Handy Andy had really fallen a long way after Changing Rooms was cancelled

Hanoi is a really nice city, full of stuff to do and most importantly, it has a cinema! We went to see Wolverine (rubbish, but Elaine gives it bonus points for Huge Jackman's naked arse) and Star Trek (top notch reboot, although they made a bit too much of the whole "history has changed" thing). I'm thinking of writing a few reviews of movies we've seen while we're away, I miss the whole recommending films to people thing.

Anyway, Hanoi is cool, we got to meet up with some people we'd been travelling with further south. We also got to see Ho Chi Minh in his mausoleum, which was very serious, they had a guard outside whose job it was to shush people if they were talking. There was also the Temple of Literature, with it's stone tortoises and Ngoc Son Temple, with it's real live tortoises. One of the things that was most interesting to me was the typography all over the city. Vietnamese uses a load of diacritics to represent the 6 different tonal sounds of each vowel, and they use about 5 different typefaces on each sign or poster, which can be really overwhelming, but charming in a weird kind of way. Painted all over walls around the city were these odd groups of numbers in red, blue and black paint and it took us a few days to find out that, no they're not numbers for hookers or ladyboys, they're actually phone numbers for builders and handy-men who can come out and fix up the mess they've made on the wall. Industrious.

Check out the photos on Flickr and drop a few comments, especially if there's any love for the movie reviews idea. Peace out.