Hanoi

The bus from Hue to Hanoi broke. Stopped in the midddle of the night for about 4 hours while a tire was changed.The city seems ok. The market is good to walk around and sells everything from sun glasses to sharks.
Ive been trying to mooch about a little and give my wallet a rest. Saw the rugby and had a couple of cheap drinks. sat in the park for a while.When you are in a tourist destination you are aproached by someone every minute or so normaly trying to sell you something. In the middle of the day in a park you were aproached more often by young people who claimed to be students. Most had a survey they wanted me to fill out and sign that involved questions like "How long have you been in Vietnam?"and "what do you like best about Vietnam?", They were so boring i only got through one of these. I had little better to do and I was happy to try and help them with their english, but when the survays and questions theyasked were so generic and boring I tended to cut them off short. However there were a couple of girls who were quite fun to talk too and i ended up spending about an hour helping them with their pronunciation and sentence structure.It was refreshing to be able to talk to a local without them demanding money from me. At this point It wouldnt surprise me if they wanted me to pay them for the privalage of trying to teach them english but that was not the case. Obviously they were only talking to me becausei spoke english but it was fun to do and they tried to teach me a little vietnamise.
Saw the HO Chi Minh museum and it was a little different to what i expected, the first floor was full of quotes and black+white photos but the second floor appeared to be more like the tate modern
On the last day before leaving there were people on the street burning envelopes and photocopies of US dollars, this seems farmilliar to me but i'm not exactly sure what purpose it serves. Im pretty sure its not the chinese new year or anything. Waiting for a train was a little dull, the hostel check out was at about 11 and the train was at 21:40. I was carrying myu large rucksack around all day and had already seen the sights. Spent a fair amount of time going into a coffe shop buying the cheapest drink on the menu and spending an eternity to drink it.
Geting the train ticket into china was a littl;e difficult because you need to give your chinese visa number to get it. I booked the ticket at the hostel because i wanted to book it in advance but didnt want to collect it myself from the train station. It cost me an extra two dollars but if i had collected it myself it would have cost about 6 dollars in taxi fares. Anyway, the difficulty was that the girl at reception looked at my chinese visa and declared that it had expired. I still dont understand how/why she thought that. On the visa it states that all entries must be utilised before march 2012, which is like next year. Even the date of issue was only about two weeks ago and it was a 30 day visa with two entries. Anyway, It took about another five minutes for her to realise it was valid and continue to book the ticket.
The last couple of days in vietnam were also a little difficult due to money management issues. I needed to have spent all my Vietnamise dong before leaving, but i needed enough money to last me untill the last evening. I was on budget, but then ended up going out drinking and spending all my money with an entire day left. i needed money for a taxi and some food and i had litteraly nothing.i ended up having to get another 500,000 dong (bout 15 quid) out on the last day. This was way more money than i needed and I needed to spend it all as its fairly useless outside vietnam. I ended up spending some of it on a mandarin phrase book with chinese symbols that i could point too rather than phoanetical spellings in english (I have completely given up with pronounciation of asian languages).I also bought a jumper and some more socks. I would have liked to get some better walking shoes but all the stalls seemed to sell were flat sole shoes (converse/lecoste style stuff) and sandals. My walking shoes were haggard but i still had some fairly sturdy sandals that i bought in siem reap for the floods.
I might have to go shopping for some tough shoes in china,... and probably a coat. All i brought with me were clothes for south east asia where the weather is warm and it dawned on me that north china and japan will probably be quite cold in late november.
I'm a little nervous about entering china but i have printouts of my flights out and reservations for hong kong. I dont have any hotels booked in mainland china yet but i have a few adresses of hostels just to fill in the gaps on the forms that I may or may not need to fill out.