| I had some business in Vietnam last week. Decided to bounce through Narita to Hanoi. 14 hour flight to Narita and another 6 to VN over China. I was there for 2 days in meetings but had a little time to tour & shop before heading back to Tokyo. I think the craziest thing about Hanoi was the traffic. I understand it's even heavier in Saigon & HCM City. It's amazing to ride around there and see how traffic works. Pretty much all cars are small. There are about 4 bicycles and 30 scooters per car on the road. During the time I was there I saw 3 legit motorcycles and a couple tuk tuk kinda things (3 wheeled truck things based on motorcycle bits). I shot some video on my phone while we were moving around town. Redlights? just a suggestion. Lines on the road? just a suggestion. direction of travel in a lane? just a suggestion. Cars are LHD over there which helped my perception of driving, but it was kinda wild to have people going headon with you occasionally. Everyone plays by the same basic rules so even as chaotic as it sounds, accidents are few and far between. The skill of the car drivers in particular is rather amazing. They have to know where the corners of their cars are at and every inch counts if you want to get anywhere in the urban areas. Lots of horn honking, but nothing rude... it's all intended to alert drivers ahead of you that you are coming into their proximity in a blindspot, or telling the other driver they really shouldn't continue to drift into your 'lane'. Track rules seem to apply.. if you have the fender advantage (even for a bicycle or scooter) you have the line. Very courteous. They don't drive particularly fast. Most of the time is < 30mph when there's traffic and the style is extremely fluid. None of the American floor it and stomp on the brakes driving, it wouldn't work well there at all. Vid of driving around in Hanoi 
Myself and a business partner in front of Ho Chi Mihn's tomb. He's in a glass case inside to view his body. He died in 1969, so it's really odd to see the mummified body.
The VN Technical School (I'm going to screw up a bunch of details here probably). Basically the place is almost 1000 years old for training Doctors. In order to be a doctor you had to study in your village, and then pass tests to go to the school. Study there and take another test to pass the boards. The tests are personally graded by the king. You pass you get to be a professional. If you fail, well... you die. There's like 83 huge stone tablets with names on them of people that have passed on one side and failed on the other. So if you know your geneology, you can trace back your family and see if there were any smart folks in the tree.
Bich Silk (haha) store while shopping. They used to grow the silk right there and then process and weave it. Now the worms are off site, but you can see the looms running in the back allies from the stores.
Pho Ga (chicken noodle soup) before I got out of country. The food is like a blend of japanese and chinese with pho instead of ramen (less salty it seemed).
So after two days in VN. I red-eyed overnight to Narita where Tetsu, Hideo & Masa picked me up at early thirty in the morning for my day long layover. We had breakfast together at the airport and then headed over to TRUST/GReddy. I hadn't been there before so this was all new to me. Tetsu had talked to his sales guy about a tour when planning for the day's activities. We ended up having a meeting. There's not much they do for the Z32 anymore besides the universal parts (boost controllers, etc), but after talking to them a bit about market size, etc. and I've seen a few folks asking for the SP1 exhaust which hasn't been available for like a decade... they have agreed that there are some older items they can go back and do short production runs on for me like the SP1. I'll follow up on this shortly. I got the tour of the place which was very impressive. They have a larger facility than I had imagined. Several dynos, in house urethane molding, laser engraving, stuff like that to support their product lines. 
I didn't ask to take pics during the tour, didn't seem to be the right thing to request considering some of the things I saw there. I toured through the R&D garages, etc. while there. 
Thanks to the good folks @ TRUST/GReddy for hosting us. Went over to NISMO HQ & got a tour there as well as a nice lunch meeting. Here's some sights from there... 
Last season's SuperGT GTR
NISMO 350Z RS
2009 SuperGT trophies
$18,000 USD GTR titanium exhaust. This thing doesn't go on a car, it goes on a wall in a frame... amazing piece of work.
Thanks to the folks at NISMO for the time, lunch, and their continued support of the ZCCA ZCONs. 
Yasu & 'B' met up with us at the airport before my departure for dinner & drinks.
And a quick 11 hour trip back home... thank God for noise canceling headphones! I debated a long time on if I was going to take a camera or just live off my 3GS. I used the phone the entire time, it takes pretty nice photos considering it is just a phone. The lifesaver for me is the gorillapod photo app (free) since it burst shoots and you can generally get 1 good photo from the burst. The other help is Tansee photo transfer for my PC. Just copying to the PC messes up the order and the numbering. Tansee maintains the internal numbering for the copy so you can make sense of your directories afterwards, unfortunately it doesn't retain the actual time of creation too.
Later
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Travels to the far east. - 
