Last day in Hanoi

...and I'm sitting at the hostel, cooling off from the heat. I walked around all morning/afternoon looking for a painting, and I finally got ripped off at Ha Gallery, 18 Hang Trong. Bought a huge painting which I will either hang in my living room or my bedroom. Can't tell where it'd look good, since I haven't really seen the apartment yet. I'll probably refuse to leave the hostel again until my taxi comes at 5pm. It's quite hot, and I'm starting to smell funny. yummy.

Surprisinly, I'm quite looking forward to getting out of Hanoi. The vacation has been treating me very well, but I can't say that I'm crazy about this city. I don't know how many times to reiterate my frustration at the traffic. Green light = Red light = Go! Traffic moves ceaselessly almost all hours of the day. Since my hotel room faces the road and picks up all the traffic noises, I pretty much only have peace from 2 to 6am. Seeing as to how I usually sleep round 3am, this only gives me 3 hours a night. Some lady at a shop I stepped into said, "You must work very hard" and pointed to my eyebags. NO, it's the damn traffic keeping me up ALL NIGHT.

Last night, a lovely couple from Sydney taught me a thing or two about navigating the streets of Hanoi as a pedestrian. Basically, traffic is so chaotic and comes at you from all angles and in all directions. However, pedestrians have to cross at some point, right? There's no sense in waiting for traffic to halt, because it won't. The trick is to walk very very very slowly across the road. It can be a 2 lane road, it can be a 6 lane road. Don't worry abut looking for a pedestrian crossing. Just walk very very slowly, and traffic will navigate around you. Ah ah, tricky. Very counter-intuitive, but it works.

All my complaining aside, what really amazes me about the traffic is that people can carry almost anything on their bikes! I've seen different motorcycles carry 4 cases of beer, or a family of 5, or 4 portable keyboards, a huge wreath... The motorcycle carrying the portable keyboards was so packed, that the load practically hid the second passenger from view. You'd think more accidents would happen, but surprisingly, I've only seen one in the past 5 days. It was painful seeing the tiger beer bottles strewn all across a 6-lane road, broken, wasted. Motorcyclists also seem to have some kind of Napoleon complex, and like to unnecessarily assert their presence on the roads. So even if a big bus starts honking furiously at them, they refuse to budge from the center of the lane until the road becomes wider and the bus are barely able to inch past them. At this point, the bus is so close to the motorcyclist that, should the motorcyclist be even a little nervous, he would probably tip over into a ditch by the side of the road.

Apparently, cars here are taxed 200%, but that's according to Jeff the Republican. Don't know if I can trust Jeff, whom I met on my Halong Bay tour. Jeff is a manager of an electrician company something something in Reno, Nevada. He thinks that the only reason that illegal immigrations (i.e. Mexicans) should be allowed into the USA is so they can do the monotonous, brainless work like sheeting. He believes that they simply do not have the capacity to do the work that requires brain power, like putting together electric wires and systems.

One thing I sort of regret about my trip to Hanoi, is that I never ate at the little road side stalls. Many travellers I met on this trip have said that they're delicious, albeit a little greasy. But most of them took a little while to get used to the food, tummies felt different for a while. After my bout of food poisoning last week, I just wasn't prepared to suffer again this week.

Anyway, more to come later on the rest of my trip. I haven't been very good at updating, because I travelled out of Hanoi for the past 3 days.