Vietnam Part One - Hanoi!

Rich and I started our recent holiday in Vietnam in Hanoi. I have to say Hanoi is the craziest city I've been to in Asia - there are people, animals and scooters everywhere. It's the only city I've ever been to where there have been live chickens in the streets.

One of our favourite places in Hanoi was Hoan Kiem Lake, it seems to be a favourite of the locals too. I think we went there about three times!

Here's a few of my favourite sights in Hanoi - first of all Hoa Lo Prison or the "Hanoi Hilton". This is an old prison that was constructed by the French during colonisation to subdue the Vietnamese freedom fighters. Later on during the Vietnam war it was used as a POW camp. It's a pretty haunted place, but well worth a visit to make you realise just how lucky you are!




We also went to pay a visit to Ho Chi Min or "Uncle Ho". On a crazy hot Hanoi day we lined up with tourists and Vietnamese people to visit the Ho Chi Min Mausoleum - it was a pretty surreal experience. We also got to see some important buildings from the time, which included Uncle Ho's stilt house.



We also visited the West Lake in Hanoi on the advice of the Lonely Planet guide, but to be honest if I visit Hanoi again I won't be making any effort to walk around the lake again. It's pretty horrible - it's the only waterway I've seen in my life with dead fish literally floating in it.

However, near the West Lake is Quan Thanh Temple and Tran Quoc Pagoda which are really beautiful and worthwhile seeing.



We also visited the "Temple of Literature" or Van Mieu, which is a beautiful but extremely busy temple. We even got to see some traditional Vietnamese instruments played whilst we were here.



Here's a few other things that I liked or was just plain puzzled by whilst I was saying in Hanoi.

1) Scooters! There are scooters EVERYWHERE! A taxi driver told us that there are 100 scooters to every car and he refered to the continual tooting as the "music of Hanoi".
2) Communist Propaganda - You can still it everywhere in Hanoi! However, rather ironically there are many stores devoted to selling propaganda posters and other items such as party badges to tourists.


4) Colonial French Architecture - I really like architecture and I've never really seen anything like the architecture in Hanoi before, even the buildings that have seen better days seem to have a kind of French shabby chic.


5) Eating a variety of fresh fruit - you can't get a lot of fresh fruit in Korea and you tend to pay quite a lot for the fresh fruit you can buy. I wanted to eat as much fruit in Vietnam as I could!6) Uncle Ho - He's everywhere!7) New Zealand Ice Cream - It's really popular in Hanoi - there's even a NZ ice cream chain which has Pure New Zealand posters inside.

8) Birds kept in delicate wooden birdcages - I really loved these cages and they were all over the city. I did feel sorry for the birds though - with all the fumes from the scooters I just don't feel like they would have a very nice life.9) Cheap drinks! As most people know, I'm really not much of a drinker but when the drink is this cheap you may as well have a few.
10) Dodgy Wiring - Maybe this was worse for me because I've worked with building law before and prior to coming to Korea I worked in property and New Zealand is pretty strict when it comes to building codes but all over Hanoi there was wiring like this. It's pretty scary stuff!That's our trip to Hanoi in a nutshell - next travel related blog will be about our amazing time in Halong Bay which was the highlight of our trip to Vietnam.

I've finally returned to Korea!

After an eight day holiday that included visiting three countries - Rich and I are finally home!

We visited Vietnam (Hanoi and Halong Bay), Hong Kong and made a day trip to Macau. It was a lot of fun but also very tiring. You know the old saying, I think I need a holiday to recover from my holiday.

I have so many pictures to post and stories to tell, but for now, I will leave you with a picture of a Kuromi cake (in case you don't know, Kuromi is my favourite character in the Hello Kitty "universe") I saw in a bakery in Hong Kong.
In other news it's now officially less than ONE MONTH until we leave Korea which is pretty crazy. The last year has gone so quickly. We have now started packing up our apartment and will soon buy our tickets for Taipei - we're due there mid September, some very busy times ahead.

Pifan or Pucheon Fantastic Film Festival

On Friday after work Rich and I took an hour and half subway journey to Pucheon to attend the Pucheon Fantastic Film Festival (Pifan). We had been waiting for this festival forever! I was really excited as it was the first time I'd actually gone to a film festival rather than just attending whatever festival's were in my city.

Here's a couple of shots of our hotel - it's actually one of the nicer hotels we've stayed in but as it turns out it becomes a bit of a love motel after dark!

