Good morning Vietnam!

And the morning in Vietnam starts early. Every morning around 5.30am I was woken up by the sound of car horns and bells. My windows were not able to stop much of the sound and unfortunately my windows were also not able to stop the rain. A small Mekong was going from one side of my room to the other. The guesthouse were I was staying in was an old colonial building with high ceilings and giant windows, therefore not quite isolated and a hole here and there also fitted into the picture.
I peaked through the curtains and saw a chaos down there, lots of motorbikes, cars and cyclos. I was wondering what all those people were doing so early in the morning in the poring rain. After staring for a couple of minutes I thought well they can do what ever they want to do, I go back to bed.
After a couple of hours I decided to mingle with all the motorbikes, cars and cyclos and also conquer the rain. The Old Quarter was on my list for the first day, the Old Quarter is the oldest neighbourhood of Hanoi. Every street has it’s own theme, the textile street, the bed street, the shoe street and so on. Very easy shopping this way, but not for me. Every street had its own theme and every shop in that street sold those goods but to me still every street looked the same. It is very crowded, people are eating, cooking, socializing, smoking pipes, playing games and fixing their motorbikes. In between shopping you constantly have to watch out that one of the things on wheels that are speeding through the streets will not run you over. After an hour or 2 I was lost again, like always. I was looking for a famous lake which was only 5 minutes from my guest house, so not 2 hours. I ran into an Aussie-girl who also was a bit lost. So why not be lost together? The next days we had loads of fun and the last day we even managed to understand the map a little bit and not to get lost as much as the days before. We filled our days with wandering around the city, visit nice restaurants, lunchrooms and bars visiting a water-puppet show (which is a Northern Vietnamese tradition of already more than a 1000 years old), shopping and sniffing culture.
Hanoi was a great city, the people were very friendly and the atmosphere was great. Definitely a country to put on my list of places where I have to go back sometime.

Flashback to Ko Chang
Last weekend Jellina and I took some time to relax on the beach. Ko Chang is a small island which is perfectly suited for this purpose. During the day sunbathing (for me this means: smearing sun block continuously and ending up under my towel instead of on my towel) in the evening dining on the beach and visiting the only bar on the island.
This weekend I also managed to burn my eyelid, I never thought of putting sun screen on my eyelids before, but in the future I will never forget this anymore. It hurts terribly and I looked like a monster, my eye was all red and half closed. Long live the guy that invented sun glasses!
The absolute best moment of this weekend was a couple of minutes in the local bar…imagine a very small island…with only a couple of hundred inhabitants…not many tourists…only one bar…suddenly this came out of the speakers: ja dit is, o dit is, die leipe Mocro Flavour, geen probleem Ali B, met leipe Mocro Flavour (sorry only Dutch people will understand my confusion here)…I was confused and surprised and the same time.