Weller's crazy life!: recap of vietnam

i have been back from vietnam for about 3 weeks now......so, i am sorry for lagging on blogging about. i hope everyone had a chance to look at all my pics. i took about 800 pics, but after editing and narrowing things down i was nice and only posted about 400 pics on facebook. 400, yes i know that is still alot....but narrowing them down was so hard!

vacation time! tara and ben met me inside my metro station, since my line takes us to the hongquio airport (local airport) it only took about 35 min to get there..not bad at all. we had prepared ourselves to be in crazy lines at the airport, but it wasnt bad at all....we were shocked. our plane was delayed about 2 hrs, but we weren't stressed b/c we had a 6 hr layover in guangzhou...yes i said 6 hrs. we were very limited on what flights we could b/c all of china was traveling this week. we brought uno cards with us to pass the time in the airports......people were very into watching our games, hahahaha.

pics at the airports:

ben likes to sleep alot! ( we are still in shanghai)

we love uno

iphone fun

we paid for our visa's when we landed in hanoi and they gave us usd as change. last time i will be holding usd for a long time!

hanoi: we ended up getting to our hotel about midnight. we settled in, watched some tv and got to bed. we woke up, showered, had a delicious bfast made in our hotel for free and then headed out into hanoi. walking around, we realized that something was going on...ya something big. hanoi was celebrating their 1000 year anniversary as the capital of vietnam. we happened to get there on day 2 of the festival..unreal! the whole city was decorated!!!! we wandered around hanoi all day...it was pretty hot. i got an amazing tank top tan line and great lines from my rainbow sandals. not nearly as hot as shanghai....but still hot! hanoi is a great city. we stayed in the old quarter. each street has a theme to it (metal, gold, sewing, food, etc)

around the corner from our hotel, food stand

zippers

buttons

the gate of a pagoda

gorgeous old woman

ho chi minh's mausoleum, unfortunately his body was in russia for a few months to get worked on. i really wanted to see his body!

they have plumeria's in vietnam!

president's palace

pagoda

military museum

military museum(i feel like this could have been taken in the 1970's)

military museum

night market

cute kid and her dad

tara and ben at dinner

ben and i

halong bay: we got picked up at our hotel in a taxi and then we got transferred to a bus to take us on a 3 hr journey to halong bay. driving thru the countryside was gorgeous. however, i did get a lil sad when thinking about how much we destroyed of this country during the war. the ppl we met in hanoi were so nice and so vibrant!