Day 29 - Wednesday, Nov. 13 - Shanghai to Hanoi (Part 2)

All this runs through my mind during the three-hour flight from Shanghai to Hanoi.  The trip is easy; the welcome at customs icy.... and particularly slow.  At least two flights have arrived at the same time - through the pea soup and rain:  ours and one from Australia.  The lines stretch into the middle of next week.  And with the customs agents taking three minutes for each, that may be how long we’ll be here!
  When it’s finally my turn, the customs officer looks at me, then at my passport photo, then at my visa.  Then she becomes obsessed with the passport.  For at least 30 seconds she wiggles it back and forth, to get it to catch the light. Then she feels several different pages between her fingers as if wondering if I made this in my bathtub.  Finally, without asking a single question (does she speak English?  Does she speak?), she stamps both my visa and my passport and hands it back to me, without a smile.  Whew!
Obviously my suitcase had a faster, easier time.  It’s already on the carousel when I get to baggage claim.  I escape out the door and search for the promised greeter from the hotel.  Lots of people, lots of signs.  After walking back and forth between the two exits, I see “Mr. Sandy Schopbach” and am whisked off by a driver who speaks almost no English.  Stanley, where are you?!  I’m on my own.

The rain stops after the first half-hour.  (The airport is a long way outside of town!)  We cross a suspension bridge over the Red River, projectors on its columns shifting colors in a loop.  The traffic here is even crazier than in China; rather than picking a lane, drivers seem to aim down the lane lines as the pilot did when he landed our airplane.  And there are motorbikes galore, many with no head or tail lights.

Apricot Hotel, guarded by Uncle Ho

  The architecture in town - what I can see of it now that night has fallen - has something decidedly French to it.  After about 70 years of French colonialism, that’s normal.  It makes this foreign land a bit more familiar than China was.  Plus I can read the signs, even if I don’t understand what they say.  Gone are the ideograms of Japan and China; the alphabet here was also inherited from the French, although the accents are different.  At least if someone gives me a street or a shop name, I’ll recognize it.

At the tasteful Apricot Hotel, the doorman takes my bag, ushers me in, hands my papers to the concierge, who calls over Rosie (aka Kha Han), who makes me my “welcome drink”.  Somewhere in there, Rosie thinks I’m with the gentleman seated across from me, but in fact he’s waiting for his brothers to arrive from Australia.  That gives us something to talk about while Rosie makes my reservations for Ha Long Bay tomorrow.  I’ll probably be seeing him again.
  For the moment, I need to get some sleep.  Aside from walking the Bund, I’ve done nothing.  But all in all, I’ve been in transit ten hours.  It’s time for bed, just after I eat the banana from the fruit basket in my room (better than the Chinese bananas) plus half of my last “Snicker” candy bar, with a heartfelt thank you to Stanley, my candy purveyor for the past two weeks.