Hanoi

Hanoi is the capital of vietnam and it’s located in the north of this beautiful country.

We’ve been here for 4 days exploring, walking around, eating all sorts of different food and tasting some funny looking drinks.

One of the highlights of our stay here was the cooking class at „apron up restaurant„. It includes going grocery shopping at a local market and cooking 5 dishes with a local. You also get a lot of information on vietnamese cousine and lifestyle, cooking and shopping habits, traditions and much much more.

We were welcomed with a hot herbal tea and some instructions on what’s going to happen. Our group was than devided into two – a vegetarian and a meat-eating group.

Cause of the rain we got a traditional vietnamese hat to wear while we were outside grocery shopping 👒

After this really cool and informative shopping trip, we went back to „apron up restaurant“ to start cooking.

We prepared 5 dishes: pho bo (the traditional vietnamese noodle soup), fried spring rolls, bun cha (meat balls), papaya salad and egg coffee.

Afterwards we enjoyed the dishes together, talked a bit and got a certificate to prove our skills 😜

Before heading home, Lena and I walked around the city and stumbled upon a night market. This market opens on weekends only and there aren’t any motorbikes and cars allowed. You can buy anything from clothes, to food, souvenirs, sunglasses, bags, shoes and much much more,

We’ve been to a really nice coffeeshop: „the note coffee“ near the Ho Hoan Kiem lake and treated ourself to a coconut coffee and a strawberry-banana smoothie. It was a saturday and the whole road around the lake was closed off for traffic.

To celebrate our last night in hanoi, we went for cocktails at „chill cafe & lounge„.

A curiosity about the city: there are quite a lot of streets where you can buy mostly one sort of product. For example there is a decoration street (for halloween or christmas, holiday lights etc.), a bronce street and a tin street (here you get only things which are made out of bronce or tin), a clothes street, a bamboo street (we saw a lot of ladders, but also just bamboo sticks), a beer street and many many more.