Hanoi and Halong Bay

Vientiane nervous girl
In my room in my underwear, listening to music; knock on the door, I open; it's an australian girl. Her "Uhhh oh... I.. uuhhh.. yeah..well... haha!.. me and my friends were... yeah... oh!.. uhmm... I thought.... you're alone in there?... you... wait... listening to music as well?... uhhh... so you traveling?"... so then we're just talking about traveling, but I'm pretty puzzeled as to why she knocked on my door. In the end I think I figured out that she thought there would be a ton of people in my room and wasn't expecting me to open pseudo-naked. It was kind of how guys stutter when talking to really pretty girls, which is obviously a very flattering thought ;P

Vientiane to Hanoi and the stupid taxi
Take a taxi in Vientiane and the driver and me are best friends :) Have lunch at awesome buffet at airport, get on the brand new turbo-prop Air Laos plane that takes me, very comfortably, to Hanoi! I love you Laos air. Even gave me an amazing lunch box on a 45 minute flight. At Hanoi, guy ask me if I need a taxi, me: "no... wait, actually yes". He contacts a friend and after a while I find myself in a taxi with 3 dudes, which I thought were other passengers. The meter's not running, so I ask how much it is, it's "1500", I'm still fiddling around with the exchange rate, but figure out that that is extremely cheap. When we get near, they add 3 zero's, so it's a million and a half (60 euros). We get out in the middle of frickin nowhere, the taxi drives off leaving me with the two guys who get increasingly angery because I refuse to pay the ridiculous amount. In the end I do end up paying, so that sucks. Really hard to controle anger after that. They drop me off at the wrong backpackers as well. I go to the right one on the back of some dudes scooter for about 50 cents.

Hostel
Hostel is amazing: free internet, best shower in weeks, duvet bed covers are super soft! It's Tet festival (Chinese New Year) in Vietnam, so EVERyTHING is closed. Have soothing conversation with an attractive English girl and her male Canadian travel mate about my taxi calamity. Start talking to (what would later turn out to be my friend) Anouk from my bed, while she's in hers. Talk about meditation, etc, I like her from the start.

Halong bay
Halong bay is a beautiful bay full of fantastic islands. Meet group, talk to English girls in bus, talk to Anouk and her friend Jen (who would also become a great friend later) at the bus stop. Our guide's name is 'Before' and he talks like a Zen master. Get put on a 'junk' boat (Jonk in Dutch). Very nice. Go to biggest (bigger than the biggest volleyball gyms I've been in) and most beautiful cave I've seen in my life. That night, the English portion of our group decides to get absolutely shitfaced (drunk). I'm being pretty sarcastic about it, this kind of creates a safe haven for people that don't necessarily want to get absolutely drunk. Anouk and Jen are there and so are two Australian girls and an Indian couple. The Indian couple was a little older than the rest and were ther only ones who didn't book through our hostel and were like "wtf did we get ourselves into???", but I think they had fun at our table :) I was the only one of two people who did karaoke (the Flintstones), amazing... :P Really fun night, just a lot of my kind humor and fun.. Before this I was already feeling a little weird, but this was the night that really set off this period that I've been in since, that I can only describe as fun, I don't care, impulse, humor, sarcasm, losing myself in the moment, people, chit chat, friends and randomness.

Rest of the tour: we go kayaking, trekking up a mountain (or 4 of us, rest stayed in the hotel room, cuz they're PUSSIES) and go to Monkey Island (Island with monkeys). The whole tour was really cold. Thought I brought my pants, but I forgot my detachable leg parts, so really, I just brought: more shorts. I run into Karen from Holland out of nowhere! She used to be in the girls volleyball team I used to coach and I always meet her in odd places. She gets a long quite well with Anouk, who is quickly becoming a good friend. We have movie night with Anouk, Karen and Jen in our hotel room on new year's eve.

Somewhere on the way back from Halong bay, our bus hits a dog, which was absolutly horrible.

Food during the trip: sea food and more sea food. Really good at beginning, really sick of it at the end and at the end we get by far the worst rendition of this meal, so we're craving some Western food, will we get it though???. PS: see pictures for good impressions of Halong Bay.

Back in Hanoi
Anouk me and Jen are best of friends by now. We set out for good food. Have ice cream at 'Fanny's', which is amazing. Find some Pizza place where I have a cheese burger / peperoni Pizza and it's equally good. The table covers are made out of blanc paper and you get crayons. We make the best collective drawing that that place has ever seen! I need to get the pictures off of Jen to show you. By then I'm in my sugar induced energy shock babbling state (which some of you have seen me in before). I vaguely remember talking to random people about their food etc. We then head over to the next place for white hot chocolate and cheese cake. We then just sit there as the absolutely random conversation continues... very cool night of letting go, indulging, relaxing and not caring. I will write later about the relationship about relaxation / patience and mindfulness... but I feel that these kind of nights are very beneficial in that they are complete relaxation, but they just lack in mindfulness.

