"Hanoi makes NYC seem bucholic"

Meg is rolling out some memorable quotes these days. Hanoi is stunning, full of surprises and not surprisingly, reveles layers and layers every day. Life in Hanoi takes place on the street, compared to other places where all the locals disapear to eat at home with their families, the Vietnamese in Hanoi pull up tiny plastic chairs to tiny plastic tables and order food from stalls that make only one thing. This makes it easy to order of course, and people are thrilled when we try their food and try repeatedly to say "delicious," the word for which is Ngon, but seems unpronounceable to western toungs. Ours, anyway. We learned another word, for "good," "tot" which, when we use the two together we can make ourselves understood. This is handy, because we are seriously eating everything in sight, well...almost, I have not yet braved the organ meats soups. Vietnamese is a tonal language, so and up or down or even or low or high tilt changes the meaning of the word completely. Despite this, we've mastered please, thank you, the numbers 1-7, "how much does it cost" (though I have a really hard time understanding the answer and have resorted to the technique of fanning out my money and letting the person choose the appropriate bills. Not the best technique. All manner of things are traded in the street; sweets, shoes, car parts, animal parts, pirated DVD's, snake wine...(?!) and clothes. We took a brief side trip, we were going to spend a few days in the outlying area, but we liked Hanoi and were eager for something to be familiar for a few days, so we hightailed it back and have two more days here before Jill Krauss joins us and we head off to the famed Halong Bay. On our way back to town we met an older australian couple and a young woman from Montreal, and spent the day with all of them today. It was refreshing to swap stories and trade tips and share a lot of laughs. Meg laughs particularily hard when she gets to tell the story of me somehow dialing an outside line when I was trying to reach the front desk of our hotel (I swear I only pushed 0 and #!) and asking repeatedly, about 10 different ways, if we could flush the toilet paper or if it needed to go in the trash bin, before the patient woman on the other end made it clear that I had dialed a household. "I don't know why you ask me this" she was trying to explain. She laughed very hard when we figured it all out.