The transport, the most common one here, is the scooter, as I said. Everybody has one. And they use it in more many ways that you can ever imagine. This small bike on gas has place for 4 or even 5 persons. The whole family can be transported on it! Successfully!
And beside the bunch of people riding it, you can see that a whole different world can be transported with it! Even a big refrigerator that somehow manage to stay on the back of a small scooter in a strange equilibrium… And sometimes you can see chicken being transported, or a whole pork...
The image of Vietnam changed when I met Christine.
Good people are to be meet in the most common places. Along the time I made friends in bus, pharmacy, supermarket... me and Christine met in a DVD shop.
She was talking about her sick dog and she was looking for treatment. I thought she was a tourist and I told her that maybe the best is to get in touch with the French Embassy. We started to talk and I found out that she was living there, she’s half French, half Vietnamese and from that day on, we sow each other every day!
I am proud to say that I have a good friend in Hanoi, she showed me another face of the town, she invited me and Fid at her place - a kind of traditional Vietnamese house but in a good way, not at all narrow, very big living room (as we would never get to have in Paris!), few floors, lots of dogs…
Thanks to her I found good places to buy pearls, real ones, cause here you can also have real stuff for still same small prices; I discovered corners that I never knew about, shops to buy everything you want, that I couldn’t discover by myself. Suddenly my staying in Vietnam became vary pleasant!
I found a good place to do some sport, there was also a swimming pool, in the afternoons I was seeing Christine… and evenings were reserved to my husband. So life was so good!
Having a good friend can be the secret ingredient of a happy life, did you know that?
I started to use a motorbike every time I went out, there were always a few at the corner of my street, I knew now the prices so no matter what they were asking I couldn’t be fooled, and the driver was smiling like a kid caught doing something bad when asking for a price and found out that I was giving him just the half.
I started to feel at home in Hanoi, it was very hard to say goodbye, especially to Christine, who even very beautiful, never let me take pictures of her.
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