Me, Anouk, Jen, Nancy and three English girls
Meet my former travel companion Nancy at the hostel, it is nice to see her again. Her, Anouk and me head to the temple of literature. Kind of crappy I thought. Not very impressive and stuffed with overly superstitious people (for Tet). Also was just cranky myelf.

Oh and then this British girl I just started talking to was just game to go with us to do whatever we were doing and she wanted to bring all her friends.. which was really cool, yet a tad bit odd. There were not enough bikes, so they didn't come, but that night they joined us for dinner. So I was stuck at dinner with 6 girls, which was horrendous obviously. It was a strange dynamic, because on one end of the table I had my friends who were a little older, more mature, more intellectual and more aware of the world they live in, while on the other the end I had the younger, more naive, pretty party girls... like they were all attractve in different ways. My brain is trained to hone into only one kind of girl, so that resulted in a lot of contradiction in my brain. The most physically attractive (in the cliche sense) British girl kept coming to walk with me, cuz she obviously thought I was amazing. She kept telling me how confident she was, but this was obviously based on her looks, which is a sucky form of confidence, because you're gonna get older and you have to uphold it everywhere ("I'm the prettiest" or "the coolest"), which leads to jealousy and anger, etc, etc. I'm obviously above this kind and only subscribe to the kind which flows from mindfulness, acceptance of whatever is and hence my confidence is unmovable and invinsible, but really it's not.... I get arrogant quite often, but suck it.

Crazy photo session with Anouk
Do random cycling with Anouk. She becomes super cheerful and happy all of a sudden and we start taking a whole bunch of strange pictures. Check out the pictures to see how they came out. All the lying on the floor and taking pictures with random objects gained us some fame in the sqaure we were at (people testing their English on us and taking their pictures with us).

Ho Chi Min Mausoleum and the communist intimidation scheme
Me and Jen (Canadian girl) walk to the Mausoleum. Enter the strangest trip back through time. The whole time I kept thinking "is this actually real??" You get there and you are met by a huge assembly of glorious communist flags waving in the wind. There's soldiers everywhere. You get in line to give them your camera and phone, except they didn't want my phone, even though their sign had my exact phone on it! We walk towards the mauoleum, but we couldn't walk where we were walking, but other people could :S??? We are instructed to take our hands out of our pockets, to stop talking and join a steady stream of people into the mausoleum. At some checkpoint they take Jen's water bottle (which was a really nice one she brought from Canada), which we never saw again. We see Ho Chi Min, being all dead and stuff and we continue on to the house on stilts, which is where 'uncle Ho' lived. The place had signs saying "DO NOT STOP HERE!" and we actually saw a straw box that read "work is glory... happiness to everyone". There were hardly any foreigners in the place btw. And you just get this general feeling of being the enemy (which might've been me) and you actually start to feel like some kind of super capitalist, it's quite hard to describe the vibe of the place, but something like 'communism lives on, the West shall perish' might come quite close.

After this I went to the revolution museum and the Hoa Lo prinson (sarcastically known as the Hanoi Hilton, by the American POWs). And this place was also just filled with communist propaganda. For instance, the prison had a whole exposition on how badly the French treated the Vietnamese in the prison (which I'm sure was partially true), but then they made it seem as though the Americans had the best time of their lives there. I'm not exaggerating, it showed pictures of the Americans doing cooking classes, playing volleyball / basketball, converting to communism, translating stuff for Ho Chi Min and them receiving souvernirs when they left so they could remember their time there. The French part had paintings of the French looking like Satan while torturing the Vietnamese. The Revolution Museum was the same. It had stories about how the glorious people's army downed thousands of B-52 during the war, while they didn't even have the technology to fire at something at that altitude. This is linked to the fact that people in Hanoi really don't seem to like Westerners. Compared to people from Thailand and Laos, they are highly unfriendly in my experience. At restraurants the waiters get angry at us almost evry time. Once they charged us for using their napkins and even dug up the trash to prove that we used them. Of course everything I just said is also highly one-sided from my perspective and that's the strange thing about this place... it elicits a quite strong angry reaction from me. It succeeds in driving me into the role of siding with capitalism and the American Vietnam war effort. I mean in a way I can see why the Vietnamese people would be angry; they got the shit bombed out of them, but the propaganda is obviously wrong. The whole thing is just pretty twisted and is very symptomatic of the way thought will make perople (this includes me) identify with certain ideals. Now I thought the ideal of communism had all but stoppped existing, but around here it is still completely in full swing and it makes me realize how much of a capitalist and a Westner I really am. It kind of annoys me that I don't have more time to be mindful of, study and understand this situation.

