Vietnam: Hanoi
Patti and I hadn’t planned on spending a week in Hanoi. It was always our intention to take a side-trip further north and break Hanoi into two meals. But as it turned out, we ate the whole damn thing in one uninterrupted bacchanalian sitting.
It’s a rich and filling meal, Hanoi. The capitol, the home of Uncle Ho, the spiritual center of Vietnam— a hustling, noisy, colorful, wonderful mad blast of a city.
We arrived on the very comfortable 12-passenger limousine van from Ninh Binh, reasonably rested and ready to fight. From our first moments on the crooked pavers, it was evident that the Old Quarter of Hanoi was a special place with lots of secrets and that we would become good friends. With its narrow streets lined with decaying French buildings seemingly holding each other up, it reminded me immediately of San Francisco’s Chinatown except it was flat and there were no Chinese characters on the signs. Oh, there were characters alright—just not on the signs. The smell of fresh fish hung in the air, and lanterns swung gently in the afternoon breeze. Wicker bins of herbs, fruits and trinkets spilled out of storefronts on both sides of the street as tourists and residents alike squeezed by, narrowly avoiding being struck by the motorbikes speeding up and down, honking
Patti and I would both be clipped by vehicles in Hanoi, actually. She by a motorbike; me by a car. No injuries of course, and neither driver even glanced let alone stopped. But it’s still unsettling to be brushed by a moving motor vehicle. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen much more, honestly—the way the traffic works. The scooters go as fast as the congestion will allow. And although that it isn’t usually very fast, they are constantly zigging for an advantage, even when that’s zagging on a sidewalk—pedestrians be damned. In reality, neither pedestrians nor scooters can use the sidewalks much, as they’re too stacked with postcard racks, Banh Mi carts, spa sandwich boards, tiny stools with low stainless steel tables and hundreds of parked motorbikes for anyone to really use them for passage. Mostly all traffic is forced to share the narrow street, which makes for some very artful dodging.
I don’t know how she did it, but Patti discovered Bia Hoi that first evening. We’d been walking around holding hands in the dying light, browsing the Sunday market and a few shops— really excited to be in a new venue. We were thinking about chasing some dinner, but figured on a beer first. I was watching for something that looked like a bar, but Patti spotted this elevated platform on the corner with a few blue resin tables inside and some Vietdudes drinking beer from plastic pint glasses. It might have been this novelty that caught her eye initially. We hadn’t been served a beer not in a bottle or can in six weeks, but these guys were drinking draft beer. It didn’t look like a bar. There was no counter or cooler, no kitchen or cash register. It was just a tiled rostrum, open to the street on two sides—more like a drinking platform.
“Let’s go in here,” Patti said without looking at me.
We stepped up into the space and approached the only empty table. Looking around we saw a girl with a tray of pints and we pointed at the table, raising an eyebrow and two fingers in the universal sign of ‘this table for two’? She shook her head no, and after setting the glasses down on one of the tables, motioned for us to follow her across the street to a smaller storefront with some chairs out on the sidewalk. She pointed to two empty ones and we sat down. There was an older man sitting on a stool pouring beers out of plastic spigot like the ones you see on Garden Street. He looked at us and I said ‘hai bia.’ He poured them and the girl brought them over.
We noticed that the 3rd corner of the 4-way intersection was also being served by this same keg. The girl and a young man were running beers in both directions, dodging motorbike traffic with trays of pints. Purely bananas. But our corner was headquarters— the source and the soul. It was an older crowd (all male, of course) and we felt honored to have been seated there. We didn’t understand why and never did learn. We visited this particular Bia Hoi (which translates to ‘fresh beer’ literally brewed that morning) two more times and were seated in one of the other two spaces by the same kids both times. The last time there, she seated us at the table we’d asked about originally, even though this time we pointed to our first seats on the hot corner. Just another of the great mysteries of Vietnam.
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There’s plenty to do in Hanoi. We went to the Temple of Literature. We spent an afternoon at the Hanoi Fine Arts Museum. We took a coffee-making workshop. We went to the Women’s Museum. We went to Train Street and Beer Street both.
But in between cultural attractions, Hanoi was a lot of eating, drinking and shopping.
Not that it was all pho and bia hoi. You can’t have Vietnamese food every night, and we did have some very good Indian (twice), sushi, and a pretty serviceable pizza in Hanoi. We enjoyed a cocktail at the historic Metropol Hotel and frequented more than one sky bar—the first of which also featured Alice & Edlin! We shopped for pottery at the remote village of Bat Trang where you can watch the artisans throwing in large and small studios alike.
