I arrived in Hanoi at about 12pm yesterday but then had to wait for an hour to get my visa. They had created this great system where you fill in a form, give them a passport photo (which they attach to the form by putting a staple through your forehead), hand in your passport (they don't take the form) then go through the gateway and wait on the other side with the 60 or so other people who arrived at the same time and also filled in the form and handed in their passports. We formed an orderly queue (of course) but then after waiting for half an hour, realised that they were just shouting out names randomly. So the queue became a rugby scrum out of which people slowly emerged, slightly battered, clutching their passports like they were winning lottery tickets and looking extremely relieved.
After I'd fought my way through (and paid 50 dollars for the pleasure) I was picked up by a lovely little man (nothing dodgy, it had been arranged) and driven to my hotel. It was cool to see all the rice paddies with people working in them wearing their little conical hats and kids herding buffalo with sticks.
First impressions are of very friendly, smiley people and parts of the scenery reminded me of Bali. It suddenly occurred to me that previous homes I've had in Asia (Daejeon in Korea and Hong Kong) were much more affluent and therefore not that different from what I was used to. Vietnam is nothing like them. There is obviously a lot of poverty here and it's clear that English is not widely used. It's going to be interesting to see how I cope with that.