Vietnam - Hanoi

Flying from Laos to Vietnam is like the change from a lonely dustroad into the rush hour of Berlin - considering the amount of people in each country.
It starts already at the airport where one gets surrounded by hordes of taxi drivers that sticked to us like insects and did not leave any time for a conversation. I was always interupted in the middle of my sentence that I tried to shout towards Suse by one of those men dressed in very smooth leather coats (very out of fashion and too much agent like...) trying to offer me: "Taxi - Old Quater - 4 people, 2 dollar each! SAVE!" Would you have believed them???
We simply took the airport-minibus which was the same price and we were more than 4 tourists anyway already. In the save bus there was a Vienamese who was quite nice and funny in the beginning but then he was telling us all about the accomodation in Hanoi and reckoned the rooms cheaper than US$ 10 would be not good enough for ...! We managed to change the topic of the conversation back to facts about Vietnam and Hanio and what people are doing in the city which we thought was quite enjoyable. This way we found out why so many people were carrying arond these little orange trees in Hanoi?! In not even a weeks time there would be the Chinese New Year celebrated all over Vietnam and the little trees belonged to the celebration as much as a Christmas tree belongs to Christmas. This coming festivity was (one of) the reason why all the streets were covered so nicely in red colour - there were red flags and banners as well as propaganda posters as far as the eyes could see! Besides the decoration of the streets there was obviously taken care of the feast for the citizens of Hanio. On our way into town there was a motorcycle loaded with three or four metal baskets that were containing dogs! Yes - those creatures are even listed on a Vietnamese menu! We saw it right on our very first evening in Hanoi, didn't try though!!!
Almost all the time from the airport to the city we were passing huge rice fields that were crowded with people. It was unbelievable! It looked like the whole nation was standing united on the fields - comparable with an antz nest!
Despite the quite chaotic traffic with thousands of motorcycles running inbetween and around the fairly rare cars, we finally reached our destination - the Old Quarter of Hanoi. Here the nice Vietnamese who told us about everything before really started to walk on our nerves! The question was again where we wanted to stay - and apparently he knew a nice hotel ... He was one of the countless guys hunting for commissions who probably live of sending tourists to this and that hotel. In the first hotel we went to we were even asked who actually dropped us there - there seemed to be even several guys claiming commission from the hotel!? But actually nobody told us to go there which would have reduced the rent for us in the end... While we kept looking for a nice place to stay more and more men came following us offering us THEIR hotel. The strange thing was that - like they said - they didn't have to do anything with each other but we got the same business card from two different guys advertising THEIR hotel?!
After we'd looked around for about an hour we finally found a nice and cheap room viewing the city of Hanoi. By this time we felt hungry and thursty so our first way was straight to a local restaurant with affordable food. On the menu they offered DOG in an extra column in various ways of cooking. Even the sounds coming from the back of the restaurant were underlining this part of the menu - there was obviously a dog houling ... we decided to go for another dish!

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