Our first full day in Hanoi begins- the phase of the North begins! The next ten days were all each incredibly notable in their own rights, and so much happened that all the words I could possibly paint in here might still miss out on great details that I have forgotten about. As I write this, it has already been more than ten months since the trip to Hanoi occured. I will try my best to put as much as I can remember here, but it is likely I’ll forget something.
Our story begins as we woke up in our spacious hotel room and immediately began to plan for the day. There were probably a million places that were in my mind at the time that I was eager to visit, but we started off by eating breakfast. Our breakfast started with small amounts of whatever food the hotel cafeteria was serving (it was serving quite a lot, so there was no shortage of food) but my mom got worried that I wasn’t eating enough for the day and so she bought a huge bowl of pho for me to eat, which I did. I was now filled up for the day, so we called up a driver and headed to our first attraction, known as the Temple of Literature.
As we headed out to the temple, we talked a lot about all the different things in our life but eventually arrived there and got a look inside. It didn’t take long to check in, and it turned out that this place was meant to honor those in the past. Not for being great war heroes or soldiers who died like in other honorary monuments, but for education and progress. They listed the names of all the most achieved people in Chinese, or the old Vietnamese Alphabet (which I can’t read) and also showed many of the artifacts from that time period.
It was really interesting to see these artifacts, and another thing that caught my attention were the ponds. This place was filled with these sizable ponds with their own little habitats for fish and other critters. In the back was a massive temple which I’m guessing highlighted the “temple” part of the Temple of Literature. The area had a smaller model of the overall temple complex which was really interesting to look at. On top of that, there were Buddha statues and religious structures all over this building in the back, so a lot of people came here to pray as well. We spent a couple hours here taking pictures and looking at the artifacts from six hundred years ago, and after all that we left and went back out on the car to our second attraction. This attraction was a lot bigger than the first, which is impressive given how sizable the first one already was- this attraction was the Thang Long Citadel. Built in the 1000s, this citadel has stood the test of time and contains many hidden relics. We were only able to begin to scratch the surface of this amazing building. We checked in pretty quickly and eagerly entered the area, walking towards the amazing structure of the citadel. We took some time to admire the structure from the ground, taking pictures which really highlight how big this thing is. Oh, we also got this one of a bird feeder too.
So yeah, the structure of the citadel from below was amazing, but it got even crazier when we walked to the side of the building and discovered it was actually possible to climb up to the upper floors of the building, which we certainly did. We took some pictures of the building’s interior which was boring either because that’s how all buildings of the time were or because renovations had been made. The view was pretty nice from up there (Sadly I couldn’t get the picture, I forgot) because it was so high up. We also encountered some stairs that led to a closed trapdoor which we took some pictures of Casey from…
There were more relics here than the boring interior of the main citadel- to the side, we found that there were several smaller buildings. After going inside, we found a museum full of HUNDREDS of these relics from the ancient Vietnamese times— Me, Casey, and Mia all surveyed them together (Koia had walked off and we couldn’t find her for some reason). You’d expect all those relics to attract a great deal of tourism, but surprisingly there was none. We had an entire exhibit to ourself. A whole museum, actually… we could run around the place and make noise and no one was watching— it was wild. (HOW DID I NOT TAKE PICS???)
We just kept going, from little museum house to little museum house until we eventually found Koia, then the four of us continued to explore each of them, surveying whatever interesting artifacts we could find. Most of them were simply basic uses of pottery, art, or weapons. Casey eventually got tired and for a moment he went back up to our parents so he could zone out in peace. Me, Koia, and Mia were still looking for some more action. We explored the rest of the last mini museum and eventually started walking back in the direction of the main citadel. When we went down there, we found a small alcove in the side of the back wall of the citadel. Being curious, we entered it.
What we found in the alcove turned out to be very interesting. There was a TV playing something inside the alcove, but that wasn’t the interesting part. What was interesting was a staircase that was dimly lit, led to a dark and unknown room, and we couldn’t see where it led. It looked like something from a horror movie.
The three of us slowly crept down the staircase, leaving the light of the daytime behind us. At the bottom of the staircase, we encountered a short highway and another dimly lit room— an eerie noise was playing from somewhere. I wasn’t scared, obviously, this was just something that they did in order to create a scary environment, but they did a pretty good job at giving me the chills sometimes. The room we had found was full of maps of South Vietnam, I’m guessing back from the time of the war. The maps were extremely detailed— we could see every little town imaginable as well as the frontlines of the war during the time.
Adjacent to this room was yet another room, this one being filled with several alcoves which each mostly were filled with some interesting artifact from the war. It was also filled with a huge table of yet another map and some coffee cups. And as we looked around the room, without warning, the lights lighting up the dim alcoves suddenly began to flicker on and off, shaking what was inside and generating a rapid high pitch noise of a the flick of a switch. That caught me off guard a bit, but all three of us mostly just scoffed when we saw that it was simply another trick in order to create a scary environment. Spoiler Alert: I wasn’t scared. After some more exploring, we discovered a switch near the entrance to the previous room which we discovered turned the lights in the alcoves on and off.
By this point, it was about lunch time, so we all decided that we should find food— we didn’t really feel like eating anything too obscure and weird… we weren’t exactly feeling it that day— snail soup. We had snail soup.
The rest of the day was honestly pretty idle. We just spent a lot of time in the afternoon doing nothing and we went back to our hotel and just kind of relaxed. All those days exploring had me really tired, and we’d need our energy for the next day of the vacation. This was going to be one of the most demanding days of the trip- we’d be getting a great dose of exercise, because we were headed towards one of the biggest natural beauties of Vietnam. Its name is—