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Another couple of days has passed in this crazy city. Yesterday we woke up at 9 in the morning (thats right Dave :p), slowly but surely we are beating the jet lag we think.
This was our first morning on our own and we were hungry for food. Amy had a plan to go to a place from Lonely Planet, after searching for it for aproximatelly 20 minutes, we were told by local LonelyPlanet book seller (yes, he was most probably selling fakes) that it is within another shop and then on the roof. We found the place eventually only to find out they only serve drinks. LONELY PLANERT YOUR INFORMATION IS WRONG!!! :) To be fair everything in lonely planet has to be taken with pinch of salt and common sense, the map is great, but most of the time we orientate by hunch and hope hehe, luckily so far we are getting to places...eventually. Places marked on map are usually slightly off, but thats no biggy.
No breakfast still after that place we decide to go to the center and try our luck, as we were walking towards another caffe, we noticed a little place on the street with worlds smallest seats and tables where locals were eating and 2 westerners. I was like - ok lets try this place. Well, Amy was not impressed and was not happy at all, so we were brought noodles and then bbq'd meat in stock(buljong) and some vegetables, noodles were cold and origin of the meat was unknown. Expression on Amys face was: are you for real? I didnt care and started eating, then by watching others I realised you are suppose to dunk the noodles in the stock, which made them warm. The meat was pork in my oppinion, there were pork meatballs and bbq'd strips of pork. Amy was not happy as she was not convinced it was pork, she kept saying - I bet its a dog! Made me chuckle :) I was then hushing amy to pay attention what others are paying so that we dont get ripped off, I think we were too obvious as the owner just charged us 30k Dong per person - 1 pound each. It did fill us up. Amy refused to eat the meatballs but ate the rest, I finished what she had left.
As we left the place we decided to withdraw some money and go find the travel agencies we had planned to visit. As we were on the street, all of a sudden some woman just walked up to Amy as we were looking at our map and placed her goods on Amys shoulder, before we could realise Amy had vietnamese hat on and they were like - take a picture. Amy was all : oh yesss , smiling away - whilst I realised - we are getting scammed. So yes the moment later same thing lands on me and Amy takes pictures. And ofcourse as we were done they started hasseling us for money getting louder and louder. Amy was bit perplexed and confused at what was going on, after paying each lady 20k they left us alone. One local woman was walking by and laughed - Yep we got proper scammed :) Oh well When in Rome eh. So then we made our way to first tourist office, on the way our stomachs were starting to hurt and we thought - thats it we got the food poisoning from the morning food. Fortunatelly after buying some coke and drinking that and few burps later, we were ok by the end of the day. The initiation of the stomach was done we think.
At the end of the day we booked a trip to Ha Long Bay for $100 per person in Delux Cabin with Halong Dolphin Junks. They will pick us up from our hotel and we will be there 2 days 1 night.
We also visited a tailor shop as Amy still needed a pair of shorts. When we first approached them they said they dont have the fabric for the shorts and asked us to go and find some and they will make it. Well its safe to say we didnt find any fabric, so at the end of the day we went back and asked the trousers to be made in different fabric. They said ok and we paid half of it ($5) and we will get them on Thursday after we get back from Ha Long Bay.
On our way back to the hotel we went and bought the tickets for the Water Puppets Show, we will be visiting it today at 17.00
Now some bad news folks :( As we got home, it came out for some reason there was an error on our memory card in our camera and all the pictures taken were unreadable, it kept saying Card Error. We worked out that it was most probably because we tried to upload the pictures from the hotel computers. We tried to make a copy at a different Internet place but no luck. Only solution was to delete/format the memory card. So we lost all the pictures, luckily we have uploaded KL ones and there were only 45 done in Vietnam :( I suppose we have to stay i Hanoi longer (please send money for this) to remake all the pictures :) Just kidding. We tested the camera, it seems to be working now, hopefully it will stay like this. We should've taken couple more additional memory cards for it. Oh yes also it seems Amy forgot the spare battery for the camera in KL - not confirmed as we havent unpacked our entire bags, but it seems so - we cannot find it anywhere.
That should be pretty much it, we are off to Ha Long Bay tomorrow so stay tuned for more :)
Jaan
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