alfred: Style? You think that is the right word? Melange would be better). Alfred has a point, there is a crazy mixture of every kind of style you can imagine. But the dominant feature is that buildings are usually tall and incredibly narrow. Our hotel is actually the width of our bedroom and this is quite usual. Maybe all land is divided into plots this side, goodness knows. Also, they usually don't put any windows on the side walls so light is at a premium. For our hotel, it means that only our room and the one above it have any light. The internal rooms have no windows at all and the ones at the back are advertised as having windows but actually these open into a narrow one-metre gap that separates the hotel from the building behind!

Crossing the countryside you see the same style: tall, thin houses standing individually in the middle of nowhere and with solid side walls, no windows. And I was reminded of the mathematical puzzle called Towers of Hanoi - does anyone know why this puzzle is called that? Is it because Ha Noi houses resemble the three rods needed for the puzzle?

Saturday 2nd November
Early start today and off in a minibus to the temples of Hoa Lu, Vietnam's ancient capital and the boat trip up Tam Coc, often referred to as the inland Halong Bay. We raced to be ready for the 0745 pickup and then kicked our heels for thirty minutes as we turned out to be the last to be picked up!  It was a little like being back in Rwanda as the only two seats left together were in the back corner and we squashed in there as best we could (Alfred: For a whole hour. Poor Ruairí and Martine. And then they moved to nice, comfy seats at the first rest stop so we can all dry our eyes). The other tourists were a Japanese couple, an Indian couple and two elderly gentlemen travelling with very young female Asian companions.

At the first rest stop  (Alfred: Really? You are just going to leave it at that? It was creepy! OK, one of the couples may have been genuine as it was really hard to tell her age and they didn't seem to be behaving as if their relationship was on a 'business' level, but the creepy guy in the back?? Pleeeazzee!! No wonder you had a shower when you got back to the hotel) ... at the first rest stop we wandered around the shop/cafe/tourist trap and saw two things that caught our eye:











Personally, I found the idea of Fifty Shades of Grey being on sale here far more upsetting than the dogs being fattened up but maybe that's just me. (Alfred: Yes, it's just you.)

The temples at Hoa Lu weren't the most amazing thing ever. The site may be historically important but absolutely nothing remains of the original buildings from a thousand years ago as everything was recycled to build the new capital of Ha Noi. But it was a pleasant stop with the offerings and carved figures and colourful Buddhist temple flags.

After a really nice buffet lunch in Tam Coc (Alfred: Ruairí really pigged out on the caramel pork!!) we headed off for our boat trip. I really was hoping for a life jacket but these were only available for the Chinese tourists who had presumably booked them in advance so I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best! It was an amazing experience, easily one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. The two of us in a sampan being rowed by a middle-aged women ... with her feet! I have never seen this before, the feet aren't even attached to the oars by straps or anything and they are incredibly skillful. The scenery was stunning as you can see from the photos (Alfred: taken on Ruairí's Smartphone as the idiot had forgotten for two nights running to recharge his camera battery!!). Guidebooks and Tripadvisor had warned about the intensive hassle from vendors but, to be honest, unless you had never travelled before it was pretty mild stuff! And the sight of people wading across the river did banish my 'I don't have a life-jacket' fears.

 Then we went for a short cross-country cycle which was really good, both for the exercise as well as the scenery and then bus back to Ha Noi.




Football
That evening I donned my Chelsea shirt for the first time and went in search of somewhere showing the Chelsea-Newcastle match. Unfortunately, I found one and watched my team being humiliated by a poor Newcastle side while drinking beer in the company of two Ethiopian Waste Water Management specialists who had just finished a two-week training course here in Ha Noi. I told them there were job opportunities in Dublin at the moment if they could cope with living in Ballymore-Eustace!

A day to make the mind boggle

Oh yes, today turned out to be quite a day, despite the fact that we spent most of it in bed (Alfred: Well, of course, it is .... forget it, sorry). We got up at 0930 and grabbed breakfast just before they stopped serving (though I got the feeling they would have hung on anyway!). Then we went straight back to bed again, me only pausing to write the blog entry for yesterday. We finally arose at 1600 or so and headed out. We decided to do a tour of the lake and as we got there a voice said: 'Ruairí, is that you?'  Now, we are all used to the phenomenon of bumping into people where we least expect them and this seems to happen to the Irish more than most but the last time I saw Heloise Allan was in 2009 when we were both VSO volunteers in Rwanda and now we run into each other in Ha Noi. Small world.

After dinner, which was memorable in particular for Martine's minced beef soup and the morning glory fried in garlic (Alfred: Yes, my American friends, morning glory is something you eat over here and it is delicious!), we came back to the hotel and found our room had been decorated as in the photo below, with chilled white wine and a special honeymoon cake. And then we broke the corkscrew trying to open the wine and they had to send someone down the street to find another corkscrew! But it was so so sweet of them, really heartwarming in what is a very middle-of-the-range hotel. Must get on to the Tripadvisor site and write them up!!