Here's a night time shot of Pucheon, it's acutally much bigger than I thought! It also seems to be a city of neon. It felt like there was more neon here than in central Seoul.Our first movie was "Down Terrace" which we watched on the first night with Joseph and his son Cohen who is in Korea for his summer break from University. We also caught up the guys the following morning to watch a Japanese film called "Confessions".

After that we had some time to kill so decided to check out some of Pucheon. Here's the Pucheon "cultural bridge" - I'm a little fuzzy on what makes it soon cultural but it's a pretty cool bridge.

We also visited a park near one of the many venues where they were playing films - this was a very cool park and they had closed down the road near the park so kids could ride their pedal cars around. Which was pretty cute.


Here's a few photo's we took outside on of the venue's for the festival, the Pucheon town hall, there was some kind of competition on where people make sculptures out of food packaging.



Here I am, feeling rather happy with a whole bunch of movie tickets! A lot of ghouls turned up for the screening of Death Bell 2 - I even got to meet a couple of them. I thought afterwards maybe I should look more scared in this photo.Part way through the festival, we all decided we needed a break so we headed to Aiins World, a theme park which features minitures of some of the worlds great buildings and monuments. It was great cheesy fun!





Here's a few photo's from our last day, we watched our final film at a museum in Pucheon. It was a pretty cool museum - it even had a Miffy exhibition on but we didn't really have time to check it out.



I'll blog a little more about the films I actually watched later when I have a little more time.

I'm leaving for Hanoi and Hong Kong early tommorrow, so blogging will be pretty limited in that time.

I hope everyone has a great week!

Birthday 2.0

This is my second birthday post, I've been pretty lucky over the past couple of weeks and recieved three more birthday packages/presents.

First of all from Joseph - some Hello Kitty sicking plasters and a CD of my favourite Korean band "Go Go Star".

Next my friend Jess from Wellington sent me a big package of red things for my birthday (red is my favourite colour). Here's my favourite red things - red accessories! A set of flower earrings, a chunky heart shaped necklace and a cute lady bug bracelet that Jess made for me (handmade gifts are my favourite).
She also bought me a sarong from her trip to Rarotonga - which is going to be perfect for my trip to Halong Bay (near Hanoi).
Finally a package from London from Conor and Sue - they sent me so many great things but here's a few of my favourites. A skull CD case, cute pens and cutie cutie panda key covers.
They also sent three - that's right! three! t-shirts. One for Rich and two for me. This is my favourite one - don't call me girly!!

I can or I can't

Recently in my high level English class I asked the students to draw pictures of something they can do and something they can't do.

Here's some things my students can't do that bought a smile. My favourite is the first one.

I can't love kiss

I can't kill people (that's a relief!)

I can't die (maybe he's a vampire in disguise?)

Bucheon Film Festival

As soon as I finish work tonight I'm going straight to the subway station so Rich and I can make the journey to Bucheon and attend the Bucheon International Film Festival.

We are going to meet up with Joseph and his son there, we'll be catching up for dinners and seeing a few films together.

Here's the films Rich and I will be seeing at the festival - in order of viewing:

Down Terrace - United Kingdom

Confessions - Japan

Death Bell 2 - South Korea

Gintama - Japan

We are also seeing a horror triple feature on Saturday night - it's actually a little unclear which films are showing in the triple feature but I am pretty sure House of the Dead is one of them.

It's mostly going to be a weekend of horror films but that is my favourite type of film - should be a great weekend.

Birthday Dress - fail!

So if you read my blog regularly will remember my post about this years birthday dress. Well the dress turned up a day or two ago but it was a total failure as they had sent me the completely wrong dress!

I'm leaving Korea on 1 September, which is around 6 weeks time (I can't believe how fast the year has gone!) so they isn't much time to replace it either.

However, in the Rock Collection's defence the did say they would reimburse me as soon as the dress is returned.

Which is a little sad, but it's all money I've saved I guess!

In other news, yesterday we picked up our Visa's for Vietnam and Hong Kong. It will be time to leave for our trip very soon - less than one week in fact. I can't wait to get away for a while.

We've pretty much nailed down what we want to do in Hong Kong, the main thing is of course catching up with my old school friend Lillian.

We're a bit more open with what we want to do in Hanoi - we want to got to Halong Bay, but have been told it's much easier to book tours in Hanoi once we get there.

