On wedsnesday I started my voluntary work at Peace Village day care centre. It was a bit difficult at first as the language barrier made communication so difficult; I stumbled awkwardly through some Vietnamese introductions. However, once I started playing with the children, it somehow didn't really seem to matter that we didn't understand each other! I spent the morning working with a small group of teenagers with mental disabilities, and most of them had Down...

On Tuesday we had a lovely lie in and then had a late breakfast of pineapple pancakes- delicious! The guy serving us had been having English lessons, so he pulled up a chair at our table and started to practice what he'd learnt. He was very sweet; he told us that he loves music from the 1980s!! We then went to the train station to buy our tickets for the return journey to Hanoi. However, all the staff were on their 3 hour break (!) until 1.30pm. Out train was a...

I was meant to start my voluntary work at Peace Village day care centre on Monday. However, the manager of the centre was on holiday until Wednesday, meaning the necessary paperwork could not be completed- there's a surprising amount of bureaucracy in Vietnam, considering how laid back they generally are (e.g standard 3 hr lunch break!). As Alice and I had two days off (Emily is at a different project), we took the opportunity to take a day trip to Ninh Binh, a...

On sunday we took an organised tour to the Perfume Pagoda, a complex of Buddhist shrines inside a cave near the summit of Huong Tich Mountain. We were picked up from our hostel by our tour guide, a lovely man called 'Number One'! The other people on the tour were really nice, and we had a good laugh together. There was an Austrian couple, two Vietnamese girls, a Malaysian family, and us! The perfume pagoda is about 60km southwest of Hanoi, so we had a two hour b...

First off, apologies for getting so behind on blog entries- I have been very busy!We have the weekends free at this volunteer project so I spent saturday doing some more sightseeing in Hanoi. In the morning we visited Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. Ho Chi Minh is considered the national hero of Vietnam, and there were a great number of vietnamese queuing to pay their respects. It was a very organised and high security set up, with armed guards everywhere, but we finall...