We've moved on from the Old Quarter into a lovely place in the French Quarter, the Midori Boutique Hotel. I look forward to the prospect of staying here again before we fly for home. We've been given an inside room, with a 'window' opening onto a tiny shaft of an atrium but the result is blissful quiet, away from all the street noise. And the staff have been friendly and helpful. Also, we have a rain shower. And who doesn't love a rain shower?
Jet lag for us looks like bedtime around nine, sleep, then awake again around two, followed by a second bedtime around four in the morning before catching another few hours of sleep prior to breakfast. We catch up on email and the news in this middle of the night wakefulness while I take pains not to cough and splutter in Adam's directions. He figures I've got another three days of serious contagion left in me and this flu has transformed itself now into hacking and sniffling which is a welcome, if still inconvenient development. The exertions of the day tired me out, but the nausea is subsiding and for that I am terribly thankful.
We wandered across town today to Huu Tiep Lake, site of remnants of a B-52 shot down over Hanoi in 1972 and now decaying in a small fish pond. (And as seen in Top Gear's Vietnam Special). The pond itself is is within a dense residential block bisected by laneways that the builders of the medieval era would have found too narrow. These are not the constrained streets of old French hilltop fortifications, but rather narrow crevasses giving the only access into a large city block. Pedestrians share these pavements with motorbikes, mercifully fewer in number, so one can't let one's guard down even here without danger of being clipped by a handlebar.
Nearby, we paid our ten cent entry fee to check out the caged birds and the bathrooms of the botanical gardens. The dusty looking peacock had the run of the cage while his bedraggled peahen was shut inside a tiny box, to peck away undisturbed at her tray of corn.
We were mildly dismayed to discover that Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum wasn't opening on Friday afternoons, but the magnificent displays of hibiscus made up for some of the disappointment. Even on a quiet Friday, the mausoleum was overrun with tour buses, Adam's idea of a perfectly terrible afternoon.
We did accomplish one critical mission today, locating a roll of electrical tape. We took an auspicious turning and found the street lined with hardware shops, carrying some of the largest roller bearings either of us had ever seen. Traditionally, it seems shops of a certain kind have been grouped along streets. So you've only to find the hardware street, or silk merchant street, or funerary goods street, if you're looking for a certain item. The hardware street is the most consistent one we've yet found holding to this old tradition of clustering.
Dinner tonight was a bust. Adam made a selection and marched us to a spot which hadn't yet, and maybe wasn't going to, open for the evening. And as we both turned up our noses (wrongly it may have transpired) at the Spaghetti Box Italian place, we settled on Chinese Buddhist cuisine instead. The deep fried tofu was acceptable, and Adam ploughed through a plate of steamed root veggies, but neither of us enjoyed the stewed aubergine. Maybe we should have tried the vegetarian meat... But it was the bakery that saved the night serving up fresh baguette and pain aux raisins.