Starting out the morning with a run around Hoan Kiem Lake and watching the Zumba meets Tai Chi exercise class.
More yummy breakfast food!
After breakfast, we headed to the Ho Chi Minh Mausaleum. Contrary to his desire for a simple cremation, the mausoleum was constructed from materials gathered from all over Vietnam between 1973 and 1975. Set deep in the bowels of the building in a glass sarcophagus is the frail, pale body of Ho Chi Minh. The mausoleum is usually closed from 4 Sep to 4 Nov while his embalmed body goes to Russia for maintenance.
We waited in line for quite a while not really even sure what would be inside. Once we were inside, we were back out again in like 3 minutes. The girls were definitely unimpressed! At we saw the cahnging of the guard before entering.
The Presidential Palace of Vietnam, was built between 1900 and 1906 to house the French Governor-General of Indochina.
When Vietnam achieved independence in 1954, Ho Chi Minh was claimed to have refused to live in the grand structure for symbolic reasons, although he still received state guests there. He eventually built a traditional Vietnamese stilt house and carp pond on the grounds. His house and the grounds were made into the Presidential Palace Historical Site in 1975. The palace hosts government meetings.
Parts of Ho Chi Minh’s Home
Carp Pond on the grounds of the Presiential Palace
"Uncle Ho's Stilt House", is an integral part of the "Uncle Ho" legend built up by glowing Vietnamese propaganda over the years. The stilt house's design is based on traditional houses from the Vietnamese northwest, which reminded Ho (it is said) of the houses in which he took refuge from the French while he was still a revolutionary. There are only two rooms in the stilt house that contain Ho's legendary personal effects. The house even lacks a toilet—Ho was supposed to have scrapped the toilet from the original design. The void deck under the house was used by Ho as an office and receiving area for important guests.
A cute little child care group that I couldn’t resist getting a picture of
One Pillar Pagoda-a historic Buddhist temple
After going back to the hotel and checking out, we enjoyed lunch nearby.
After lunch, Brian headed to the Army Museum while the girls and I went for mani/pedis.
Unfortunately, this is where our day took a bit of a bad turn. Brian usually carries the camera bag everywhere we go and I just have my camera out of it to take photos. Since he was going for a longer walk, he left me with the bag which I set down next to the girls at the salon. I went to a nearby salon chair (with hair, etc. on the ground) and decided to leave my bag where it was, by the girls. I then moved to another seat and they ended up moving my bag a little as it was in the way of a new customer (I did not know this). We were in a rush to catch our taxi to the airport, so once we were all done, we rushed out of there…without the camera bag that had all of my lenses and video camera (I had my camera on me) AND passports in it. We didn’t realize it was missing until we were dropped off at the airport and there wasn’t enough time to go back to get it. Thankfully Alaina had taken one of the salon’s brochures so I had the number and she had taken a business card from out hotel, so I had that number. Thankfully Sudip had given me a SIM card to make calls….so I contacted the hotel to see if they could get it and we’d pay for a drive to deliver it in hopes that it would get to us on time. They had to send someone to the salon and even though it took a little while, they were able to ptu me on the phone with the salon who wanted to verify it was my bag. I was very grateful that they didn’t just give them my bag w/o getting verification. They made it to us with everything intact (thankfully there were amazing people that were trustworthy and kind!), but we had missed our flight to Ho Chi Minh City. We were especially bummed because the Suvedi family had flown there the previous day and we were going to get to see them one last time before they left Vietnam. It was definitely frustrating, but we got another hotel booked for Hanoi’s Old Quarter (even though we still had to pay for the one in HCMC) and got a taxi back.
Once we were checked in, we headed out for dinner. We walked past these stree venders, but had an Italian place in mind
Having fun making paper airplanes!
Poor Hallie-she had some allergic reaction to something (our guess what the deet in the repellant) and these red bumps showed up slowly but continued to spread all of her exposed skin. She wasn’t bothered by it, but it looked awful and people looked at her ias if she had some disesase. This was her after a few days. Brian had already gone down with her to ask the front desk at our hotel and they found someone to take them by scooter to the pharmacy. They said it was just some reaction and prescribed some cream. It eventually went away, but we were a bit nervous about it!
Last picture of the night was a funny picture. The girls had the choice of getting ice cream at the restaurant or at the ice cream stand. They chose the latter, but then had to watch mommy and daddy eat ice cream in front of them. 
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