Shopping

The flood waters have receded, I'm back to a normal schedule, and we finally got to have Halloween in my English class at Blue Dragon. Thanks to some construction paper and several pounds of candy that mom sent from the States, a good time was had by all.
I've also been able to go out and do a little bit of shopping. Shopping is kind of a big deal here. Tourists love to shop in the Old Quarter for bargains and souvineers. Vietnamese people love to ask people how much they paid for everything. And expats like to exchange info on where to get the stuff they miss from back home. I got to fill someone in today on where to get full-sized stick deodorant, and I got a good lead on where to get tortillas.

My dress shoes were soaked in the floods, and I tried to clean them up a couple of times, but they kept getting all moldy. I eventually tossed them because I didn't want to get some kind of foot rot. So I went shopping for some new ones. My friend Paul took me to a place where he got some shoes and hooked me up.
They were 350,000 Dong. Which is pretty good considering they were designed by Italy.
I mean, if an entire country put everything on hold to design a pair of shoes, they gotta be worth $21.58. Plus they're slip-ons, which is handy around here.

There are all sorts of bargains to be had in Hanoi if you know where to look, and there are lots of interesting products too. For example, hygene products named after America's fattest president.
And you know how people like to point out that "Evian" is "naive" spelled backward? Well here they spell it right.
You can get women's beauty drink...
...young rice, green tea, and peanut ice cream......American ginseng drink......Batman 5......and moon cakes with "Chinese sausage", "fin of fish", and "gac oil" on the list of ingredients among a lot of other things. I still haven't found any Ben and Jerry's ice cream. It's probably not going to happen. But this week I have found contact solution, my favorite hot sauce, and a can of cranberry sauce that I'm saving for Thanksgiving.
So, it was a good week for shopping.