Hot Hanoi!

This is how cold it is in my room at night; when I come out in the mornings, my camera is SO fogged up that photos come out looking like this one in a perfectly blue sky day!

We took the bus after breakfast to Da Nang airport where nobody was in the parking lot and nobody was going through security; it was grand to zip through the cumbersome process so quickly.  These are some bus window photos as we drove through the country to get to the airport.

SOME fool in our group insisted we stop at a marble factory to look at the "yard art," and this statue greeted us.  Some Buddha!

It was about 34 degree centigrade, and the airplane had newspapers in the cockpit to prevent it from getting scorchingly hot in there!  There ought to be some device that would work better than this.

After we checked into the Maison d'Hanoi (puleeeeeeese), I went walking around the little Hoan Kiem Lake and tried to find the opera house, which I remembered vividly from my last visit; I never did find it due to a very flawed map, but I DID see these three enchanting and enchanted children watching their grandfather throwing some red lettered sheets of paper on a flame; I wondered if someone had died and just what the ritual was all about that held so intensely the attention of these three children.

This is in the middle of the lake and always looks magical especially at the beginning and end of the days.

These are the beds in my room (roommate has gone off to Hue), and I have to ask WHY anybody insists on sleeping in such cold quarters that we require QUILTS in the delicious heat of summer!  It makes me crazy!

I wandered through the old city and found the place I stayed in when I first came to Hanoi about 5 years ago; I loved the place then, and it certainly looks enticing now.  At LEAST there were no quilts on the beds, at least as far as I can recall.

I still love the nooks and crannies of a city, and you can always count on me for obscure, anonymous photos of same.  Tomorrow we go to Halong Bay where my not bringing a bathing suit may pose a problem; however, I just wore a running bra and my rolled up running shorts when I went in the pool yesterday.  I am beginning to think it may be time to write about the funding of academic trips...