Day 25 - Hanoi

My parents begin their trip back home today, so we had breakfast after a little sleep in and then we made our way our for a walk with the parents so they could do a little sight seeing before heading off.  They ended up saying a quick farewell while we were out and about and sending us off to go for a walk.  There was some kind of festival in town going on, no idea what it was, but it did mean that we didn't have to worry about traffic while walking on some of the streets. There was plenty of cars still out and about, but these ones were being controlled either kids or their parents with a remote control. We ended up doing a bit more of a look around and heading back to the hotel after an hour. I checked with the staff and my parents hadn't left yet so I went up to their room to spend some time with them before they departed the hotel.

After they left, we decided to head off and get some lunch down by Train Street, for those of you not familiar with train street, it's a little street with a lot of cafes and bars where you sit outside, and then when the train comes in, they move the tables closer to the bar as the train comes past you with such a small gap, you could reach out and touch it.  I had read somewhere last night that the train generally came past around 3pm, we had decided to walk down earlier so we could have lunch and then check out the train, but as it turns out, the train was arriving at 2pm today and it was already after 1:30pm.  A lady encouraged us to go with her to her bar for a beer, it was next to the train track so we ordered drinks and sat down at the tables and waited for the train to arrive.  We could hear a bell ring and people started moving and sorted the tables back, followed by a second bell, by this stage the tourists were generally off the track, with some of the locals still roaming about, a third bell had pretty well much the rest of those still roaming about getting off the track as the train approached.  As it was passing it turns out that the train was a double decker passenger train, we filmed some of the passengers as they were coming past as they were filming us as well.  As soon as the train had finished going past, the street and road traffic went back to normal. We then headed off to get lunch.

We came across a Cafe down a street near Train Street and found a place called Puku, turns out it was setup by a New Zealander, the bar has now been sold from the original kiwi owner to a local Vietnamese person, but some of the items on the menu still have NZ names with them, like the Moana, The Weka, the Kea, all of these were sandwiches, which is odd as I haven't heard of any of these as names back home for a sandwich.

After lunch we made our way back towards the hotel, we decided to take a random direction, I knew my phone would be too flat to use it for navigation, so we would wing most of it and if we got too lost the could just grab a cyclo or something like that... About a kilometre down the road I realised I had left my sunglasses back at the Cafe, the others continued on and I ran back to the Cafe to find they were still there, thank goodness, I didn't want to loose my new and inexpensive "Ray Bans" on their first outing.  I decided to head back to a different way to the others, I managed to find a couple of different things, like a cathedral on the way back, that wasn't overly interesting as I couldn't go in, it was gated off, so just grabbed a photo from the outside and continued on.  I headed past the lake which we had walked around several times already in the last couple of days and couldn't help how many people were just standing or sitting around taking photos of themselves (or at least their friends were taking phone of them). I decided to get some photos of some of them too.

Finally arriving at the hotel it was time to relax and chill (literally) a bit as it was a pretty warm day, as we have an early start tomorrow we decided we would just drop in next door for dinner tonight, the restart was the Sky Bar of the hotel called Shining... The name reminds me of the movie, but apart from that it doesn't have any resemblance to the movie whatsoever. To get there we all took the elevator up, on the going down on the other handz the elevator wouldn't accept us all in there, it started beeping and the door wouldn't close... Hard to believe just a few meals was enough to stop the lift going down, I jumped off and let the lift go down without me, and I took the next one, and no... This does not mean I was the one stopping it going down, I know someone out there reading this I bound to say that.