Right, so here I am starting my brand new blog on a brand new platform (for me, that is). Certainly, there have been times when I tried to blog, especially that short period when I was living in Jordan but it didn't really work, and I don't know why, and so I just put that behind me.

So I'm going to start anew, especially since there's always so much to write about. Like that one time when my husband and I went to Vietnam last January.

I guess I was expecting Vietnam to be something like North Korea that we visited in October, 2013. To my huge surprise and relief, it wasn't.

First of all, we arrived to Hanoi and spent a couple of days there. We lived in the outskirts of the Old City in the hotel called Hanoi Sky. The hotel cost us some $30 USD per night, and it was still very clean and nice and even served breakfast in the morning.

The city itself is very interesting, too. It has the so-called Old City but don't expect it to be like the ones that we have in Europe. No castles, no city walls, none of that. It's just an older part of the city with narrow streets, cafes where you eat sitting on a plastic chair right on the street, and rest assured: the food is always going to be fantastic.

However, though Hanoi is trying to look all modern and Western, there's still so much Asia in it. The traffic is hectic with lots of scooters and cars and pedestrians moving in all the weird directions. Crossing the road becomes a real challenge. If you hope that they'll stop before a crosswalk, forget it. Surely, no one wants to run over you so just make sure to cross very slowly giving the drivers time to stop and let you go.

The other things we did in Hanoi:
1. Walked around
2. Ate a lot (who wouldn't)

3. Got me a stamp with my own name and design

4. Got photographed by the local Vietnamese for using the selfie stick

Hanoi is definitely a lot of fun and worth visiting!