Hanoi

Flying from Ho Chi Minh City into Hanoi has felt like flying from Berlin to Vienna. Ho Chi Minh was bustling, never sleeping, never stopping. Construction everywhere you turn. Commercialism in bloom. Everybody going somewhere. A town on the move, with an eye to the west.

Things here move a little more slowly. It is smaller, more relaxed, even a little less “weathered”. We are staying in a hotel right in the middle of the French quarter, a very quaint part of town where French colonial days are reflected in the architecture and the pastry. People seem content here, taking time to sit by the lake, closing their shops to spend time with family or friends, preserving and upholding time honored traditions and Vietnamese ways. A town quietly content with its Eye to the East.

I hope I don’t get to know this city too well. Not because it doesn’t seem wonderful, it does. I just think its time for me to move on, to go home. While part of me wants desperately to explore Ha Long Bay and walk the roads of the central provinces, my eyes are definitely to the west, and my heart is there too-in the Mountain west to be exact. Where my Grahams wait, in their busy life that seems to be never sleeping, never stopping, with a feeling that things are under construction-or should I say destruction- all the time. My blog from Hanoi must be discontinued until another trip, and this trip must be over. Time to go home; I just wish it was today instead of Friday.