CHINA-VIETNAM | part 1

About two weeks ago, in a plane full of Chinese people, my dad and I arrived at Chengdu, China. Chengdu is a big Chinese city and is famous for its pandas. Instead of visiting pandas we had a good cup of tea with the local people as you can see above. Endlessly refills are standard over here. It was hard to explain that they kind of drowned us with all the tea after some time.We stayed for a short amount of time at Chengdu before we headed off to Hanoi, Vietnam.

I always thought Chinese traffic was chaotic. But I take it back now that I've been to the old quarter of Hanoi. People are everywhere, mostly on motorbikes. Nobody sticks to the traffic rules. There's actually just one rule: watch where the others go. As long as you keep that in mind you can go where ever you want. This results in some kind of swirling continuous flow without traffic jams and looks like a big ant colony. My dad and I tried it ourselves by bike, it was pretty much fun!

The Women Museum beautifully shows the women's role in society of Vietnam. For people who are into fashion, you should really visit it sometime. The museum exhibits an inspirational selection of traditional garments from different places of Vietnam.

We made a 2 day boat trip to Ha Long Bay (descending dragon), listed as one of Unesco's World Heritage Sites. Ha Long Bay contains about 1600 islands. Alltogether from a distance they look like a giant wall but when you come closer it appears they are all seperate islands with limestone mountains. A group of people even lives on boats between the islands, I cannot imagine how life like that would be, you?

Other must-do-touristy things we did: visiting Ho Chi Min's Mausoleum (looks just like he'll wake up any moment!), walk around the lake and watch people exercising and dancing in the park, watching the Water Puppet Theatre and eating lots of spring rolls and pho bo.

Unfortunately we lost a lot of time at the Chinese ambassy for getting our visas renewed. We had to come back 4 mornings in a row and one time they interviewed us. They suspected me from wanting a job in China. Luckily VanBerlo's business card could proof I wasn't.

People carry everything around on their bikes.

Everyone really likes dad's glasses!

Eventually we got our visa and we're now in Guilin, China. Still recovering from a bad flu I had over the past couple of days but will be fine. We travel around some more and I'll keep on taking photos.