Beginning of November we used few days to go for a trip and after considering tickets prices, we decided on Hanoi, Vietnam. As I had a layover there before, I was imagining us walking on cloud of coffee scent and shop for cheap souvenirs while enjoying autumn weather… It turns out staying in Hanoi one day and four days is a totally different story.
Of course, I can still honestly say that I do like Hanoi and I wouldn’t mind going there again. But living in bustling city like Hong Kong and being on a little crossroads now made both P. and me, have a bit of conflicting feelings about the place.
And it also made us realise how lazy and traditional we are…
How we totally gave up walking.
I love walking and when sightseeing, walking is even better, but Hanoi with higher
number of scooters than people (or so it seems) is quite non walkable. Scooters and motorcycles are parked on the pavements and there is not much space for pedestrians at all. In addition, Vietnam uses an application called Grab – apparently coming from Singapore. It’s like Uber but for both cars and motorcycles, way cheaper and more reliable than regular taxis. This app became P.’s best friend and he just wanted to order cars to go everywhere and me being my lazy self, I just followed him on that.
In the end, during our 4 days visit, we ordered Grab over 10 times and we barely walked at all.
How we discovered our favourite food
Up till now, we both thought that all Asian countries have amazing food and since we eat all types of food in our everyday life: Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai; we also thought that Vietnamese food will be similar. Not only it turned out we had no idea what Vietnamese food is, but we also realised why Vietnamese food is so different in Hong Kong. Vietnamese food seemed like a lot of greens, rice noodles and fish sauce. Last day of our stay we even went to Korean bbq to have something different.
How we decided to move houses in Hong Kong.
In my previous post, I have mentioned I’m being torn between staying in our cozy, little apartment and moving to a spacious one that’s rather out of the city. After we spent those few days in Hanoi, where the honking sound and the scooters’ engines sound fill the city, together with loud conversation of both locals and tipsy tourists, I have reconsidered living in a quiet place. Add to that the news about Mainlanders swarming in waves to Hong Kong after opening both the bridge and fast train, I think looking for apartment far from all that wouldn’t be a bad idea after all.
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We came back to Hong Kong feeling more tired than we thought and thinking about it now, we might be more like local people than ever. After all the main style of travelling of Hong Kong people is based on three rules: Eat well, Sleep well, Shop a lot. And this is exactly what we are going to do next time we travel.
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