Seventh Day - Hanoi 11/8/10 4:32 PM

Sumner

Today was our last day in Hanoi. We started the day as normal with breakfast. Then our driver picked us up to go to class. We did class and learned more about present perfect tense (I don’t even know what that is in English so it was very difficult to do in Vietnamese.) Mr. Tan works on very complex stuff that may or may not be practical, such as present perfect tense, instead of doing things like where is the bathroom or I need a hotel but he is a very good teacher. After that we summarized what we did during the class this week.

After class we had lunch with the staff at the place where Tan was employed (they are a travel company as well as a Vietnamese class place.) We had rice with spring rolls, beef, some vegetables, and pig intestines. I accidentally ate a piece of the pig intestines. It was, shall we say, not of my liking. I ate my life away with the egg rolls because after everyone had left Tan, the boss of the business and Hannah, Mom, and I stayed behind and chatted. I was able to eat all the rest of the egg rolls and there were still a lot more left. I ate almost an entire plate of them! Once we were stuffed to the brim we went to a silk village. The silk village wasn’t very village like because the city had spread out over it. And it had a couple thousand people! We went first to a factory that weaves silk. I say factory but it wasn’t really a factory it was more like a barn type thing converted to a factory. In the factory there were machines that wove the cloth. They were extremely loud but very interesting. It all was powered by a very small engine that then turned all sorts of other things that: shot the spool of silk across the strings to make the silk, pushed the silk into place, rolled up the finished bolt of silk, made the pattern and all sorts of other things. After we saw the factory we walked around the village for a while. Then we walked into another “factory.” It was basically the same but it had four going at once and each one is extremely loud. When we got out our eardrums were bursting! Imagine being in there all day long!

We then drove back to our hotel to pack for our bags for going to Sapa on the overnight train. Then we went to the hotel that we booked our trip to Sapa with and waited for a man that had our tickets. We met a couple that were going to Sapa with us and a single woman that was going with us also. Then the man arrived and took our money, and gave us our tickets. Then he told us that we would be on the 9:50 train even though mom had emailed him and talked to him on the phone about being on the 8:30 train. Anyway we went to the train station and then he took the other people that were on the 8:30 train and got them to their cabins and then came back and brought us to our train. We were thinking that we wouldn’t be able to board the train until closer to time (it was about an hour until our train left) but we were able to board. Mr. Viet (he’s the one who is helping us at the train station) showed us to our room and we started to settle in for the night. The train still hadn’t left so I decided to try to get some sleep and by the time that the train took off I was fast asleep! Read the next post to find out the rest of the story.

~Hannah~

Boo hoo, today was our last day in Hanoi. (Well really we have ONE more day.) Today was also our last day for the language class. AND we got to pick where we wanted to go with our teacher. Sumner and I got the choice of going to the Mausoleum (The place where Ho Chi Minh is.) and visiting the place John McCain’s plane was wrecked. Or we got to go to a Silk village. Which do you think we chose? Of course we went to the silk village. (Because I do not want to see a preserved body.) Though going to a silk village makes you really deaf. The machines are cool the way they work, but yet they are quite deafening. But lets get going with the information, here it goes!