Hanoi: uncle "Ho" and Hobbit-like plastic chairs.

First of all: Happy Women's Day!
We started today at 7.30 am (after about 4 hours sleep) with 1) the alarm clock and with 2) a huge party (noisy!) parade going on just in front of our window. Thanks women united!
So yes, quite early for vacation, but we planned to see a lot of places in Hanoi... After breakfast we wanted to go straight to Ho-Chi-Minh Mausoleum. As it was slightly raining we chose to go there by Cyclo - which means a poor (quite old whiskey-smelling) man had to drive us...
hah hah!
Once we got there and figured how to get in and what to leave out of the mausoleum (I mean weapons, drugs, cameras, hats and stuff like that) we got in a row with 'gefuehlten' 100 kids from a local school. All about the size of Gaby (a few might have been maybe smaler than her!), all aged between 6 ans 12. Each wearing their green and white school uniforms, being quite bored about the duty excursion. To make a long story short: it wasn't Ho-Chi-Minh who was the attraction of the day for them - it was just the two german chicks with their white skin and their long noses. I have defo no idea why - maybe just because we were laughing and making fun with them?!
So, we saw uncle 'Ho' himself, seemed like he had nice dreams. Of course we tried to take pictures. But that is another story - sorry guys. And we saw his former house on steels and his really fat koi-carps.
But besides having fun with the kids at mausoleum, we had to fix two things for the next days: booking the boat trip to Halong Bay and getting the train tickets for our ride to Hue on tuesday. Both fixed, we ran into Alex and Nicole (we met them at Hanoi Airport last night) by accident, just walking around Hoan Kiem Lake. We spent the afternoon together, visiting Indochinas biggest (former) prison and doing some more sightseeing.
Exhausted from almost 10 hours of running around and visiting places, we needed a 'rest' and chose a small street-cafe/soup kitchen (with even smaler plastic chairs!) to get us a beer and fried rice with waterspinache for about EUR 2,00.
So then, we were nourrished to explore the nightmarket and maybe Hanoi's nightlife? But as it turned out - Hanoi is NOT the city that never sleeps. Most of the bars close at 11 pm and there are hardly clubs... BUT: there are street cafes (call it spelunke or boatzn) where they sell beer for 3.000 Dong (which is about EUR 0,17!!!!!) and where you can meet travellers from all over the world, just sitting on Hobbit-like plastic chairs, drinking beer and chatting about life and travelling. Sounds like heaven on earth, doesn't it? For us, it does and so it happened, that we had a great night out with canadian single-traveller Erin, fine dining cook american Jason (both supposed to be on the boat trip with us tomorrow) and the two franzakken Sam(uel) and Vincent (wenn ich den am Feuer............................................................)

Nothing more to say for now. Tomorrow we start our 2-day boat trip and we're excited about the (supposed) beautiful scenery at Halong Bay and the night on the junk. Time for our goodnight beer and hopefully some hours of sleep. We'll be back on tuesday (or maybe wednesday)! Bussi baba