Welcome To Hanoi

So there it was, the capital of Vietnam: Hanoi. After sitting on the bus for hours and hours, I finally arrived there in the afternoon and started exploring the city right away. My hostel was in the old quarter which is certainly the most vivid place of Hanoi, so I immediately got to experience how busy life is in the narrow streets of that area. I didn’t stay there that long though but went to Hoan Kiem Lake instead which is known for a turtle tower right in the middle and small Ngoc Son temple which is accessible by a bridge. I went around the lake first and then made my way to the temple. It was small but quite nice. In the evening, I decided to have dinner at one of the numerous food stalls in the old quarter and then went to the rooftop bar – that’s what I did almost every day during my time in Hanoi 😉 It's a really nice bar, always quite crowded, so it's easy to get to know other people 🙂

The next morning, I decided to join a guided tour organized by my hostel. We started at St. Joseph’s Cathedral which looks like Notre Dame de Paris. The reason for that is that Hanoi was a French colony in the end of the 19th century. It’s the oldest church of Hanoi and it was very impressive to walk through there. After walking around the lake again, we stopped at the statue of Ly Thai To who founded the Ly dynasty and made Hanoi the Vietnamese capital a bit more than a thousand years ago. We finished the tour in a small café which is famous for the legendary egg coffee, a real Hanoi specialty. As I don’t like coffee, I had an egg chocolate instead which was really tasty. The tour ended pretty early so I still had plenty of time to explore the city. I made my way out of the city center, stopped by at a Lenin statue – Ho Chi Minh, the key figure of communism in Vietnam, met him in the 1920s - and went to the Military History Museum afterwards. It was interesting to see all the airplanes, canons and panzers being used during Vietnam War. From the museum, I continued exploring by walking past some famous buildings such as the presidential palace or the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum and finished my tour with a walk through the botanical garden including a small temple when it was just about to get dark.

After another nice evening at the rooftop bar, my friends from Lao, Jane, Andi, Mathilde and Matti finally arrived in Hanoi. We decided to go to Cat Ba island together the next day. Our last full day in Hanoi was nice. I showed Jane and Andi around for a while and had lunch with them. It was great to see them again. When we went to the rooftop bar in the evening, Mathilde and Matti joined us so we were finally reunited 😊 After staying at the hostel for a while, we went to a show which is extremely popular with tourists in Hanoi: the water puppet theatre next to the lake. It was a very entertaining and funny show, so we all really enjoyed it. It was basically a show of some puppets telling a story in the water while being accompanied by some musicians and their instruments. When the show was finished, we went to the old quarter for some time to try some Vietnamese beer before I went to a club with Andi and Jane to party a bit. It was a nice end to my first stay in Hanoi before going to Cat Ba in the next morning. The next adventure was about to start…

TO BE CONTINUED 🙂👌