Flood Video: Day 2

The Hanoi flood continued for a second day. When I woke up I could still hear rain falling outside. What I could also hear was the sound of water falling into puddles. Turns out, puddle was my whole street. The water level kept getting higher and higher and the rain seemed to be getting stronger and stronger.

We called our landlord and asked her about our garage door. She told us there was a chain we could pull to manually get the door down. In the darkness from the night before we could see the chain was was coiled up on top of the garage door. I piled up the kitchen chairs and unwound the chain to open the door. I then went over to the neighbors and moved our bikes back into my house. After that Huyen and I had a new mission -- go to her apartment and get her stuff.

The two of us decided to walk to her house since the roads were a car/motorbike graveyard. Everywhere you looked were cars stuck in the water. The two of us trecked through the streets for about forty five minutes until we came to a slight obstacle: the road to Huyen's house was about waste deep and by far the dirties water I've ever seen. Huyen asked a woman who was walking towards us about the conditions ahead. It didn't take Vietnamese language skills to read her body language. Huyen turned to me and said, "Okay, lets go back. She says it is much worse ahead."

So Huyen and I turned around and gave ourselves a new mission -- finding food. We went into a couple of markets and little side grocery stores and bought all the food we could carry. We had no idea how long the flood would last and wanted to be safe rather than sorry. Here's some great video from the second day of the food. Check out the overflown lake!!!!...that's where the fish in front of my house must have come from.