I arrive in Hanoi

The only way I could have booked a slower flight would have been to fly via the south pole.
The cheapest flight from Britain was via Korean airways, and Korean airways, obviously, fly to Korea, which, I only just realised, is half way between China and Japan. Vietnam is a five hour flight from there.
And that is when the weather is good.
And it wasn't.
Korea was covered in snow. Our plane, and all the other planes before it, had to be de-iced. So our plane sat on the runway for an hour and a half, waiting to take off.
I left Britain on the evening of the twenty sixth Dec and arrived in Hanoi in the morning of the twenty eighth of Dec.

I went through customs and walked out looking for someone with a sign with my name on it. Quick as a flash a Vietnamese man came up to me (with no sign), saying 'Come, come, this is your driver. We recognised you.' 'Oh yes,' I said, 'and which hotel are you taking me to?' He dissappeared. Then I saw the sign with my name on it, in the middle of the crowd of waiting people.

My driver was not happy. He had been waiting to pick me up for two hours.

Next day I was woken from a deep sleep by the telephone in my room. 'Hello,' said a Vietnamese voice 'It's eleven o'clock, time for breakfast.' My room at the top of the Hotel was so quiet that I had slept for eight or nine hours and not heard a thing.

The traffic in Hanoi is as bad as everyone says. Traffic lights are reserved for very big streets. In the little streets all the crossroads are traffic-light-free. Swarms of motorbikes weave in and out of each other to get across. Faint faded zebra crossings were once painted on the roads but clearly they were just put there as decoration. No-one pays the slightest attention to them. Pedestrians just walk out into the street and the traffic weaves around them. If in doubt, I picked a small Vietnamese woman and walked with her, without looking at the traffic at all. So far so good.

Each street in the old part of Hanoi is named after the street's trade. So you have the silk street - very up-market this one - and the wedding paraphanalia street (where I am living at the moment), the haberdashery street, the street selling screws, bolts and nails, the motorbike street, and so on. Old Hanoi is a shopper's paradise. You can find every kind of beautiful object, from lacquer bowls to hand-carved wooden objects, fine porcelain, jewellery, clothing (of course) and all the usual tat - bags, purses,  boxes, hats. People sit at little tables on the pavements in the spaces between rows of parked motorbikes, eating and drinking, while hordes of motorbikes buzz past like angry hornets.

I went to the Kangaroo cafe, the one and only genuine Kangaroo cafe, not to be confused with the seven imitation Kangaroo cafes that litter the streets of old Hanoi, and drank a big pot of tea with lemon for 35p.
Then I began to investigate the shops. I began to find old textiles, at shop prices. Well, you have to start somewhere! I ended up with a tribal skirt, beautiful but absolutely huge.