At last, I've gone through my photos from our first stay in Hanoi (still to come: Angkor (the big one), Hoi An, and our last few days back in Hanoi). The pictures include: temples, people, street scenes, and even a study of the fascinating walls of Hanoi.

We arrived in Vietnam at night. The 12-hour flight to Seoul, 2-hour layover, 5-hour flight to Hanoi, and customs/immigration had us in kind of a fugue state of exhaustion. Fortunately, our hotel had arranged to have someone meet us (as did most of our hotels on this trip), and if it's not quite as great as an actual familiar face, it's nice to come out the door and see your very own personal name on a placard.

It was already dark as we left the airport. I had no real idea what Vietnam might look like, so I was eagerly looking around for my first clues. We were on a long 4-lane highway with walls on either side. Past the walls.. darkness. Occasionally a palm tree or other foliage would pop up. Then occasional small dilapidated-looking buildings. They looked like they'd been sitting around dilapidating since at least the war, no lie. We started to see scooters on the road -- our first few included one with several people crammed on, and another loaded with huge bags of onions, a good indication of what we'd see the rest of the trip. Other taxis on the road kind of genially changed lanes and honked and flashed at each other; it reminded me of that simpsons scene where Jimbo et al steal the bumper cars and happily zip off into the distance.

As we got (presumably) closer to the city, more houses began to loom out of the darkness. We reached a quiet residential neighborhood, and it looked like nothing back home. The houses were all french colonial (or neo faux french colonial concrete), mostly 3-4 stories tall and skinny, like one room wide. Every now and then you'd see a much taller one, 5-6 stories, popping up. They pretty much all looked slightly worn down; I started to wonder if everything you build in Vietnam looks old and colonial after just a season or two of jungle climate. We wondered whether we were out in the suburbs or if this was the city itself; like I said, we had no idea what to expect really.

The crazy tall and skinny houses, the interspersed palm and other trees, the general decay -- it all made me ridiculously happy. Part of the joy of traveling is seeing something different, and this was seriously different -- mysterious and beautiful. I turned to E (with, she later said, my face shining with happiness) and said "this trip was a really good idea".

Obviously, if you've just been to Vietnam, pho is going to be much on your mind. I'm actually relatively new to vietnamese food -- I think I had my first pho maybe 6-8 years ago, and only in the last year or two have I grown to like it so much that I wanted to visit the country.

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Slate's Moneybox just finished a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia too, and has some comments on Vietnam's economy. Yes, I know I'm lagging in trip posts and photos (including a half-written one about... Vietnam's economy). Sometime soon.

Hoi An is in the central area of Vietnam, near Da Nang and Hue. It's best to not go during the flooding season, I'm just sayin. The things to do if you are going to Hoi An are: (1) stay at one of the euro beach resorts on the beach and walk on the beach and sit by the pool; (2) have the famed tailors of Hoi An make you custom-fit clothing at low low prices; (3) enjoy Hoi An's french-colonial-slash-tropical charm.
Some activites I would further recommend: shop for art, ride a scooter, take a cooking class. I thought Hoi An was the perfect contrast to busy Hanoi and hot-and-tourism-intense Angkor, so if you're in the neighborhood, you should go there.
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Here is a picture of our hotel. Okay, really, we are staying here and drove through that flooding last night trying to get here.

here's a brief email I just sent my parents with some highlights of the trip so far...

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