On the way there and back me and Jen had a really good conversation about communism and capitalism back home, where we agree a lot. We agreed that capitalism's tendecy (or the ego's) to make people desire the fudge, muffin, oreo, chunk, butter scotch, play station, Ferrari, sex porn, homo-sexual (the ultimate sense temptation product we came up with) is perhaps not so good either :P

Over socialization
Usually if I've been social for 3 days on end I have to go and find some solitude and just listen to music, read and meditate, because I just get social vatigue. Lately however I've been social for about 3 weeks on end. This has never happened to me and I'm pretty sure it has to do with the lack of thought after the retreat. It's starting to have weird effect on me though. Like I cannot stop talking.. and I crave social interactions everwhere I go and I do ridiculous things. Like a lot of times it's quite fun, but I've also picked up the habit of mocking the Vietnamese people whenever I interact with them, which is something I'm less proud of. And like usually I'll say weird things around people I know, but now when people I don't know join in, I'll just continue on and I get a lot of WTF?? kind of reactions. Relaxation and patience like I said are currently great, but mindfulness is not, which has resulted in me eating way too much crap food (had cake 7 times in the last few days) and swearing more.

Water puppets
Go see water puppets with Jen! People said it got boring after 10 minutes, but I enjoyed every last minute of it (there were 60)! It had different things with different puppets about every 3 minutes and I thought it was so funny! Like you'd have puppets trying to catch fish with baskets and then they'd catch each other over and over! Genius! See pictures and movies which I will upload later. After this I have a very long and satisfying conversation with Jen about meditation, thinking and not thinking, progressing and friends. This goes on till 3am.

Sofitel
My dad had given me a present where I could stay in a hotel for one night. It was the hotel he used to stay at while he was traveling for the bank. The place turned out to be quite the luxurious place. When I booked it, it had a special comment field where I added 'I'm a backpacker' and a backpacker I was. I arrived with my two backpacks and the guards at the door went "can I help you sir??", "I have a reservation", after which they lead me to the reception, still somewhat incredulous. Get my room; it's amazing. I had my own study, king size bed, art on the wall, the shiniest bathroom ever, plasma TV and a 'pillow menu' :) Used their fitness centre in the evening and the morning and it was absolutely excellent. Then it was time for dinner. Time to choose my clothes... The shirts I had were: a white T-shirt with black stains on it, a Hawai shirt, a black shirt that was so wrinkled it hardly even fit anymore, two wifebeater shirts and... my black and golden shirt that reads 'you have the right to remain silent, so shut up'. I picked the last option, you can't really read the text very well and at least it was clean. Still people would look at me a little strange, like "who is this Hoodlum?" I'm sure they thought I was some kind of internet whizz kid with too much money. But then I'd answer everyone's French bonjours in my immaculate French accent and be all ""please, after you" in the elevator. The French restaurant was full so I had an appetizer at the open bar, which was caramelised duck with fruit. To give you an idea, the bottle of water was twice as expensive as my lunch that day. Food was good, obviously. Then back to French restaurant, where my spot had freed up. All my dad's lessons in etiquette came back and despite my shirt I blended in really nicely. It was also funny to be there and actually look around and to notice that despite the ridiculous classyness, it is still just a restaurant, with regular people. I had the sea bass with mashed potatoes and the creme brule for desert. The food tasted like pure quality. Like some one had spent years perfecting the dishes, which is probably exactly what had happened :) One of the best things about the meal though was the bread! It has to have been the finest French bread and butter I've ever had. It's such a simple combination, but if it is prepared so well, it is amazing. Watched Letterman on TV that night and went to sleep in my amazing bed.

Next morning I have breakfast buffet, which is 20 euros and I think I'm the only one that got his money worth out of it. I had croissants, coffee role, more baguette with butter, fruit, creme caramel, cheese (gouda and edam as well), chicken, fish, cake, apple pie, cereal with fromage blanc, orange juice and green tea. I work out after and check out. At check out, I pay my compliments to the guy who works at the fitness centre for his professionalism and good help. They ask me if I'll be back: "maybe when I get rich" :P I've never been in a hotel like that, or perhaps when I was really young, but I must say it was a great experience, especially in contrast to some of the bambo shacks I've been in during my travels. It also reminded me of how much I actually like the French cuisine: good french bread, the simple ways they prepare their meats and fish, creme brulee, cheese and croisants, mmmm. Some part of me also appreciates classyness like this and I feel at ease in it. Of course it's strange to go back to finding places where you can get lunch for 2 euro instead of 3 straight after. But anyway, I want to thank my dad for the great present.

Hostel plus bus
Go to lunch with a Norwegian girl, then get on the sleeper bus with a German girl, which is where I am right now, while my head continuously bumps against the ceiling from the bumpy road.

PS: I apologize for making myself seem like a hero, it's more like a writing style, than an objective presentation of events.