Welcome to Vietnam!! A land where:

• Honking your horn replaces: using your indicator; changing your mind after accidentally using your indicator; saying you’ve stopped in the middle of the road to text; or haven’t stopped to text so watch out; or to just let the world you exist and have a way to let everyone else know about it;
• The strange people are the ones not in a spontaneous dance competition;
• You wish you had more vices to indulge apart from street drinking;
• Zebra crossings are used ironically to give tourists a false sense of security;
• Dogs are unbearably cute…probably because the know they have to be. It’s better to be cute than tasty;
• The alarm clock is redundant thanks to constant construction (or reconstruction) and destruction, honking horns (see above), street roosters and babies crying (I think their tears are used to give their Phos what their colonial rulers would have called their ‘I don’t know what’…);
• The healthy diet is offset by the addition of condensed milk to coffee…and almost everything else;
• There would be need to constantly fear electrocution as most of the exposed wires are overhead…except that overhead in Vietnam is about 5’4″;
• Cafe Melbourne coffee is at Melbourne prices, but here (unlike Perth) that doesn’t mean it’s cheap;
• Cafe Bong isn’t what you’d think it is, but neither was Cafe Tit, and that’s ok because you’re happy not everything is literal, otherwise handing over a bunch of Dong for a night on a Junk boat could have been a very different experience;
• There are way too many other puns that can be made but are best left alone, after Lea commented how she found the wait at the airport very…Hanoi-ing, but was later moved enough to comment “Hanoice is Hanoi…” and we then moved to a Hlong to Ha Long bay competition that made us both sick, thus kickstarting the great pun embargo;
• You are somehow instant friends with all other Caucasions even if they’re degenerates drinking beer in a gutter…next to you;
• The first Aussie you meet in the gutter is shaking more than you and the five 20c beers you both knock back does a lot more for your shakes than his as he might need something a tad stronger…like coffee with an egg and condensed milk;
• A healthy fear of chairs (when pushing towards the best part of 100kg) turns to acceptance as your arse drops 4 feet to plonk on tiny plastic chairs designed for…Vietnamese;
• Shoe shiners work two jobs as the spare sets of thongs they carry to lend to customers appear double up as mushroom farms;
• The police’s most important job is to take vendor’s chairs off the footpaths, put them in their trucks and then sell them back…repeat;
• A beer with free chips isn’t as it seems… the chips come in the glass (that was Lea again…I thought we said no more puns!);
• The fakes are so well done they’re almost indistinguishable apart from the name, but ‘Moet and Chamdon’ is too clever not to buy;
• You get the chance to choose hotel rooms by weighing up a room with a balcony or one with ability to flush toilet paper #thirdworldproblems;
• Pho is pronounced more like ‘fur’ and with beef it’s like ‘fur ball’…which is fine, but slightly uncomfortbale because you’re sure some menu items really do come with fur balls…
• English sarcasm fails to translate;
• Remembering how to say ‘thank you’ sounds like “come on” can get you into trouble as actually saying ‘come on’ might sound like shut up so it’s a fine line between being polite and offensive #theJamesStewartStory
• You’re not sure why they keep lighting fires in the street…until you think of every time you’ve lit a match in the toilet…
• Our tour guide to Ha Long bay could have been right at home giving relationship advice with my Father in Law at our wedding as he talked of his only adventure sport being arguing with his wife and how the bay is like a lady as it’s beauty changes with it’s moods…
• A five dollar upgrade got us a room on our boat 5 times as big as the others, including a toilet you could flush paper in after having had a poo with a view;
• After worrying about every little thing that probably won’t happen back in Australia, because something will clearly go awry here you somehow stop worrying (acceptance: just like the fat tourist breaking chair acceptance);
• If you made it to day 4 before your first uncontrollable bowel movements you’ve done well…I did well!

It was difficult arranging these random thoughts into a coherent story of our time in the North (I assume, I certainly didn’t try). But all ‘jokes’ aside, we loved our 3 nights in Hanoi, a mind blowing amalgam of 8 million locals and god knows how many tourists, and were so lucky to have a perfect night in Halong Bay. The people work so hard and are fiercely patriotic in a way you only see back home in conjunction with radical racism. But here they are so friendly to us despite the fact our faces must remind some of them of those that caused them to lose their place in the world in less than a century only a short time ago.