Baby Cot and a Visit to Lang Son Soon

With news that we travel to Lang Son tomorrow at 7:30 to visit the babies, we at least prepared by finally finding a baby cot at what we call the Hanoi Mall (also known as the Trang Tien Plaza). We bought it on an afternoon shopping trip with Marci and Lisa, and it was just delivered to our hotel room. For 1,200,000 VN dong, it is a bargain! The delivery man, who probably delivered it by scooter, wouldn't take a tip, but he did accept one of our Chicago Marathon hats.

If you haven't figured it out by now, we are just visiting tomorrow, and our G and R is now scheduled for Monday. We hope that is a firm date, but one never knows in Vietnam. Patience seems to be the name of the game.

Our baby cot purchase at the Mall gave me a chance to get a photo of the motor bikes lined up waiting for what appears to be one of three traffic signals in Hanoi. These traffic signals seem to be only suggestions to drivers, bikers and pedestrians, rather than actual rules about whose turn it is to cross.


On Ed's run, he discovered a place called Bar-B-Que Chicken, so we ate there today with the whole crowd (Lisa, Betty, Marci, Katie and Tien), and then celebrated our fast food indulgence with the masks they handed us on the way out. If you can't tell in the photo of the motor bikes, many riders have face masks, I assume to block the exhaust of the traffic. You can buy them all over. But we got our chicken masks just for eating at the hip and trendy new Western style chicken joint (though they served a side of fish sauce with the chicken and rice).

We did miss our driver's arrival with the baby cot, but here's a glimpse of our street at rush hour. It is a one-way street, but no one seems to pay much attention to that. Mostly, it is more like a warning than a requirement.
We had to laugh at the two guys on a motor bike carrying a large pane of glass. And I particularly liked the family of three with mom in a mini-skirt and high heels sitting side saddle, no hands. For all of my worry about walking around the streets with the babies, the rest of Hanoi seems perfectly happy to ride with infants and toddlers astride motor bikes. And we worry about kids on bicycles without helmets!