Our tour officially starts today. It’s been good to have the time to recover from jet lag but it will be nice to have someone tell us what we are seeing, where we can eat, and just generally answer our questions.
At breakfast we selected a bigger table so Dave and Cheryl could join us. We met other people from our group and asked them to join us too so we ended up meeting most of the people at our pre trip; Nine in total.
At 10:30 we had our welcome briefing. Our guide, Mai, pronounced My, described what we are doing on the pretrip. Mai has been guiding OAT tours for six years so she is very experienced and her English is excellent. We also got some rules, for example we are not supposed to talk about American politics.
Then she took us out for some street food. We went to a place right across the street for chicken and noodles. It was very authentic and tasty. In the corner of the restaurant was a small altar to Buddha and Mother Earth. Here’s a picture of the “restaurant”.
After lunch we relaxed on the roof deck for the afternoon. Here are pictures of Hanoi from the roof deck.
We met at 4:15 for our orientation walk. Mai showed us some local resources, like the ATM and the convenience store. Then we went to a restaurant for our welcome dinner. It was Vietnamese fusion food. I ate tried almost everything and even ate spring rolls with mushrooms! A good start to our trip!