March 9 Hanoi

This morning we decided to try the cyclocab to get around Hanoi. These contraptions have 2 front wheels and can hold 2 people. The driver gets behind and pedals. We tried two today and there isn’t any slower way to get around. The old women walked faster than we went. We had a one-hour tour and we might have covered 2 kilometres before time was up. We did see some interesting streets however and pedaled along two of Hanoi’s lakes .
We have just returned from supper. We worked up our courage and decided to eat on the streets tonight. We started with a beer at the first corner beer parlour. We sat on the street and drank draught beer and ate peanuts. It’s a bit disconcerting when your beer comes out of a plastic hose, but it’s still good beer. Hanoi is covered with these hole-in-the-wall street beer parlours. The beer is brewed in Hanoi according to a Czech recipe and it does not suffer in translation. Then across the street was the Berliner Doner Kebab. I still don’t know what type of meat we ate. It looked like wurst – but I liked it. Joan ate hers too. I liked it so much I followed it with an Istanbul Doner Kebab from a stall down the street (I think the meat was beef). The next stall sold prawn patties – so I ate one. It was a round patty of batter with two large prawns stuck onto it. I guess because I was a foreigner she cut the head off the prawns before I ate them, but they were still in the shell. I ate them shell and all. The next place looked like fish sticks so I asked for one. It was deep fried banana – delicious. It tasted like Tim Horton’s apple fritter. Then we finished it off with more beer and peanuts at the next corner beer parlour. All this and we were only 2 blocks from the hotel. Just wait until tomorrow night.