This morning I got up around 8am and went and took advantage of the free breakfast the hostel offers. They have a menu and you can choose what you want from it. I had chocolate pancakes (obviously). They weren't exactly the same as English pancakes but they were still nice. Then I went and woke Lauren up and told her to take advantage of the breakfast while it lasts, so she did and also has chocolate pancakes.
Once we were both ready we set off to visit Hoa Lo prison, which is not a prison anymore. It housed political prisoners from the French rule of Vietnam and then American pilots, who named it Hilton Hanoi as apparently they were fairly well treated according to the museum. This is disputed by some apparently. John McCain was held there during the war. We got a bit lost trying to find the prison and it felt like we had walked really far. The route from the hostel was almost a straight line so we don't really know what happened. But we made it eventually and paid to go round it. It was quite interesting. You could see the cells and how the prisoners were shackled. It must have been awful to be a prisoner there. There was little light and apparently it was extremely overpopulated. It was built for less than a thousand people but held 2000.
After the prison we headed back towards the hostel, stopping a restaurant for lunch. Lauren had chicken wings and I had pork ribs, both with a huge portion of fried rice, and a side of what we assume was some kind of broth. We saw others eating it so tried it. It was very watery but quite nice. The rice and ribs were really good. We both had a coke as well, and the meal came to less than £2.15 each. It was amazing.
After lunch we came back to the hostel and rested and researched things for the rest of Vietnam. After a while the house keepers came in and one of the staff wanted to do some wallpapering near my bed so we went out.
We wandered down to a big underground market but we weren't impressed. We probably spent less than 5 minutes there. It was more like a car boot sale. So we wandered down towards the lake and round the town, seeing what there was to see. We ended up back by the lake so we sat and watched Hanoi life and traffic going on around us. Around half 6 it had started gettin dark and all the lights around the town had come on so we started heading back and noticed a waffle place. It was so cheap, we thought why not? They were quite small portions which was fine as we were still full from lunch. After the waffles we went back to the hostel. On the way back to the hostel we passed a place selling chicken feet and some kind of brains. I originally assumed it was chicken but thinking about it now, it was too big for a small chickens head. It was a a bit smaller than the palm of my hand so I have no idea who's brains they were.
Lauren's bag had arrived at the hostel and she was very happy. We started doing some planning but around 10pm I feel asleep sitting up in the middle of the conversation, only to wake up 5 minutes later wondering why the music had stopped and where Lauren had gone. (She'd gone back to her own bed). So that pretty much put an end to the planning and we both went to bed properly.
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