A few more days in Ninh Binh

A few days in Ninh Binh and the sky was gray – all the time. What to do the whole day? Hard to say but before you realize it – the day is gone – the sun goes down and dinner is on the table. So for you this post with pictures from two days.
Wake up late – check the sky – GRAY :-(
Have coffee and cookies and if I was up early we went for a soup next door. Waiting for dinner and talk to the guys. Sometimes we did something.
And sometimes something happened at the hotel. One day a wedding was underway and the soon to be husband with family stayed at the hotel. They all dressed nice and lots of decoration was brought to the hotel. I took some pictures for you.

Gifts for the bride. In Vietnamese beliefs the red colour will bring luck to the young couple.

Betel leaf with areca nut as traditional gifts

The words “song hỷ” are carved into a mellon as the Chinese character 囍. Here they used hearts and not squares. That means double happiness. Or happy together if you like :-)

Waiting for the rest of the family. You see a decorated lacquer boxes, covered in red cloth on the right of the table. And some more gifts on the left.

The other night I was invited to Thanh place for dinner. The whole family prepared a meal. That was interesting since I could take a look at another house and the customs there again.
Food was good and so was the local firewater.

Happy at the YAMAHA shop. Viet brought his scooter in for repairs and we had to wait for it to be finished. The girls were happy with me and needed a few snaps. I like that – it is an easy way of making a few ppl happy with absolutely no effort!

Next we went to a gold shop to change money. And on the other side of the street, I see this. Ahhh Indian Food! Let’s go there quick. Turns out that they serve something strange which I really want to eat only once. Some baked little pastry or something.

Gray with a few drops of rain. Well – another one of these days…

Next stop: the park in Ninh Binh. Not sure if it is the only one but it is big and is in the center. As you can see the Vietnamese learn to drive very early. Still, it does not help. I would say they are in the lower 10% if it comes to proper driving.

The wheel saw better times as well. There were a few girls playing and they where happy when we walked past it. Time to try some of the English they learned in school.

This was the saddest thing of the whole winter 2016/2017 trip: Poor animals at the park in Ninh Binh

A few cages with monkeys

Sweets for the monkey. There was a woman selling sweet stuff to feed the monkeys. Should sell bananas or whatever the monkey needs. But not sweet stuff with sugar…

Rare birds? Nope – the usual city birds. In a small cage…

More monkeys

Well together with the sky this makes for an another sad display

The Breakdance kid's had fun. A few minutes later one of the gardeners saw me and gave me two 10 liter cans of water and signaled me that I should follow him. He brought me to a small patch of land with some seedlings and instructed me how to pour the water over them. Strange but a lot of fun! Since I have my personal Vietnamese translator I could ask all the questions about the strange park I wanted. Which is nice.

Searching for a coffee place – a local one – we stumbled over this nice pool.

The Mikoyan-Gurevich 21

Better know as the MIG-21 or the Fishbed as the soldiers from the US called the plane in the last war. It does not look much but they managed to shoot some US planes out of the sky. Hit and run – do not wait for an air fight. You might lose it! That was the name of the game. Usually, the North attacked head-on with some MIG-17 and the MIG-21’s came from the back. The F4 Phantom was easy outmaneuvered and the NVA shoot down a lot of them.
After almost 1000 lost US planes America had to change something. The NAVY opened their “TOPGUN” school and the USAF started a similar program. And they put different planes in the sky as well that could deal better with the light and agile MIG-21