   

Twenty-four hours upside-down in a backpack (or Why does Ruairí have to go abroad to find people who will spell his name properly??)

INITIAL OBSERVATIONS
Driving in from the airport in Ha Noi Martine and I began the processs of acclimatizing ... no, reacclimatizing ourselves to Asia. Of course, everywhere is different so what could the drive of about 40 minutes in from the airport tell us?   Well, firstly, the area around Ha Noi is a mass of big, enormous and truly stupendous building projects, including a gigantic bridge across whichever river Ha Noi lies on. Secondly, everyone seems to observe the speed limit rigorously (Alfred: Actually, he's serious; this isn't one of these Ruairí things where he is actually, oh-so-cleverly saying the opposite of the truth and - rather condescendingly if truth be told - trusting the faithful to figure it out. Six lane highway from the airport to town and virtually no-one drove over 60 kph. And everyone on a motorbike was wearing a helmet. It was like being back in Rwanda ... well, kind of). And, thirdly, car indicators are for decorative purposes only, for use at Christmas and national holidays or whenever Ha Noi needs to floodlight an area cheaply! One reason for this is that using the indicator might interrupt the texting that all drivers indulge in
while they are driving around Ha Noi.

(Alfred: I have to use one of my infrequent interjections here to highlight how unbearably smug Ruairí has become since he realised - rather belatedly - that the capital of Vietnam is written as TWO words (Ha Noi) Please do notice therefore just how often he manages to work the name of the city into his sentences!)

Having visited Vietnam in January, it was interesting to compare our memories of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) with our initial impressions of ... em, Vietnam's capital. Some things are the same - incessant traffic, dominated by motorbikes and some bicycles, tall but incredibly thin buildings in a bewildering melange of styles, friendly people, an air of hustle and bustle. But, at first glance, Ha Noi does seem a little more laid back, less intense (Alfred: he's been here less than 24 hours and spent most of that asleep. Please treat these 'insights' with the respect they deserve.)  And they do love eating! Maybe it's because Vietnamese eat out so much compared to at home but it really is striking to see so many people eating in public and so many places for them to do it!  Our first meal was in a little restaurant on the street where we had - what else - two different kinds of pho (Vietnamese soup) and it was great! (Alfred: Apart from Ruair* ... where is the key for the fada? I have never seen a keyboard with so many accents on it but where is the one for writing Ruair*'s name properly? OK, open Word, type Ruair, insert symbol í, copy and paste here. Ruairí. Anyway, Ruairí decides soup will not be filling enough and orders an additional noodle dish. This turns out to be another soup, so three large bowls of soup arrive for two people, to the obvious bemusement of the staff. Ruairí, of course, does his usual imitation of 'this is what I meant to do anyway' which, given how often he has had to do it over the years, he now has down to a fine art).  The restaurant was on what looked like a little alley between two main streets but this meant there was a constant stream of motorbikes whizzing past our table, which would have been fine if not for the waiter's unnerving habit of grabbing at the sleeves of the passing motorcyclists to try and persuade them to stop and eat.


QUICK RECAP
So how did we get here? Well, we spent the last few days in Ireland in an orgy of packing and throwing stuff out. It really is amazing how much stuff one can accumulate in a house after nineteen years of living there! Sunday and Monday saw our diet restricted to whatever was left in the fridge a we were forbidden from buying anything new. This led to some interesting salads and sandwiches (Alfred: I suspect Ruairí may never eat anchovies again) but the Chinese dumplings with burdock filling did end up in the bin. Then, we packed our bags. Our weight limit is one 30kg bag each plus one cabin luggage and a laptop or handbag. And we actually ended up weigh below that (Alfred: Oh, please!). One suitcase of 17kg each, one backpack of maybe 6kg and my laptop. And that's it for the next two years! Then my wonderful friend Éamon arrived at 4 a.m. to bring us to the airport (Alfred: Coddayn Gale ger 'masochist'?) and off we went. And it was a pretty uneventful, if exhausting, trip. Dublin-Heathrow with British Airways (forgot how nice BA are to fly with) and then Malaysian Airways London-Kuala Lumpur or twelve hours or so. A few hours in KL and then on to Ha Noi - well, almost. Apparently something went wrong while they were refuelling the plane so, even though they had already loaded everyone on board, we all had to get off again  and wait for a different plane. But nta kibazo as we say in Rwanda (Alfred: A phrase indicating you are frustrated and pissed off but far too cool and laid back to show it).

