Hanoi, Vietnam

Sometimes trying to tell or write about your travels is just really hard to do, at least for me. There is just so much that you see and do and that just happens on a daily basis while traveling that is hard to explain to people unless they are just there experiencing the same things. With that being said, I have so much that I feel I need to write down about this past month in Vietnam and Cambodia because I do not ever ever ever want to forget these last four weeks that have changed me in more ways than one. So this journal about my travels will be sporadic and rambled with a side of a lot of pictures. 

We finished up our school year on March 7th. A day later we hopped on a plane to Bangkok, spent the night on rough bumpy seats at the airport and the following morning we flew to Hanoi, Vietnam. Hanoi was crazy, exciting, mind-boggling, confusing, and cold! I feel like Hanoi really shows the Vietnamese culture. In some ways it's an aggressive culture-- at least when they are driving, but in other ways it's a culture that just enjoys every moment of their day. Cafes are always full of people from early in the morning until late at night. It's a culture that runs off of coffee. One Vietnamese coffee for me and I was ready to conquer the world with a side of jitters, but the Vietnamese could drink their coffee all day and still seem fine. I guess maybe they just get their jitters out on the road. The streets are loud and the traffic is crazy. People blow their horns like it's nobody's business. You know the whole 10 and 2 thing you learn in drivers ed in America, well in Vietnam it's 10 and horn. People everywhere are sitting on the street eating Pho, drinking coffee and spitting sunflower seed shells on the ground. Everyday was a sensory overload-- the smells of fishy noodles and strong black coffees, the sounds of horns and people chatting or yelling on the streets, the sights of unidentified meats, almost traffic accidents, and colors of buildings, and the tastes of fresh baguettes and coffee drowning in condensed milk. It was an exciting city, but also a tiring city. We found a sense of calmness and relief each time we left Hanoi, but Hanoi is a city that I think every person needs to experience.

Travel tip for Hanoi: When traveling around northern Vietnam, Hanoi is the perfect hub. So don't book multiple nights in Hanoi because you will keep having to come back. One of our biggest travel mistakes when traveling through Vietnam was this. We booked three nights in Hanoi when we first arrived, but after three nights we took other trips around the North which kept sending us back to Hanoi. So we saw a lot of Hanoi and had a lot of Vietnamese coffee. Luckily we weren't on a tight time schedule, so it all worked out.