Brother Has Landed

After spending 19 hours in the Taipei airport, my brother finally arrived in Hanoi. Why 19 hours you wonder? I will address that quickly. See my brother is cheap. Very cheap. So cheap in fact that he would do his laundry in his dorm rooms in college in a bucket and hang them on strings in his room instead of paying the dollar to do it in the machines. Therefore, when he got a flight to Vietnam that required him to be at the airport before the buses would pick him up, he decided that he would just take the bus to the airport the night before and sleep in the airport to save money. Great idea. Only problem was that come morning his flight was delayed however many hours. So he sat and sat and sat in the airport. Enough said.

I'm glad he got there safely. He said he took the shuttle to the hostel and warned me that it should only cost me $2 when I take it. In all seriousness, I'm super excited to be traveling with my brother and so appreciative that he is giving me this heads up. Unfortunately, I land at 10pm on Saturday evening after the shuttles stop so I set up to have the hostel send a driver. You would think that this would be the safer option. However, I did have to laugh when I got this email from the hostel:

PLEASE BE AWARE OF THE FOLLOWING SCAMS

Please be aware that taxi drivers and some shuttle buss drivers for that matter, are paid commission to take customers to other budget hotels and these hotels will tell you we are full, close or they are our sister hostel, this is completely untrue. They sometimes even use our flyers or signs - making you believe that you are at the right spot or they are there to pick you up. If this happens to you stay in the car/bus and wait for them to take you to your destination or shuttle stop or find a taxi a different taxi and show them the address on the booking sheet or the download the flyer on our website.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have to take back the idea that I don't need to have a clue where my hostel is because I'm getting picked up by a hostel driver. :) Darn.

Kenny says the hostels great and the city is crazy. No rules was how he put it.

He is there scooting out potential day trips for us and trying to get a lay of the land. We came into this trip having some idea of what we wanted to do but knowing that we had to be flexible. And it's a good thing too.

Chinese New Years. The most important of the traditional Chinese holidays begins on Sunday.

All of a sudden I feel like I'm back in Morocco. Kenny tells me that tours are few and filling up quickly. "What should we do?" he emails me.

We shall see.