Hanoi Days 5 and 6

Early Friday morning our group got on a bus to Hai Phong - an industrial port city northeast of Hanoi. We got to visit this amazing NGO started by a women who contracted HIV from her husband and who was basically shunned by her community. Her son who is 5ish also has HIV and is not allowed to go to school because the Headmaster is discriminatory and thinks he will basically infect or scare the other children. Now for those of you who don't know much about the HIV epidemic in Vietnam, there is a LOT of stigma associated with people with HIV. Most of the people who get HIV in Vietnam contract it through a "social evil" - there words not mine - like injection drug use (IDU) or commercial sex work (CSW). This women did not contract HIV that way but the stigma she encountered was horrendous. It was a great morning, but a rather sad one.

Then we headed to lunch at some local tiny Vietnamese restaurant. Oh, all the toliets in Vietnam are pretty much squat and pee ones. This one was out behind the restaurant by where they held all the sea food they later cooked you. Quite a site.

Friday night we went back to a restaurant we had been in Hanoi already called Hoa Sua - this is a restaurant that is also a cooking school for street kids to give them vocational skills and whatnot. The food is awesome and the teenagers who work there are great. I have this amazing goat cheese and apple salad - mmmmm makes me hungry just thinking about. Oh, and the chocolate moose isn't too bad either! Then we headed to the Dragonfly bar to have some drinks (less then two dollars for a very potent vodka soda!) but we headed home by midnight because we had a trip to Halong Bay schedule for the next morning.

Halong Bay, well I can't say enough about it. First, the driver who got us there and back - CRAZY! Now most drivers here you would call crazy but this guy went above and beyond. He was never in a lane and constantly flashing and honking people. Shannon and I were in front (the girls who get car sick!) and we were fairly amused/terrified the entire time. Oh, we also witnessed a motorbike crash (nothing serious though) and got to see people carry an interesting array of things on these motorbikes including, but not limited to, 4 dead hogs, two giant baskets of live chickens, a basket of dogs, and about 4 giant bushels of melons. No, none of those are jokes. Sadly, no pictures to prove this thus far, but I promise to work on it.

Halong Bay is a bunch of limestone islands in the Gulf of Tonkin - for those of you who aren't history nerds like myself the Gulf of Tonkin would be the same gulf we faked the attack on our ships in, blamed Vietnam for, and thereby justified starting the Vietnam War. Lovely history right? Well, it is beautiful! Plenty of pictures of that. We also go to go through a giant cave. Pictures of all of this to come. The boat was super and while it was rainy the whole time, that made it seem more tropically and such. Sadly, we didn't get to swim, but I suppose I shall just have to come back! Alright well it's Sunday morning here and Sarah, Nicole, Daniella, Twan, and I all have to catch planes to HCMC/Saigon in a few minutes so I must stop.