hanoi, posted while i'm actually here!

we're in hanoi! and i can actually update the blog on time because vietnam lets me us blogger! so hopefully there won't be too much posting of 10 entries on one day anymore.
we got to hanoi by bus, and were dropped off not at a bus stop, but at some random location which we would never have found on a map. we got some cash and found a taxi, which amazingly didn't cheat us on our way to a hotel! and he even dropped us off where we asked, not some hotel he gets a commission from. we went to the old city hotel, which is secretly also called the queen star hotel. we read reviews online of lots of hanoi hotels, and all of them are either expensive or have really mixed reviews. but this one seemed ok. we got there and they showed us a room. it seemed ok, then the guy told us it was $20 per night. and online we could book it for $16, so i asked if we should just book online and suddenly the price became $16. we got our room and it was right next to the breakfast nook and lobby so it was kind of noisy. and the air didn't work very well and the bathroom drains smelled sometimes. not awesome. we decided to ask for a new room the next day.
we got dinner from a noodle place. it was just soup noodles, not too exciting. but then on our way back we found a cute little lady selling baguettes. so we each got a baguette sandwich for way cheaper than our noodles. mine had soft cheese, egg, and cucumbers. soooo good. then today our hotel didn't have any other rooms, but they showed us another hotel called the phoenix 2 and gave it to us for the same rate ($16). i'm not sure how that all happened but i'm sure commission was paid. and we also had our walk over supervised. i guess to make sure we didn't change our minds.
today we tried tourism. i got to pick our day's activities: we saw a temple with a giant embalmed tortoise, then went to the hua lo prison museum where US POWs were held during the vietnam war, and to the temple of literature. the tortoise was huge and neat but the temple was just any other temple. the prison museum was interesting mostly because it was not exactly objective. there were two whole rooms dedicated to how well US pilot POWs were treated in the prison camps. seriously. like there were tons of pictures of smiling pilots playing cards and guitar and stuff. and it talked all about how the vietnamese treated the pows humanely and through this convinced them that the war was wrong. two whole rooms of this. and there were all these pictures of john mccain and one saying how he was treated for injuries there. but i'm pretty sure that he's still jacked up from torture in this prison. and he tried to kill himself there. it also talked a lot about how terrible the french were while they were in viet nam. i'm sure some of what the museum said was true, but it was definitely a somewhat biased museum.
the literature thing was ok. not all that exciting.
we're going to see ho chi minh's mausoleum tomorrow. and plan some tourism.
viet nam is pretty intimidating. it feels like we have to be super on guard all the time. and that everyone is out to cheat us. everything is so sketchy. like both hotels we've stayed in operate under two names. and if any business here is successful, several other businesses open up and steal the name. there are like 10 fakes of every successful business. and it's hard to tell which is real and which isn't. and the ticket seller at the turtle temple shorted us 50000 dong in change. she gave us lots of small change so we counted it and realized it was short and went back to her, she didn't say anything, just took the money and gave us the correct change in bigger bills. she totally knew she shorted us. on guard all the time. oh my. i think viet nam might be a bit hard to do.