Hanoi assaults the senses in every way.  We woke up to the sound of traffic outside our window and those noises spent the rest of the day with us.  Car horns, the sputter of scooters, the roar of buses and the clang of bicycles bells surrounded us all day.  Small children three deep on a scooter ride behind their mom on their way to school and granny clutches the back of the drive with one hand and holds on to a bag of groceries with the other as the makes her way home on a Grab a Scooter which is Hanoi’s answer to Uber.  Our first stop this morning was to the old prison known to most Americans as the Hanoi Hilton.  We learned first hand of the suffering of so many men and women.  The political prisoners who were held by the French and the American pilots who were shot down over Hanoi and  held by the Vietnamese.  The prison was designed to bring suffering, fear and death to its inmates.  The second stop was a happier place, the Museum of Ethnology.  This place honors the many different ethnic groups who came to Vietnam to escape hunger and war.  The museum was a collection of their crafts and clothing and the outside was a collection of their homes and villages.  My favorite was a house designed for the family to live upstairs and their elephants to live under the dwelling.  Sorts of like an American beach house.  Just when we thought we were on sensory overload when visited the Temple of Literature which is the oldest university in Hanoi.  Today was graduation day in Hanoi and the custom is for graduates to come to the temple for group pictures, individual pictures and  to celebrate their accomplishments.  They burn joss sticks when they pray and show their gratitude to the spirits.  We stopped by to pay our respects to Uncle Ho and to visit his stilt house.  He was not at home, but is in Moscow being reembalmed.  It was ok with us to miss him.  We spent time in a local park where two 12 year olds practiced their English and Troy let them use his camera to take pictures.  A water puppet show and a rickshaw ride back to the hotel ended the day.  The puppet show was wonderful and the rickshaw bicycle ride scared the daylights out of us.  Now it is time to recharge for tomorrow.