Hanoi - scam ahoi!

Hanoi - 1/07 - 3/07/2011

Astrid's mytery birthday present. She loves surprises so this year she got wisked away to Hanoi. Ian even managed to sneak a visa into Astrid's passport without her knowing!
Hanoi is hard to describe and best experienced...motorcycle crazyness, quaint areas with socialist poster shops, tourist trap lacquer shops, dead man in transparent coffin, mini plastic chairs, scams, ice-coffee, pho and streetfood...would sum up the town.
We spent hours looking at socialist art (we have a sweet spot for all socialist realist art/posters), browsing through lacquer shops (Astrid likes those, but less now that our paid shipment never arrived and we bascically got conned) and sipped many many ice-coffee's to cope with the heat. We also went for dinner at Bobby Chin's restaurant and tried our hand at a cooking class the next day. The cooking class was fun and included a trip to a local market where we could witness the gutting of frogs first hand. And of course we also had to go and visit good Uncle Ho in his mausoleum.