There are hundreds of nice different places where you can eat traditional food - accompanied by traditional music, plus costumes.
Or French food! And I can tell you that in the French restaurants, for half of the price of regular one in France, you can eat the tastiest “cuisine Française”!
There are streets here with different specialities: the street with shoes, the street with towels, the street with decoration, the street with clothes, the street with tools, the street with ... paper for presents… And this means that all along the whole street you can buy only this!
And what is very handy here, is the fact that if your scooter or bike wheel got flat, you don’t get to get angry or to lose time by pushing your vehicle ; at almost every corner there is someone with a pump, someone that for a very small amount of money will inflate it for you and you can happily continue your way like nothing happened.
Taxis you can also find everywhere and if you want to pay even less than 1 $ for about 2 km, (yes this is real!) you can ride on the back of one of the scooter-drivers that stay in groups at the corner of the streets, who will be happy to take you wherever you want. Just show them the address (in all the places you go they give you cards with all the details, it won't be hard to remember a place that you want to go back to) you'll be there before you know it!
There are also places where you can have a suit done in 2 days! For about 60 $... and a real nice material!
Doesn’t it sound a bit unreal? Well, come and see! You will never regret it!
What I absolutely love is the fact that on the streets, when they invite you to buy something or they ask you if you do not want a ride with the bike or the scooter, they address to you with “Madame”; with the French accent!
It has a particular charm on these dusty old streets, between horns and small shops, between old women without teeth carrying their 'balance' on the shoulder with big heavy baskets full of food, fruits, soups or underwear, between laud laughs of girls when noticing you, between curious looks right into your bag and heads that are turning around and follow you for quite a while, between taxi drivers that try to fool you showing you the mileage meter and telling you that this is the amount that you have to pay, well, between all this, the sound of a gentle “bonjour-merçi-beaucoup” (because all of them, as a proof of knowing French, are saying the same words together as I wrote them) it is comforting in a funny, ironic way.
All this adventure has just started! So I am curious: what’s next? ...
And next was a trip: 2 hours with the car from Hanoi and another hour on the river in a small boat.
Both sides of the river are watched over by mountains. With a lot of imagination they say that these mountains have the shape of an elephant back; there are 99 elephants, and all of them are watching the pagoda. Just one isn’t. So the rebel elephant was punished for wanting to be different and a part of his hip was cut. (It really looks like it is cut by a giant sword and on that abrupt cut-side there is almost no verdure).
And then, another one and a half hour climbing a mountain on some stone stairs, humid and slippery, till we arrived on a cave named “Perfume Pagoda”.
It is useless to describe the amount of people that we found there, praying and bringing “offerings” for different Buddha and different wishes. (“Offerings” that are staying there for a while and then they take it and eat or drink it there).
There is a big stone known as the “Money Stone” and one named “the Gold Stone”; people rub with their banknotes to those stones so that Buddha will give them more (you could see the places where they mostly rub it, stone being very flat and shiny.)
We were the subjects of a few laughs of some people who had never seen another human raise.
We also laughed when we sow people pushing each other and struggling, with hands in the air as high as they could, fortunately higher than the neighbour, to catch a drop of water that was dropping time to time from the place in the ceiling that is known as the “source”, “the fountain-head” and it is considered kind of saint.
We laughed again when we’ve seen a video clip (or a movie) that was being shoot on a bridge over the river with traditional costumes and traditional music; there was obviously a love scene as the couple was hands in the air, in a slow motion hug and very languorous looks…
And then we took lunch on a terrace where we could see the animals that we were probably eating from, hanging, with no skin, waiting to be cooked.
I was sick the next day, just me in the whole group. Probably my body was not used with that kind of meat... dog meat, no idea what it was, and still don't want to know!
.
