Good morning Vietpham!

It's 4 AM. My first day back at work starts in 4 hours and I can't sleep. When I try to sleep at night, my body thinks I'm taking a nap and wakes up 2 hours later with a head ache. I hate jet lag. I'll be crashing during the day because I already have a knack for falling asleep during professional development presentations. On the agenda for today is "formative assessment strategies" ZzZzZz. Hopefully, my colleagues will be able to keep me awake with their snarky comments. I have the best coworkers.
I keep having to go back and delete the "extra space" after sentences because Jack the Lawyer informed me that two spaces after a sentence is a "time-honored mistake."
Well, because I can not sleep, I've decided to finish up my Vietnam posts. Last time, I ended on my first night in Hanoi when I went out with David to the discos.

Hanoi is a very interesting city. It is a much more modern metropolitan area than most of Vietnam. The citizens seem to dress much nicer than other parts. The women are beautiful. They are all slender and tall and keep up with the latest fashion trends. The dialect in the north is very difficult for me, a southerner, to understand. Mel's family speaks this dialect. I jokingly refer to it as bourgeois. The men in Hanoi sound like a mix of Orochimaru, Mario Cantone, and Lil Wayne. It's quite flamboyant. Every word spoken seems to begin with a "Z" sound. For example, if a racist such as Thomas ever visited Hanoi, he would pull back his eyes and say "zing zong zing zong."




Okay, so here is a photo of my sister, mother, uncle, and I as we were leaving the airport. You may notice I am as big as a house due to all the food my relatives keep throwing at me.


Later that day, I went fishing with my uncle, and we caught absolutely nothing.


This night was also the night that I went out on the town with Mel's brother David. You can see those pictures in the previous intoxicated post.

The following morning, we went sightseeing. I saw the corpse of Ho Chi Minh at his Mausoleum in the middle of Hanoi. Don't tell my dad that I went here. He'll probably beat me. He's still pretty sensitive about the whole war thing. I dunno, something about the whole being forced to reign hell fire down on his own countrymen really ground his gears.


Here is the pagoda built on a single pillar. It's supposed to be some kind of engineering marvel.


In the center of Hanoi, there are two lakes. In Hoan Kiem, or Lake of the Returned Sword, there lives a 100 year old turtle who is currently very sick. The name of the lake refers to a legend of a king who was given a sword by a giant turtle, and after the king defeated his foes, he returned the sword to the giant turtle.

This much like the King Arthur/Lady of the Lake legend, or the much more famous Lion Turtle/Last Airbender legend. ENERGYBENDER!