After lunch, we took a walk around Sapa, which consists of a couple of streets and easily explored in less than an hour. The weather was cool (or maybe cold) and I would estimate it to be around 15 degrees. After walking around for 30mins, I gathered people in Sapa can be broadly classified into 3 groups, namely 1) Vietnamese: Visitors (from other parts of Vietnam) and shop keepers, dressed cleanly in thin make-up 2) Foreign tourists: I would like to name them as Farangs, they consists of mid-range tourists and backpackers, hanging around to enjoy the scenery and surrondings 3) Minority Groups (mainly Black Hmong): The black Hmongs come from the nearby village to buy groceries from the market. They also tried to gather extra income by selling tribal clothing and accessories to foreign tourists. Though it seems that the minority groups will greatly outweigh the farangs.

Some of the Hmongs (a.k.a The Miao if pronouced in Chinese) are excellent English speakers, mostly with the Amercian accent. This greatly helped them in communicating with the farangs, making some friends while doing the all-important sales pitch. There is nothing wrong with this, I mean, they were after all earning a living through honest ways. In fact, it was through this way that I came to knew 2 Hmong girls and experienced wonderful hospitality. While I will elaborate later, I noticed that they can pick up a language with reasonable efficiency. I suppose this is useful since with the ability to communicate, better understanding can be created. I thought I interacted alot more to Hmongs more than I spoke to the Vietnamese during the trip.

Perhaps it was partly our fault that we didn't bother to pick up vietnamese as well.