"Entering Vietnam"

At the border we needed to get out bags on, and walk inside the train station. After scanning my bag, they wanted to have a look inside it. It turned out they were after my shampoo. It is kept in a metal container, and the texture of it is solid, like a piece of soap. I came across this soap by random, when walking through the streets of Trondheim when preparing for the trip. It is hand made and sold in a store called "Lush". The store is part of a chain, spread out over at least most of Europe. They try to be environmental friendly by not using a lot of wrapping when packaging their products, using ground transportation, and so on. The shampoo I bought lasts as long as 3 bottles of shampoo (350 ml), so that is three shampoo bottles less to end up in the trashcan.

It did not take long before the border guards let me go, and I could proceed to the passport check. They collected our passports, had them stamped, and as we got them back, one by one, we were all happy to see that we had made it into Vietnam. We got back on the train and fell asleep as the train rolled down towards Hanoi.

When the Americans, the Chinese girls and I got out of the train, we soon realized that this was not the Hanoi Central Train Station. We were apparently north of any of our maps, and realized after walking in the directions of some road signs pointing to Hanoi, that we were at least an hour's walk away from the city. Most of the streets were dead and only a few people were up and about in the early morning hours we were arriving Vietnam's capital. We walked for a long while, until we could find a bridge that we understood was crossing the Red River, and would get us to the city center. We could not walk across the bridge, so we had to dig in our pockets fore some money to pay for a taxi. We only had a few USD, but it turned out to be enough to get us to my hostel, The Drift Backpacker's Hostel. From there my American friends were heading to their hostel.

I spent the day with Thea and Stine, two Norwegian girls, originally from Stavanger, but they have spent almost three years in Australia and still study there. We walked around in the city, had some good food, and got to know each other. I also met a lot of other cool people in the hostel. Weather they were from The US, Germany, England or Australia they were all nice people. There was also a very eccentric French lady, but she was so intense that everyone tried to avoid her. She was always talking really loud, in her terrible French accent. I was talking to one of the girls in the staff here, and she said that this woman had booked for more than a month, and that they did not know if they could stand her that long. We walked around in the old quarter, for a while, and Thea picked up a flyer for a massage place. We all felt like one, and decided to check it out. It was right in the middle of the main tourist area, so we could probably have found some cheaper, but 8 USD is really not that bad for a 60 minutes, full body massage, including a lot of warm towels, oils and some really relaxing music.

After all this time on the trains and buses I really felt like I deserved a massage, and I know for sure that I needed it. I really felt so much more relaxed after, that I felt like a new person. The rest of the day went by buying a trip to Ha Long Bay, and visiting museums. The history museum was really bad, and most others were as they say here in Vietnam: "Same, same, but different."