I ate street food, banh mi and am stuffing myself full of as much tropical fruit as I can possibly eat. Leaving is only a day away and I’m trying to fit in as much as I possibly can in the day that remains.

Today we went to the Confucious temple, a large pagoda with courtyard after courtyard full of fu dogs and statues. While my sister and her mom helped the local economy, I wandered back and forth through the courtyards, taking it all in.

After eating very non-vietnamese pizza, we wandered around the old quarter, then took in a show of vietnamese water puppets – a traditionally northern thing that’s been adopted by the south because of the tourism value. Later, we took a cab ride to a restaurant that wasn’t there. A five dollar cab ride (expensive for vietnam) that ended up about 20 feet from our hotel at a little nook of a restaurant with odd food choices and a huge rat that scared the shit out of me as it ran across the floor.

Hanoi is full of greenery, lakes and trees abound. With all of this green you’d think the city would be a bit more inviting but it just seems cold and dirty. It’s smaller and less densely populated than HCMC but the pollution is overwhelming – everything is grey – and the traffic is even worse. We almost hit multiple people in our taxis today and while sitting on the terrace of a coffee shop watching the city move below us, we witnessed a motorbike accident that sent two women sprawling – luckily it was during a somewhat lull in traffic and no one hit them after they fell.

Perhaps I’m not being fair to Hanoi or perhaps I left my heart in Saigon, but there’s something about that noisy, dirty, crazy, friendly city that has this one feeling lackluster.