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 seroisly 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.

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...