And I watched films!!! Ed Byrne once made fun in a sketch of people who say of holidays 'getting there is half the fun' - "they must have really shite holidays!" But for me watching loads and loads of films in a row is heaven, especially films you would have baulked at paying ten euro to see at home. So I watched (in chronological order of watching) Man of Steel (very good), White House Down (had its moments but, really, a ten-year-old girl doing an impression of Mel Gibson from the end of The Patriot?), World War Z (uh), Unknown (Liam Neeson, really liked this, probably because the twist caught me completely by surprise and, unlike most such twists, was completely plausible) and The Artist (a delight).

(Alfred: I would like to point out at this stage that I spent the entire period of almost twenty-four hours upside down in a backpack, sharing this space with a Canon Rebel camera and case, changes of t-shirt and underwear, assorted documents, and whatever other random objects were from time to time shoved in. The outstanding moment of the trip from my point of view was that Ruairí decided in Kuala Lumpur that he didn't need to change his underwear, a decision that may or may not have met with the approval of his beautiful travelling companion and fellow travellers but saved me from having ... well, you get the picture).

Arriving at the airport led us to the wonderful world of taxi and hotel scams. I had, of course, prepared diligently for the trip  by reading all the tourist guide information available and all of them harped on about the dangers of taxis at the airport pretending to be from your hotel but actually bringing you to a completely different hotel with a fake name on it providing a crappy service at extraordinary cost. This sense of insecurity was added to by the Hanoi City Palace Hotel sending us a secret code by email which we were to use as verification with the taxi driver who was picking us up and UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES were we to get into a taxi with anyone who didn't have this code. (Alfred: the code was HP-858, in case you are interested, which you aren't. But you may have noticed that the hotel is the Hanoi City Palace, not the Ha Noi City Palace. Indeed.)

WHY DO I HAVE TO GO ABROAD TO GET MY NAME SPELLED PROPERLY?
Of course, when we got there, there was no driver because our plane was three hours late but a phone call to the hotel soon put that right. So the driver turned up and he had the best code of all: my name on a notice, perfectly spelled. Not since I flew into Phonsavan in Lao and was greeted by my hotel owner with a placard with my name on it have I been so impressed (Alfred: though the guy in Phonsavan did scoop the jackpot by saying 'Conas atá tú, Ruairí, conas a bhí an turas?', the fruit of some diligent research on the Internet. If you want attention to detail, the Vansana Hotel in Phonsavan is your man). Seriously, I am pushed to remember the last time someone in Ireland spelled my name properly so this made a refreshing change (Alfred: Rant over, let's move on).

SETTLING IN
The hotel is lovely though we did have to negotiate for a better room - the original one had no window but for $28 a night in the centre of Ha Noi's Old Quarter that's hardly surprising. Anyway, for an extra $10 a night we have a giant room with two beds, the smaller of which is the size of our double bed at home and the ultra-king size (Alfred: maybe Emperor-size) we could sleep sideway on. Balcony on the main street and a charming bathroom which, when I posted an image of it on Facebook, caused a certain amount of bemusement.

I posted it because of the wonderful design of the toilet and handbasin, which I described as a cross between French Third Empire and 1920s Art Deco but obviously many of my Facebook friends had not encountered an Asian toilet before and were puzzled by the hose attachment. The practice of using sheets of paper to wipe oneself after going to the toilet was essentially invented in the USA in the nineteenth century as a way of ... recycling the innumerable catalogues that were then in circulation. From that came the invention of specific toilet tissue. But, for the rest of the world and especially in Asia, it seems a dreadfully unhygienic way of cleaning and they use ... water, a little water jet after which you dry yourself and head off fresh and clean!!

ADVERTISING AND CULTURAL REFERENCES
At Ha Noi Airport as we waited for our taxi, we saw these four large billboards advertising a brand of Vietnamese coffee. Can you recognise the faces, at least some of which came as a bit of a surprise!

Answers in the next post!!

Back in harness

So, it has been quite a year! Amazing holiday in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, got married in April, did lots of travelling to friends and relatives during the summer (as well as Martine getting her CELT qualification) and now we are all off to Laos for a couple of years! (Alfred: Yes, ALL, me too. I mean, you saw the mess Ruairí made of the blog he was supposed to be writing from Asia in January: what hope would there be if I didn't come along for this experience!) And we start off with a week's honeymoon in the Hanoi City palace Hotel in ... Ha Noi, of course!

So, between us, Alfred and I will try and churn out the same high-quality fare that made our Rwandan blog so loved and appreciated by the ... dozens (Alfred: was it really that many?) of you who read it. First installment when we arrive in Ha Noi on Wednesday: meantime here are some photos of the wedding in April (try and spot Alfred in the huge crowd!)

Ken Goodwin and Marion Grace Woolley were our witnesses (both had been VSO volunteers in Rwanda with us). And then there was Martine's son, David and the master of ceremonies, Alfred!