THE STREETS OF HANOI

(Vietnam Vacation Part 2)

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Before leaving for Vietnam, Paul found a website with travel information that had an article titled: “What is A Good Guesthouse in Hanoi?”.  They recommended a family run place in the Old Quarter as being friendly, clean, quiet, well located with hot water, air-conditioning and cable TV. Monday, Paul sent the hotel an e-mail asking about reserving a room. Tuesday, they responded that rooms were $14 and a driver could meet us at the airport for $13.  We left the USA Thursday morning, but due to the international dateline and time zones, after a 29 hour voyage we arrived at 10:30 PM Friday night, December 29.  Sure enough, the first thing we saw after exiting customs was a sign with our names on it. What a welcomed sight! After a 45 minute drive, we were in our room and quickly crashing. So far, so good!!

The next morning, the first order of business was breakfast. Now two eggs over easy, pancakes and sausage were a little hard to find, but that was okay because Lois doesn’t like breakfast food. In fact, her main reason for coming to Vietnam was so she could have some sort of noodles every morning for breakfast! We set out from our guesthouse, walked around the block and found a street kitchen with Pho Ga which is soup with lots of rice noodles, some vegetables and a few chunks of chicken. On the table there was some cilantro, hot sauce and other spices so you could customize your Pho.

What is a street kitchen? We are stealing the term from the Rough Guide to Vietnam. It breaks eating establishments into the following categories: street food, street kitchens and restaurants. Street food is when a woman sets up shop on the sidewalk. She might have three or four stools, possibly a coal fired stove, some dishes and a big steaming pot of a particular dish.  These are literally all over the place in Hanoi. Slightly classier is a street kitchen. This is a small, very low overhead storefront or possibly front room in someone’s house. They have a few tables with stools, a gas fired burner or cooktop and typically serve up only a few dishes. For us, the easiest street kitchens have "com binh dan" which means they prepare a number of meals and you choose what you want. No need for menus or Vietnamese, just pick and point! Restaurants are more or less what we think of at home. The cheaper ones may not have menus amd certainly not English menus. The upscale ones have English menus, staff that speak English etc.

Now, back to that Pho Ga. As some of you know, Lois is a “seafood vegetarian”, which means she tries not to eat chicken if she can avoid it and definitely not beef or pork. So, Lois had plain Pho (without the Ga) and Paul had the chicken. It proved to be a very hearty and filling breakfast and guess what? It cost 50¢. For the two of us!

Another excellent breakfast we had was Banh Cuon. We found a street kitchen where you walk in, sit down and they didn’t even ask you what you wanted because all they served was Banh Cuon. It consisted of paper thin steamed rice flour pancakes that were freshly cooked, stuffed with minced pork and mushrooms (no stuffing for Lois) and then covered with fried shallots. We dipped them in a sweet fish sauce with some cilantro and mint. Excellent! We’re getting hungry for more just writing this. Banh Cuon was a little expensive at $1.25 for the two of us for breakfast, but we decided to splurge!

It has taken us a little while to learning how to walk on the streets in Vietnam. Besides the constant blaring of horns and total disregard for (or, perhaps, lack of) rules of the road, the big difference has been the sidewalks. We might think sidewalks are for walking on, but not in Vietnam. They are for either parking your motorbike or setting up your street food stand. This forces pedestrians to walk in the streets or zig-zag in and out from the sidewalk to the street and back again. At every intersection, there are moto and bicycle rickshaw drivers eager to offer you their services.

Crossing the street involves walking slowly and at a consistent pace toward the other side of the street. This is so that the moto drivers will see you and weave around you. If you were to try and run across, you would be breaking the unwritten set of pedestrian rules and surely end up in a hospital! So, the only way to make consistent progress on foot is to walk purposefully and steadily, ignoring the traffic and hope that the drivers see you. Not exactly a relaxing way to get around, but it seems to work.

One way of avoiding walking in the street is to take a taxi or the bus. We wanted to see the Museum of Ethnology, dedicated to the cultures of the various ethnic minorities in Vietnam. The six mile taxi ride would have cost about $3 or we could have taken the bus for 40¢. We decided it was time for a little adventure so this meant it had to be the bus (okay, okay, in reality we just wanted to save $2.60!).  Our guidebook had the bus we wanted to take and where to get it. Paul had someone write down the name of the museum in Vietnamese. We got on the bus, paid our fare and showed the ticket taker the piece of paper with the name of the museum on it. No problem, he told us where to get off and someone pointed us toward the museum. It didn’t turn out to be much of an adventure after all.

The Museum of Ethnology was absolutely wonderful. We probably spent about 5 hours there. It was in a very modern and well laid out building with extremely informative displays. We learned about the startling number of ethnic minorities, their customs, culture, the types of houses they build and the types of clothes they wear.  Best of all, it helped get us psyched for the next part of our trip to the Northern Highlands of Vietnam where we hope to spend some time in a number of minority villages.

Another place we wanted to see was the French built opera house. It looked stately and beautiful from the outside, but to see the inside, we had to buy tickets for a performance. January 1 they had a show with popular love songs and dancing to welcome in the New Year. We figured we would check it out so we bought two second row center tickets for $13 each. There were a number of singers who sang a variety of popular English and Vietnamese love songs and there were a few dance numbers. It was interesting to see American culture reflected back at us through the Vietnamese lens. The opera house was certainly beautiful on the inside, but the performance didn’t match its environs. Lois thought it was “quaint” and Paul thought it was a bad version of American Idol.

There are no super markets here, but there are tons of small family run stores and they tend to be grouped by product. In other words, there is one street that has about 15 opticians on it, another area with mostly appliance stores, another with car parts etc. There seems to be an abundance of everything available to the consumer and we see lots of purchasing. If your idea of communism is ladies waiting in long lines to buy food or consumer goods at stores with bare shelves, that might describe Cuba or North Korea, but certainly not the Vietnam of today.  From our limited perspective, at street level, it looks a lot more like capitalism than communism.

Of the five days we spent in Hanoi, about half of the time has been spent visiting museums and other sites and the other half just walking around, checking out the sights, sounds and smells of the city. We have seen a number of beautiful buildings and pagodas, heard a lot of car horns and smelled and eaten some wonderful food. Tomorrow morning, we are planning on taking an early bus to Mai Chau, the first stop on the way to the Northern Vietnam Highlands.

As a final note, we have spent New Year’s Eve in many countries over the years and either we’re getting older and more boring, or else not much happens in Vietnam for New Year’s. We didn’t look real hard, but we didn’t see any tourist restaurants or hotels advertising anything special for New Year’s.  So, we were sound asleep when it occurred and didn’t hear a single firecracker, horn, noise maker or anything. Maybe they were saving it all for Tet (the lunar New Year). In any event, we wish you all a Happy New Year!

Paul & Lois
Hanoi, Vietnam
January 4, 2007

 

Vietnam Vacation Part 1                 Vietnam Vacation Part 3

 

All content is copyright © Paul Schneider, 2007.