Hello all three of you. Ever the romantic I decided the best way to start our honeymoon off was to splash Heather's white top with lots of soy sauce at the Edinburgh Airport Yo Sushi. The top came out fine though and Heather I think has forgotten about it now. We kept on just talking about the awesome night before as we hopped on a plane to Heathrow and prompty passed out. We had a good 5 hours to kill at Heathrow but I really can't remember what we did there, I remember buying flight socks and charging my phone in Dixons under the false premise of playing with the iPad2.  Because of how stupidly early we were we were able to check in among the first 10 people and secure exit row seats with extra leg room for the long-haul flight to Korea. We tried our luck at upgrading to business class but no amount of  "it is our Honeymoon!" seemed to work. I think it was most likely the fact that Heather had turned up in her pyjamas that had prevented the upgrade.

Long-haul flights; I quite like them. Haven't been on that many but sitting down for 8 hours watching the TV comes naturally to me. Heather was asleep before she had sat down and I chose my trio of films to see me through to Korea. I felt a bit cultural by choosing the Korean in-flight meal, bit of a mistake and Heather, being asleep, missed out on the unpleasant bowel movement. Oh, on a similar note, had a mild panick Sunday morning until I remembered the copius quantities of beetroot eaten the night before.

For those of you still reading my film choices were: Super 8 (recommended), Pirates of the Caribbean 3 (not recommended) and Alice in Wonderland (just another Tim Burton nutter fest). We arrived in Seoul, Korea and had some hours to spend at the airport before catching our connecting flight to Hanoi, Vietnam. Seoul Airport is great, they are big on encouraging tourists and have lots of free Korean type things to do. Heather and I painted a Tiger using charcoal and a stencil. Before even reaching our destination we thus managed to pick up a useless trinket to carry around with us for the next three weeks.

The next flight was a mere 4 hours and was taken up mainly by sleep and playing Bejeweled. We arrived into Hanoi about eleven o'clock local time, picked up our bags, and went out in to the arrivals lounge to be greeted by a friendly man dressed in a black double brested suit with gold buttons holding a sign. I have always wanted to be picked up by someone holding a sign at an airport and the costume just made things better. We were led outside into the humid heat and the mash of taxis and were told to wait whilst out leader dude went and got the car, a very nice car with macaroons in the back. We treated ourselves to some macaroons and drinks and were driven comfortably into town. I realised quickly that some phrases that I use for yes and no are not easily understood, for example when I say "I'm good thanks" in response to a question I mean it as "no" but in Vietnam it means "yes", likewise with "we're ok thank you", only the "ok thank you" is heard. Because of this misunderstanding we listened to some nice Vietmanese dance pop for the rest of our car journey.

The hotel, wow, I'm sure you have figured out by the driver that it is a pretty nice one, but let me give you another clue: there is a pillow menu in the room. We have 4 nights here and little does Heather know that it is all downhill from here. The hotel is an original Colonial French building from the ... Colonial French time ( if you want historic facts and names of places, read Heather's posts). We had a little explore of the hotel, donned our silk robes and tried to see if we could get some sleep.

24 hours later we awoke, having missed breakfast. We slowly got ready, had some traditional Vietmansese soup for lunch in the hotel, and headed out into the throng. I woulld guess roughly that the temperature was about 78 degrees celcius and that you were not anyone in Hanoi without a motorbike. The streets and roads were full of them. The advice from our guidebook for crossing a road was to "keep a constant, predictable pace". It is hard to keep a constant pace with tooting motorbikes coming at you from all directions, but we did, and we didn't die, so a good start all in all. Heather saw a bride in a little park getting her photo taken, and then another, and then another. We counted 14 within 20 minutes, we clicked that they weren't in fact getting married but just having pre-wedding photos taken, still pretty strange.  In the centre of Hanoi there is a big lake, we decided today we would just have a stroll around it and get used to the place a little, on our itinerary we had to pick up a phrase book and also some swimming shorts that I had forgotten to pack.

Brides to be.

My beautiful wife.

This one is for the new arrival Charlie Hamilton, his birthday is celebrated here.

The locals all seemed incredably polite and apart from the occasional pedi-cab driver shouting out to get our attention we were left to get on with things. The lake had big spherical balloons floating above it to celebrate the 10th of the 10th which is a special day over here for reasons I do not know, but Heather will. We found a phrase book but not swimming shorts on our circumnavigation of the lake and headed back to the hotel to wring out my shirt.  A very nice dinner later we were sipping cocktails and listenening to live jazz in the hotel bar. Very nice indeed, and what's more is we were now multi-millionaires having exchanged $270 for over 4 million dong.

On our second day, today in fact, we made it up for breakfast, and the choice was exciting. Heather made some poor girly choices like fruit and Vietnamese porridge. I chose to go with a full American breakfast, follwed by a noodle soup, some pinapple juice and some maple pancakes. I regretted this very quickly. We headed back out into the throng, we were going to try and treat ourselves and get a dress for Heather made and a suit for me, but our guide book seemed to lie about things and we were unable to find the tailors, but we found ourselves on a walk through the old town of Hanoi through the bustling streets of motorbikes, pineapple sellers and market stalls. A lot of the housing had been built when facades were taxed, so frontages had been built only 7-10  feet across, but there was no limit on depth resulting in lots of long thin stacked up "tube houses" lining the skinny streets.

What  tourists we are.

Shrimp

One's bike is taken everywhere it seems.

After a good 3 hours of exploring markets and dodging traffic we worked our way back to the hotel and chilled, our free chocolates had been replenished and I discovered there is a chocolate buffet! We are doing this tomorrow, I have informed Heather.