We have arrived in Hanoi last night at 11:30 pm, we decided to travel to Hanoi via Vietjet Airline. I was quite impressed with the Airline and even the quality of the service. the weather is a lot different to what it is in Saigon. the temperature is considerably colder but it still has 88% humidity so it is cold but still damp at the same time. We had booked one hotel room via the internet in Hanoi’s old quarter, we were really happy with the hotel room as in the morning it supplied a buffet style breakfast, but we knew that the room was above our budget so we had to find another one. the hotel owner told us of the other hotel that the company owned and told us we could have a room for 17 dollars but it was at another location, we hopped on the back of their motorbikes to check out the room…it was shit, it was a pokey single windowed room with just a bed six stories up, and the view wasn’t anything to brag about. there was though a type of restaurant on the top floor that supplied  a similar style breakfast. i decided that it wasn’t good enough so we walked back to the hotel collected our bags and hunted down the next room. we had made the decision to try and get a room for a budget price, and we knew that there was an abundance of accommodation in the Old Quarter. We found a hotel just around the corner that was cheaper than the one we saw and it had a lot more local character, wooden carved cupboards and wall hangings, balcony  and a wierd mixture of luxurious furnishings with very basic amenities  but it suited our purpose. The city of Hanoi in the Old Quarter seems to have this cosmopolitan feeling. the streets are full of any possible thing you would want to buy. there seems to be a habit in Vietnam of having whole streets dedicated to certain item. for example there was a group of streets just devoted to shoes, A few people had a laugh as each time i would walk into one of these shoe shops the owner would look at my huge feet and he would start shaking his head and start saying no. no no, my girlfriend even had to buy men’s shoes and she is a size seven only. do all these people have miniature feet, it would seem so. , there was one street just devoted to buttons and other sewing related stuff. there was a street just devoted to different scarves and hats.there was an alley devoted mainly just socks and jocks and there are tons of jewelry shops. we decided to eat some street food for lunch  the first thing we had was radish noodles all topped with hard to identify meats, lots of herbs and peanuts all drenched in dressing, i recon it had dried liver, pork skin and beef. personally i though it was very average my girlfriend liked it. the second thing was a clear dumpling with minced offal and herbs again, see the photo for the look of this. the third and final was some fresh spring rolls. since being in Vietnam i recon i have had about a thousand different spring rolls and nothing has tasted as bad as this, it was totally fucking shit, it had some kind of dried seafood in it and it was hard to distinguish what was in there. at a certain point i was concerned that i was eating dog. But upon closer inspection i thought it was dried squid. Even my girlfriend couldn’t handle this taste and she can eat practically anything. it truly must be an acquired taste. and the whole time i am sitting on a kids chair the size of my foot. that has been a real struggle to deal with sitting in these kids chairs and there are no exceptions to this set up. Vietnam is kids chair capital. we then went to lake Hoan kiem and the temple situated on an island in the middle of the lake called Ngoc San. This was a great place to visit, very picturesque. see photos for what it looks like. From the beginning of the day we noticed that it was quite misty and this mist had stayed around for the whole day, we don’t know if it ever recedes at this time of the year but it was quite special to be in for the day. We had read online that Hanoi has more aggressive touts but we found it to be quite the opposite, people would approach you, you would say no and look away and they would just walk away.