Mr. & Mrs. Vandebilt + kids

We really just have a long layover in Hanoi – we landed late Monday night and have an overnight flight to Tokyo Wednesday night – turns out that was just long enough. Hanoi is crazy – it’s loud and chaotic and busy and really just wild. I said at least a couple of times that I was glad we were ending here instead of starting because it would have been quite an entry point to the mania of Asia.

We spent the next two days just wandering around and taking in the sights in this chaotic city. Our first stop for day one was of course a street side coffee. Until you’ve had one, I can’t accurately describe just how amazing Vietnamese coffee is. We have been completely spoiled this trip with the most delicious always available super cheap coffees. There’s just nothing that compares to a Vietnamese milk coffee. After we were sufficiently caffeinated we headed to the Hanoi Hilton – the site of a prison used to house political prisoners and later POWs in the Vietnamese war.

We spent a couple of hours making our way through the museum with our audio guides. Apparently prison museums with audio can keep the kids really engaged – this is the second time they’ve been captivated by a prison museum – I’m not entirely sure what that says about them.

There’s a street in Hanoi where a train drives down the middle of the street a few times a day. The street is full of bars and cafes that need to clear all of their tables and chairs once the warning whistle blows. All of the patrons have to stand up and behind a line that would never pass North American safety standards as the train rushes past. While it’s decidedly a tourist area, it was a fun little experience. They’ve turned the street into something beautiful and it was a memorable lunch.

After lunch we made our way back towards our hotel area to take a rest and get ready for a late dinner. We got a little distracted en route by coffee – experiencing our first egg coffee – something I’m now so disappointed I waited this long to drink. It’s essentially a large espresso shot with a dollop of boiled icing on top. We then got distracted again by the nearly ubiquitous call of masssaaaggeee. We haggled down for a family price ($50 for 60 minutes for the 5 of us!) and climbed the stairs to an open room with 4 massage chairs and 5 massage beds. It was clean enough, I mean, it’s not passing any North American health and safety regulations either, but so far none of us have any visible rashes a week later. Jacob and I had two Vietnamese men crawl over our backs (literally) while the kids had three Vietnamese women giggle and hug them and tell them how cute they were during their massage.

We headed to Beer Street (not the same as around the corner from Warburton) for dinner. The street is more noise and lights and people and chaos. We grabbed some dinner, wandered around, had a few more beers and the kids were gifted enormous helium balloons (that ended with tears, as expected) before we all had enough and called it a night.