We were originally going to take an 18 hour bus ride from Hoi An to Hanoi but then Tash found a one hour flight that cost less than $50 so we opted for that instead (thank god, because later in our trip we came across two girls who endured that bus ride from hell and barely lived to tell the tale!)
Before getting to Hanoi I couldn't for the life of me keep straight Hanoi and Hoi An. Which town was which? Where were we? Where were we going? I had no idea. After spending one day in Hanoi, I will never confuse the two again. Hoi An is small, laid back, quaint and clean. Hanoi is huge, heavily traffic-ed, loud and dirty. (Crossing the street here is actually somewhat scary!)
Our flight landed in Hanoi at midnight. We then took a large van from the airport to the city center. Tash and I were determined to walk from the bus to our hostel but there was one problem... the signs on the map didn't match the signs on the street (little did we know that this would be our first of many, many failed excursions due to inaccurate maps, not inaccurate map readers) so we hopped on motos instead. Tash and I snuck quietly into our room around 2am. After only 4 hours of sleep, our roommates decided to rise, flip on the lights and have a full conversation... in french... at 6am... The only plus side to this- I made it to the rooftop breakfast and snapped some amazing photos of the city.
Tash and I did some exploring during the day which included seeing a Vietnamese History Museum (it only went up to the year 1945), trying some not so delicious small white fruits covered in brown shells from a street vendor, encountering an "Ask Me Anything" group of students near the river (they spoke Russian, Chinese, Japanese, English, Vietnamese and French and would translate anything for anyone with the purpose of uniting tourists and locals) and my favorite part, eating 12,000 dong ice cream cones (that's 54 cents) in an indoor market that motos drove through.
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