Other than that I am going on a teachers trip with my school at 1:30. There has been much confusion with this trip. Originally I was told we were going "caving" which led me to ask a lot of questions. Yesterday at lunch I was told we were going to a temple and the mountains which is much more my style and sounded great.

But as of yesterday afternoon we are going to the beach and then to a museum - what we are doing at the beach is a little ambiguous still. But I have been told that I must wear my slippers (inside shoes) to the beach - which is a little bit weird for a Kiwi girl but as the saying goes "when in Rome".

I won't have access to a computer for a couple of days whilst I'm on the trip but I should be able to update on Friday to share details of the trip, the films I'm going to be Puchon International Film Festival this weekend and the contents of a rather exciting package of red goodies I received from my friend Jess for my birthday in the mail this week.

Film 41 - Under the Mountain

Film 41 was watched on a miserable rainy night at home (but it's summer so at least it's not cold).

Under the mountain was a TV show that was on in NZ when Rich and I were kids, to be honest, I don't really remember it very well.

However, the TV series does hold a special place in Rich's heart!

The remake was directed by Jonathan King who also directed the rather awesome Kiwi film, Black Sheep.

The film is about a set of twins who move to Auckland from rural New Zealand after their mother is killed in a car crash. They go to live with their Aunty and Uncle and cousin who have some rather strange neighbours.

Long story short the neighbours turn out to be alien's from another world and the twins have to work with another alien (Sam Neil) to stop some even worse alien's from being released from Auckland's volcano's.

The film and TV series are based on a novel by Maurice Gee who is one of my favourite writers and the special effects were done by WETA workshops.

But the whole film fell a little bit flat, I don't think it deserved the horrible review's it received, it's not a bad film.

I think it just lacked "heart" really - but on the upside it was really great to watch a New Zealand film! It's so great to hear everyone speak with Kiwi accent's and say really Kiwi things.

It has also inspired me to hunt down the original series and see what it's like and also read Maurice Gee's book.

I can't help but think there is a great story in there somewhere - it's just lost it's way a little.

Hello Kitty Polaroid Shots

Some pictures Rich took last weekend with my polaroid camera in Hongdae. In case you're wondering this is special Hello Kitty film.

In fact that's a picture of me taken outside the Hello Kitty cafe with the Hello Kitty film - that's a lot of Kitty for one picture!

It's the rainy season

The rainy season that all my Korean co-workers talk about so much has finally arrived. It rained for about 24 hours and we have had another shower and by the look of the very dark sky outside I think it will rain again before the night is over.

All this is a little depressing and completely ruined our plans to visit Gangwha Island this weekend.

So instead of seeing dolmen's and observatories and other interesting things I ended up crafting and reading most of the weekend. Which isn't a bad way to spend the weekend but it isn't what I had in mind!

Here's the cross-stitch I'm currently working on, I bought the pattern from a seller called Pop Soup on Esty who sells all kinds of retro and kitsch patterns. This design will be a pin up sailor girl when I'm done.Rich and I also did some shopping in the Uijeongbu underground mall yesterday as we really needed to get out of the house and we wouldn't get wet shopping in the mall. The underground mall is unlike a mall in New Zealand or other western countries.

It's basically a collection of very small stall holders with tiny shops - it's more like a market than a mall and it's like a rabit warren to navigate! Rich is able to navigate it well but he is basically like a human GPS, I have no sense of direction and always end up lost!

On Saturday we did find a new "handmade" shop. It's a bead shop where the woman makes jewellery out of crystal bead sculptures. These are pretty popular here in Korea, I have seen simmilar things in New Zealand but nothing quite as amazing as what you can find here.

I decided to buy these little chick earrings as I love these quirky earrings and they were just too cute not to have!I would love to learn how to make some of this stuff! One of my students has given me a handmade cellphone charm of a witch made in this style. She told me her aunty helped her to make it. I guess there are classes around that teach you how to make these cute beaded creatures but it's hard to find them when you don't speak Korean.

Also I finally bought some new sunglasses! I have needed new ones for a while but I haven't been able to find ones I like. I usually like really dark sunnies as I wear contacts and bright sun really hurts my eyes.

It seems that sunglasses in Korea aren't as dark as the ones we get back in New Zealand but I really needed new ones so I bought these. Excuse the self portrait photo!