Filling in the gaps

Ok, couldn't be bothered blogging yesterday, but today I'll attempt to fill in some gaps so far. We have moved from 'Light-Stars' to 'Stars', the hotel is heeeeeaps better and the staff are really helpful. The only issue seemed to be the air cond. unit that wouldn't work no matter how much GBFSB harrased the remote. After calling the reception to have them fix it I tried pressing the power button... ;-)
Spent the day exploring the old quarter of Hanoi, got seriously ripped off by an old grumpy cyclo, went to the Traditional Water Puppets (veeeery cool!) and then walked through the night markets on the way home.
We met up with Lan Anh and husband in the evening and spent half an hour chatting before dinner. They are both really cool and it was a huge relief to finally meet them, was getting quite concerned that we'd leave Hanoi having not met them.
My Global Roaming phone didn't work... surprise surprise... so I bought a sim card for the local MobiPhone network. I had been trying to contact Lan Anh during the day at 'Light Stars' but I'm pretty sure they were intentionally phoning the wrong number because they wanted me to take one of their Hanoi tours rather than get in contact with my friend.
Buying the sim card was rather fun. Walked into a small store and spent 15 minutes trying to convey that I needed a sim card, and wanted to know how much they were. We finally deduced 130,000 dong (when she wrote it on a piece of paper). I rounded up the conversion rate and offered her the equivalent US dollars but that caused a fairly negative reaction. Turned out the Sim card had 130,000 credit on it, but was 180,000 to buy. Having gone around in circles (and thinking it was $80 USD at one stage) we finally worked out a deal and I handed over $15USD (again we rounded up. For the sake of a few dollars I was quite happy with the deal)
During the day GBFSB walked up to some stranger as we were walking around one of the central lakes and asked him "where are you from?". The guy turned out to be Dutch, but was wearing a Maori bone carving. Turns out he had been given it by a girl in Malaysia who had got it in New Zealand.
We discovered lots of statues and official buildings, didn't have any idea what any of them were, but Lan Anh later gave us a quick run down of the history of the city, and what some of the names mean. We also chatted about how all of the small stores are clustered into areas (there is a street for buying saucepans, one for crappy european toys, one for hello kitty etc...) turns out not only are the shops clustered into areas but the street names are a description of the things there. The restaurant we were in was on 'Fried Fish Cake' Street. There ya go...