Finding a Place

I hope our blog readers haven't gotten hooked on Janet's natural phrasing and humor.  Jeff is still here and I'll keep my sarcasm and and poor jokes to a minimum...

This morning we met with some HR people from our company and gave them our requirements for an apartment.  First of all, it is odd to be renting an apartment.
Why?
Oh, thank you for asking.  On the first of this month we became landlords.  A lovely couple is renting our home in Oregon.  So we have traded places, or taken a step in a ... direction.  Anyway, we are home-owners and that doesn't mean squat in Vietnam.
So, we got a call from an estate agent a few hours later and it turned out great.

A few hours later...
So what did we do in the mean time?
Went to the French quarter of the old quarter (At what point do they just call it the Tourist quarter)?
This is what we saw today:

The ladies still cart food around on their shoulders.  Now they just have to be nimble-footed.

BTW: We wanted to take a picture of a fruit seller in automobile-peril to share the anecdote of how much their jobs is crazy.  We thought we might take a few pictures to capture this... but we took just one.  One picture.  All of them are in constant near death experiences.  They need to conference at the airport Marriott with the coal miners of WVA and come to the agreement that both jobs are hazardous.

For our dear friend Erin, we took this picture.  Janet will have something to eat in Vietnam.

We didn't go in, but we are sure that the Vietnamese are jealous of the secret spices.

I need something...Do I go to Target, Rite-aid, CVS, Wal-greens, K-Mart, Walmart???

Problem Solver:

Totally Legit.

The "Propaganda Poster Museum" was very interesting... I was asked to stop taking pictures since it is a store.  It sells posters from the 60's-70's and re-prints.  A lot of stuff was anti-American but pro-Interesting.  I would like to go back and buy a piece or two in the future.

All you Mosin-Nagant fans can ID the rifles.

There were some posters propagandizing/celebrating the death of Americans.  These were published during the war.  The most striking of which I didn't get a picture of, it showed a fist busting through a B-52 and said that the Vietnamese crushed 3200 B-52s.  I don't know that the US even had that many B-52's.This poster could have been the only source of information for many people.

Information dissemination is one of the most under-examined pieces of war.

Okay, it is 2012 and let's explore a few places in Hanoi

Sidewalk?!?

Who ya kidding?  More motorbikes!!!

This is in the Old Quarter.  The sidewalks near our hotel (a whole 5 blocks north) are parking lots.  You walk in the street.

So we did make it to a few places in Hanoi that are well visited.

St Joseph's Cathedral: 

Pax (Pacis) Regnia = Peace from my mother?  She was a big help in our move to Hanoi.

So a few blocks later, and 1 coconut water.
We ran into a fancy place.  It looks like a castle with turrets.

Up top there is a sweet looking pool.

In between all the traffic there are some very beautiful parts of Hanoi.

Just like in Bend, Oregon, they have traffic circles.  Some have the same crazy art as in Bend.  Most here are full of perfectly manicured gardens.

Stanley Godspeed approves this message.

No trumpets.  You'd drown out the sound of honking motorbikes!

You would also drown out the sounds of the opera house.

The picture isn't great, but these three shops all sell the same thing and look identical.  The shops we are standing next to sold the same items.  Everything looked like a pyramid of gifts/ little red and gold boxes.  The street parallel to us sold 2 things, lunch and "men's fashion"  but it was all for a much slighter gentleman than myself with vastly different tastes in fashion.

Yup, that is 5 power meters.  Yup they have about 400 lines going in.  Yup this is one of the most organized power lines we've seen.  Power here is plentiful and a source of humor.  We have seen many poles with nearly a thousand lines hanging on them.  The lines are a mix of gauges and a mix of attached lines, unattached (cut and taped and free wired).  We also walked past a fruit seller who had set her fruit down and was stripping the copper out of the plastic.  In Minnesota and Oregon, meth-heads did this.  In Hanoi, it is a way to supplement a hard-working fruit sellers day.  If we could only get the meth-heads to sell fruit!  I'd wash the fruit twice though.

Indonesia is Muslim, and the scene looked the same...Except: Indonesians smoke a lot more and drink a lot more tea and sugar-fruit-drinks.  They both sit on the large sidewalks and play cards or chess/checkers and hang out.  This is a Vietnamese bar.  What you can't tell from the picture is the crock-pot or sport's cooler that holds the Bai Hoi or Fresh Beer.  How foolish we are to value cask aged Black Butte Porter.  It is odd to see an open bar...not because it is an open bar... but it is 10:00 in the morning.

Which brings me to an invitation from the first day we were here.  5 guys and one lady (she was working, they were drinking) sipping something brown.  They invited me down for "whiskey, whiskey" and I politely declined.  The waved their arms and invited me again and I motioned to my wrist and their wrist and tried to translate that it was 9:30 in the darn morning!

What was intriguing was the dead snake they had in a bottle.  Janet told me that it was a bad idea, and it is.  For the sake of culture though, I might walk across the street from our hotel to meet the local drunk-snake-aholics.  I'm sure the conversation is great even if my Vietnamese isn't.

Supermarkets are great.  They save space, if the shelves are full... fill the floors!

Want "Wildberry Cherries"  Of course they have you covered.  Interested in the noodles to go with that Hunt's sauce?  You are out of luck.

So we got a call from one the estate agents.  We set up a time to meet them at 2 in the afternoon.

We grabbed lunch:

I had some fantastic spring rolls.  They weren't deep fried, they were fresh and full of veggies and prawns and the sauce was a mix of citrus, vinegar and chilies.  They were billed as "Prawn spring rolls."  The Vietnamese love pork, I love pork, certain religions don't endorse pork.  The surprise in the Prawn spring rolls is that half of it is:

Pork!  So if pork is not on your menu, be aware of what you eat in Vietnam.

We ate until 1:45, but at our 2 PM pick up time:

A 1:45 PM Call "It is raining.  So our motorbikes won't pick you up.  We will pick you up when it stops."

Made sense to us, we just hoped that they could put a 6'1" Tay(Buleh/foreigner) on a 35cc  bike and still move!

We got a call just before 3pm and had a great time.

We find out today how the negotiations went  and which apartment we will settle into for which price.  We didn't take any pictures, but the places were all lovely and the local security guys were helpful.  This experience was Janet's first time on a motorbike and it convinced us to look into buying one.

Me driving a motorbike should warrant a blog of it's own.

-Jeff