Hanoi

We arrived in Hanoi this morning at 8am. We took a night bus from Hue. Quite an experience... The bus was fine, comfortable. Though it took us 13 hours to go only about 400 miles. The bus stopped about 10 times for different reasons, change drivers, pick up more people (the bus was overbooked. 5 people had to sit in the isle) and we stopped to eat in the middle of nowhere twice (11:30pm and 1am). We didn't have anything, it wasn't looking too... clean. We were 2 of only 4 westerners on the bus and when we got off wow did the people stare at us. Mostly me.
The bus driver kept turning on and off the lights and playing the most awful music! One man behind us was humming along and another in front of us was tapping his foot very hard. Cell phones kept going off very loud. They don't believe in vibrate I guess and they don't turn it off they just keep letting it play the ring tune until it's over. We were laughing it was so surreal.

"Looking different" is an experience in asia that I have not yet written about. We have had many different experiences. A few days ago in a park in Hue we were walking around and there was a little girl around 8 or 9 years old. She kept looking at me so I said Hello, in Vietnamese (sin chao). She didn't say anything just kind of followed me when I wasn't looking and I kept looking back. Then when I wasn't looking she threw a stick at me. It hit my leg and I wasn't sure what it was then I looked up and saw her starting to run away. She didn't see that Jose was with me (he was sitting on a bench). When he saw her throw the stick he ran towards her as she was running and gave her a very angry look like, you are not going anywhere. She stopped quickly not expecting to see him and looked very frightened. Then she ran off. Two Vietnamese men walking by saw it and appologized for her.
Two other instances were one outside of a temple in Na Trang a woman ran over to me laughing, putting her arm around me and before I knew it there were 30 Vietnamese standing around laughing and a man in front of us with a camera...
The other was at the ruins in Ayutthaya, Thailand. Jose and I were completely alone and out of nowhere there were 40 some Thai people in yellow shirts surrounding us, putting there arms around us taking pictures. We think they were doing some kind of tourist training school.

Now we are in Hanoi planning a trip to Halong Bay for a few days. We are leaving Vietnam on the 23rd for Laos so we are trying to plan our day carefully.