It was an eye opener for us to be in the countryside, seeing terrace cultivation, outlines of mountains and mountains, experiencing the beauty of UNESCO world heritage site – Ha Long Bay. I did a video as well.

Here’s the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS5dL9j2iJo

It’s a drastic change compared to city life. People’s lifestyle in the Sapa villages are less developed, slower. Children there are seen to be playing with traditional games like marbles. They were left to play on their own by the streams, on the soil.

Landscape in Sapa Village

Village children enjoying themselves

However, the first thing I was overwhelmed is the traffic in Hanoi city: endless honking of the motorcycles. We hardly use traffic lights to cross the busy roads, we simply walk across quickly. It’s amazing how the locals travel around the busy roads. Traffic is a big part of our experience in Hanoi!

Imagine having to cross this road without traffic lights!

A common sight in Hanoi is that you will find locals, young and old sitting by the road side for a cup of tea, eating a bowl of noddles (known as ‘Pho’) or just catching up with one another. We have a few experiences too. You got to be willing to exchange air con with road side air and don’t expect cleanliness that of Singapore!

Me at street side, waiting for my corn and sweet potato

From Wikipedia:

The Tower of Hanoi or Towers of Hanoi (also known as The Towers of Brahma) is a mathematical game or puzzle. It consists of three rods, and a number of disks of different sizes which can slide onto any rod. The puzzle starts with the disks neatly stacked in order of size on one rod, the smallest at the top, thus making a conical shape.

The objective of the puzzle is to move the entire stack to another rod, obeying the following rules:

• Only one disk may be moved at a time.
• Each move consists of taking the upper disk from one of the rods and sliding it onto another rod, on top of the other disks that may already be present on that rod.
• No disk may be placed on top of a smaller disk.

This might be a simple game but it is a great tool to train your logic thinking.

Play the game here: http://www.mazeworks.com/hanoi/index.htm

You can try it with different number of disks. They even added the challenge of completing the game in the minimum moves. Solution is also provided should you face challenges in completing!

Have Fun!

For those who are interested in the history of this games, read more here.

I will be back in the next post to discuss on different approaches to a Additional Mathematics on Identity which falls in the topic of Factor Remainder Theorem. Look out for the next post!

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Photo Credit:psd

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