Katrina (doing the p p pigeon) in Hanoi

So last weekend I went up north in search of crisp uniforms and temperate climes.

I went up on Thursday night by myself - arriving at the very annoying time of midnight - so as to be available bright and early in the morning for meetings for work.  I got my first taste of crisp uniforms straight away on Friday morning.  In Hanoi, the security guards are an altogether more serious affair than in Saigon. Because I was early, I had ten minutes to observe the security guard at the gate of the hospital campus where my meetings were to be held.

On the hospital campus in Saigon the security guards are sort of dishevelled looking.  They don't wear hats.  Sometimes they wave a bit at people, but mostly they are just there to hold the gate open and tell you where to park. The Hanoi security guard is different.  He wears a hat, and polished leather belt.  He holds a loudhailer and you can't see his eyes because he's wearing enormous, opaque aviators.

Not the hospital guy - but these guys were out taking their loudhailer
for a walk on Saturday so I snapped a shot - for you!

The hospital guy was a classic bully. He buzzed his loudhailer at nearly everyone in his vicinity (including me) and barked orders down it at people who were standing not 3 metres away from him. But the thing that surprised me was that nobody seemed to care.  If anything, he was welcome. People needed him to tell them what to do.

So that was weird.

Temperate climes were also easy to find.

By the lake in the afternoon.  Seriously - it was almost cool!

Hanoi is at least as far away from Saigon as Invercargill is from Auckland, and the difference in weather is noticeable.  At this time of year, Hanoi is delightful.  It's warm enough that you can still go sleeveless, but cool enough that you can wear jeans and walk around and not feel like you're going to melt. Even in the middle of the day!  And as we all know - I am a complete wuss about being too hot, or too cold.

Martin flew up after work on Friday night, and so we spent the weekend there together.  Really the only dull part of the whole weekend was that I had a cold and so with all the snuffling and wheezing I kept running out of steam.  I'm glad I toughed it out though - because there was some really cool stuff to see.

Like the ethnology museum:

There was an extremely embarrased bunch of

teenage boys hamming it up around this exhibit. Of course. 

 

You probably can't tell, but I'm throwing my goat  buffalo here.
Total lady-rocker.

 Waka?

The Temple of Literature

and of course...


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wait for it!
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The tanks!

Ha!  Hope I didn't get you too excited, there!

In the eternal competition that is Hanoi vs Saigon, Hanoi wins because there's a cafe at the war museum.  Saigon would be way better if its war museums had cafes. Or if any of its museums had cafes.  It there was a cafe at Remnants, then next time I got visitors I could just send them off with a packet of tissues each and calmly sip my coffee-flavoured sweetened condensed milk until they returned. All harrowed. I wouldn't even have to get sore feet.

And I didn't get sore feet at this one either, because I just sat and sipped my drink and emailed pictures of my husband to my mother-in-law from my ipod.

This little trip was different from our usual weekend trips as well, because this time we had friends to meet.  I imposed on both Helen from Blue Dragon to entertain me on Friday night, and Tabitha (and Nathan - you only get parentheses Nathan, because you don't actually write the blog!) from The City That Never Sleeps In on Saturday.  Helen deserves a medal for looking after me on Friday night - when my exhaustion had loosened my tongue so much she couldn't get a word through my incessant slurring.

And Tabitha?  Well - she fed us pigeons!

My grandfather was a pigeon man you know.  It felt terribly wrong.  It felt like it should have had a real stiff drink of secret pigeon loft whisky to wash it down.  (I settled for rice wine and licking my fingers.)


Here's one for the Sesame Street fans.  My grandmother used to sing this to me!