2nd August - Tonight we were meeting up with Ellie again: she was showing us a good spot where the train tracks pass right by a load of restaurants and stuff i.e. about 2 feet away from the seats, which makes for an interesting view. We started off just getting some noodles from a small street food place nearby. We did notice that the noodles were actually the instant kind, which seemed a little like cheating, but a couple of beers washed them down nicely.

After this, we went to a rice wine bar across the street, to sample their delectable goods and watch the trains passing (and probably chat, who knows). For the rice wine, you order a bottle (prob 250ml) and shot it down each time the train comes (and many times in between it turns out), easy stuff. First bottle we ordered was cinnamon, which was very good and didn't last too long. Second, we wanted to go a little more risky, so we ordered Gecko rice wine. I was the only one who thought it was anything but disgusting, tasted a little orangey to me. The third and final one was a pretty safe mango one, very sweet and a good palate cleanser. Now at this point we were all pretty drunk. Simply because a) rice wine is around 20% and b) we had finished off 750ml in about 90 minutes (or do a shot pretty much when anything happens) after the earlier beers, so we were back at the apartment by midnight. 

6th August - Our penultimate night in Hanoi, we thought we should try going to the bar at the top of the Lotte centre, which is 68 stories high. We took the express lift to the top and stepped out onto the bar proper. The views were pretty good, the centre is quite close to the lake, so you can see most of Hanoi from the top. We sat down and ordered our drinks, a couple of cocktails. It would seem that the quality of the view has not matched with the quality of the drinks, we ended up leaving most of them and ordering some eye-wateringly expensive teas instead. The place itself was average at best, but the views across Hanoi really did make up for it. 

7th August - We wanted to revisit a few places today as our final day here; egg coffee and bun bo nam bo to be precise, and seeing as these places were round the corner from the post office (need to send some gifts back for Christmas, you lucky ducks) it all worked out well. Got to the post office with our bag of badly packed stuff and started getting all the paperwork done. They were really good, taking everything apart and packaging it up, making sure it was all snug in the box. They told us how much, but they didn't accept card, so we had to try and find an ATM. The issue with that isn't with finding one, it's finding one which has cash and will allow us to take it out. After 30 mins of search, we did finally find one, paid the postage and could be on our way to enjoy the Bun bo nam bo. After lunch, we made a beeline straight for egg coffee, no messing around we knew what we wanted. What we didn't realise though is that about 5 minutes before we got there a Spanish tour group had pretty much filled the place to the brim. Luckily enough some guys were vacating a table as we got there, so we pretty much jumped across the room to enjoy our final Hanoi egg coffee.