Due to the Tet holiday, which is the celebration of the lunar new year, many things have been closed in Hanoi. We had planed on leaving Hanoi yesterday and taking a bus/boat/bus to Cat Ba island via Haiphong. It seems as though the busses and boats weren't running as anticipated, so we ended up with an extra day in Hanoi. Much of it was spent wandering the city and relaxing on the street corners with other travelers and locals.
Most eating venues were closed for Tet and finding lunch proved to be a difficult feat. We ended up at a dirty street side restaurant for some pho. It was on the disappointing side, but the experience and atmospehere was worth the sacrifice in food quality. Satiated, we continued to explore the old quarter.
For dinner, we ended up at a street restauarant that was crawling with locals. That's a great sign indeed. We pulled up our foot tall stools and sat down amongst the locals and ordered what they were having. It looked good from the street. Something fried, dipped in a sauce with cucumber garnishings. It arrived and we dug in. The more we ate the more we liked it, but we had no clue what we were eating. It tasted like chicken, but was spongy. I'm pretty sure chicken isn't supposed to be spongy. When we asked the proprieter what we were eating, she only spoke to us in Vietnamese which didn't help. Finally, we resorted to animal noises and she described what we were eating by making this "eee, eee, eee" sound. Hmmmm, we thought. What animal makes that sound? Rat? some other rodent? We were now even more confused. As the rest of the meal was consumed we contemplated what we were actually eating. Dinner was rounded out with some street food for desert hot from the oven and some great green tea ice cream from "Fanny."
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