The night train to Hanoi

As Angelica said we took an overnight train to Hanoi. And you haven’t lived until you’ve used a Vietnamese train bathroom. I’ll try to start posting pictures as this thing was pretty gnarly. Just a moist dank room that smelled like fish that had been left in the sun for far too long. The flush was simply a hole letting your pee and/or poo drop down onto the tracks. This has spawned a rule of thumb in Vietnam. This rule of thumb is “don’t walk down the center of the train tracks.” Now I know why!!! The funny thing about this is that when the train came into the station you could see in the windows, so we could see someone standing up but not what he was doing, and then sure enough a few seconds later we saw liquid drop down splashing in the center of the tracks. How nice.

Enough about the toilets.

The train ride was pretty much as Angelica described it. We went to sleep, although I was not in my aqua blue silk sleeping bag, I just used mine to cover the pillow. There wasn’t much to see out the windows, a lot of rice fields, which was interesting the first couple times. And then they just become rice fields.

The only other thing of note was the chicken lady. A woman with a cart that would roll up and down the car opening your door and shaking a chicken leg at you yelling “YOU WANT CHICKEN???!!!” and yes she did use three exclamation points. In her defense she did wear a plastic glove, but then if you asked for a coke she grabbed said Coke with her gloved hand smearing your coke with a thick layer of luke warm chicken grease, which was nice of her. This became a fun recurring joke for the rest of the trip. It’s a close second to the waiter at the Chinese food place in Ann Arbor who would ask, “you want balk balk chicken??!!” He was great because he added the “balk balk” to make sure we knew what chicken was by the sound chickens make, but he only used two exclamation points. Let’s call it a draw.