102808 Goodbye Vietnam

Our last day in Vietnam! How to sum up Hanoi...We easily spent a week here, touring the city's old quarter, French district, the lake, and the surrounding areas. The city, is, well, crazy - in so many ways. Vendors hock their wares in small stalls, but if you look closely you can see these long, straight hallways coming off the back of the stall - where families eat and sleep. At night, scooters drive up the sidewalk into the stalls and back down these dark hallways. Block by block, the type of stalls change - from tourist attractions (silk, lacquer, art, and trinkets) to household items (stall after stall of zippers and thread, sacks of grains, diapers and paper napkins, toys, clothes, etc.) Instead of going to a grocery store or department store and getting a whole bunch of stuff at once, here you travel the streets, going from area to area, stall to stall, collecting individual items. Meanwhile, trying to cross the street is a total hazard as scooters whizz by.My favorite scooter so far - it had a stick 'cage' tied to it, and inside was a live hog. Women carrying baskets of food come by - they squat down, cut and weigh (on a rusty scale) meat, grains, dried mushrooms, or seafood. Nearby, a granny will pull her baby's pants down, so the baby can pee right on the sidewalk. Meanwhile, things (buses, taxis, hotel rooms, clothes) are kept immaculately clean. Today I saw some Vietnamese boys scrubbing a White guys sneakers with a toothbrush, as the White guy stood by in his sox. When we got off the bus yesterday to tour the Perfume Pagoda, the bus driver washed the floor, even though we were returning a few hours later. We've seen lots of smiles and laughter - fisherman pulling in nets, wait staff in restaurants, and people of all ages looking at Hudson and Lila.