Heyho!

Today is already my last day in Vietnam, although it is by no means the end of this adventure. Tomorrow at 5:30 am I will take a taxi to the airport and fly via Guangzhou to Sanya, where I will try to play some bridge :)

When I wrote the last entry we were still in Halong Bay. Yesterday morning we were taken back to Hanoi by our private bus. Here we stay in a nice hotel in the old quater of the town. Not far away there is a lake and around it a very nice little park. It is really good to have a green and more relaxed place in such a loud and busy town.

After we checked in to our rooms we went for lunch to a small coffee shop. I had tortillas filled with fried vegetables, not very local but it's really hard to eat fried rice or noodles all the time. It's really not easy in Vietnam if you don't want to eat meat. Sometimes they don't have anything and I have to ask if they can please just leave out the seafood or whatever and even if they have something on the menue, your choices are very limited. Fortunatly they always offer fried eggs at breakfast (or scrambled or omelett) (and they prepare it freshly), so that I'm now not only used to get up really early but also to have a proper breakfast. Getting up early is a really good thing as I have more hours with the sun and more time to have a looong breakfast with a lot of vietnamese coffee! And having a large breakfast is supposed to be healty anyway ;-) I only hope that the sessions in Sanya won't be too late in the evening, because I use to get very sleepy at about 10 pm now ;-)

Well, after lunch we had a drink in a café (Frappucino caramello for me - not bad, but the one in Potsdam is much better. Raaaaffael, will we have one when I am back?) and then the other girls went to a Water Puppet Show. I had the impression that this was going to be rather random, so I didn't join but went to the park instead to write some postcards. Which proved to be one of the best ideas I had in this holidays, not because I wrote many postcards (actually I managed about two sentences) but because I got to know some really nice vietnamese girls in my age. At first there were three girls who just came to me and asked me some questions (at the beginning I was precautious because here, they normally only come to you to sell you something) and it turned out that they were students who wanted to improve their english. As far as I understood they were send out by their teacher to talk to foreigners in the park to get some practical experience. And I was really happy that I had a lot of time to practise with them ;-) It really was SO interesting! First I talked to the three girls and when they had left there were immediatly two more who wanted to do the same thing. Their english skills were quite wide-ranged, often we had to ask each other to repeat what we had said (their pronounciation wasn't that good, but no wonder if they have no practical experience!) but all in all it was all right and we did understand a lot of each other. So we talked about our lives, families and studies, about food in Vietnam und Germany, about the hopes and plans for our future, about romantic novels, Harry Potter and ice cream. They loved me because I had so much time for them (and because I looked so beautiful - they told me :) ) and for me, it was one of the best experiences in Vietnam. Finally I can imagine how it is like to live in here and do the same thing that I do (studying and planning my life as a grown-up). And although many things are the same (thinking about jobs, dreaming of the perfect love-story, having to work for exams and having no proper plan what to do after graduation) there are differences I only fully realised when I talked to these girls. None of them had ever left Vietnam. For students here it would be highly unusual to travel to other countries, they simply don't have the money and for them this is completly normal. They asked me where I had already been and I was nearly ashamed to tell them that I have travelled not only to more than a dozen european countries (to some many times) but that I have also been to New Zealand, the US and now to Asia - without having a proper job! Truly, without bridge I would't have been to so many places, but still it is possible to travel a lot and especially in Europe it is really cheap. All of these girls dreamed about seeing the world, maybe working in another country, but most likely not all of them will ever leave Vietnam. I cannot imagine how this must be like, I would feel so trapped, but for them it is normal. My first idea was to earn a lot of money myself and give scholarships to students like them. Well, we will see.

In the evening we had dinner at a nice little restaurant (spring rolls for me) and afterwards we went to a bar, because it was the birthday of one girl from our group. I had two cocktails (very funny: there was happy hour and that meant 2 for 1. So I ordered a cocktail and just got two of them at the same time - like the champagne tasting in Burghausen) but didn't want to drink any more alcohol afterwards (I am not much into alcohol at the moment and especially not here in the heat). The bar was nice, they even had a birthday cake for her. Then the party began (meaning loud music - disco -, much alcohol, dancing etc.) - and I was just tired. I did my best for more than two hours and left then.

Having been in bed before midnight, I was awake and fit early and had a relaxed breakfast. When the others came I was informed about last night's rumours and then we were picked up for a city tour through Hanoi. For about 6 hours a guide took us to different cultural places (army museum, Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, a former univerity, prison museum) and told us lots of historical things. As it was hot and his english not perfect it was hard to concentrate, but I did my best and actually learned a lot. I didn't find the army museum that interesting, so I asked him instead about the political and economical system of Vietnam and got to know a lot. We were supposed to have lunch at a local restaurant, but I didn't eat anything (it looked not good a tall) and had instead some stroop waffles later in the hotel. After the trip we were all quite exhausted, that's why I am in my room writing this blog right now. Soon we wil have our final group dinner and then that's it!

See you soon with some news from China!