I walked the busy street back towards Hoan Kiem Lake & the Water Puppet theatre,,, shopping for gifts along the way. I had an hour or so to kill before meeting up with the girls at the theatre,, and the 6:20 show was already sold out =/

So I visited the Ngok Son Temple, in the middle of the lake, in the meantime. There is a legend about this lake involving a great tortoise who bears the sword that the ancient kings used to repel the Mongolian hordes & repeated Chinese attacks from the North in centuries past… Tortoise sightings here seem as mystical as the Lochness monster, except one of the giant tortoises is embalmed in a glass case in the temple.