But yes— there were a few Banh Mi’s and quite a few bia hois.
Also a lot of walking. All three of our hotels were in the Old Quarter, so there were very few cars taken. Most everything we did was on-foot. One of the few things that remained un-crossed off on our list of things to do in Vietnam was to take a pedi-cab. And it’s ironic that we did not take one in Hanoi since we did walk so much and since the drivers there are so persistent. Patti thinks they targeted us because we look old, but I think it was because we looked light. Those guys are super fun and we made a game out of flashing them the international sign of ‘we’re going to walk it’ which is the first two fingers of the right hand facing down and wagging in a walking motion.
And sure: the shopping. Good Hell, the shopping. The Quarter is built on shopping, offering everything from revolting plastic souvenirs (presumably made in China) to regionally-produced incense, coffee, pottery, silk, silver, communist propaganda and bamboo bongs. It’s set up like in Latin America where all the like vendors are clustered together. So not only is there a silk street and a silver street, but also a paper street, a porcelain street, a Tet decoration street, a hat street, a scissors & knives street and a brass figurine street. Plus much more. It’s wild.
Very little of the merchandise is priced. You’re forced to ask ‘bao nhieu’ (how much?) and the shopkeep looks you over, deciding where you’re from and gives you the price for your country of origin—usually more than twice what she’ll actually accept. And then I usually say a price that’s two-thirds of what she said initially and then of course we split it again. Sometimes I just gave her the first money—and this was a genuine surprise on more than one occasion. Negotiating is kind of fun with the right vendor and I think the locals do genuinely enjoy the game. And I wouldn’t want to deprive them of that, nor did I want them to disrespect me for over-paying like a chump. But it’s also exhausting, and sometimes it felt lame trying to get something for $1.45 instead of $2.10 when I would buy it at Penny Lane for $18 at Christmas without a second thought—certainly without haggling. I don’t even know how someone can manufacture, transport and retail this thing for $2. And I’m going to walk out of the shop over sixty-five cents when she knows I pay $9 for a bagel at home and then tip two bucks on top? She has the internet, she knows how fucking rich I am.
It’s part of the whole thing, and I don’t think we ever shook the invader traveler complex entirely. Especially in a place like Vietnam that has such a regrettable history with the US. The people are very warm and it does seem like they are glad to see well-behaved American tourists because we have money. But it still feels exploitive because everything is so cheap to begin with. A beer is 90 cents. The best coffees I’ve ever had are a dollar. The banh mi is $3. Nice hotel rooms are $55 (though you can get a crummy one for $15) and a ride across town in hideous traffic is $2.75. THEN tipping is discouraged. And I’m supposed to offer them half of what they tell me the already low price is? Gross!
One thing I do love about the economics of Vietnam is that it is a cash culture. I don’t think we charged 5 transactions in 6 weeks. Even some of the hotels required cash payment. It took a while to figure the money out since there are so many zeros in the equation. Like a USD is equal to 25,000 Vietnamese dong. And there are no coins of any demonination. Just paper. The thousand dong note is four cents.
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You can meet some people in nine days. Our instructor Alex from the coffee class was funny. Lan let us pet her cat. We did give some money to the old man on the corner whose panhandle tag was simply ‘money.’ (The only real asking we encountered the whole time we were in the country). But by far the best friends we made in Hanoi were at the Saturday night karaoke party. Duh.
We were strolling around the Quarter trying to decide between a nightcap and an early turn in. It might have been 10pm. We walked by a shop that had music coming from inside, and we peered in the plate glass window. There were maybe a dozen people inside— one older gent standing on a small stage with a mic in his hand a few others dancing. I thought it was a club at first and opened the door a crack. The singer smiled and motioned us in.
It was a private party of some sort in a space that may have been like a dance studio. There was no bar but there was plenty of bia and our sponsor brought three over immediately and showed us to a table. His name was Ha which means river in Vietnamese. He (Ha) was very happy we had joined the party and told us so repeatedly, almost constantly. He was definitely the karaoke host, and performed frequently including backing me up on a shredding version of Hotel California (of course) which ended in a pretty respectable air guitar jam with me in the middle flanked by River and Minh, age 73. Unlike the dapper Philip Seymour Hoffman lady’s man who danced with all the gals, Minh was more of a free-style soloist and could not be undersold when he felt like cutting. He did take time out from his interpretive jazz movement odyssey to spin Patti for a couple of numbers, however. There was also the lady in black who was a bit more serious about her karaoke than the fellas, who seemed like they were there mostly to drink and dance. She looked like maybe she was hoping to get discovered. And she did have a lovely voice…
We drank and sang and danced and laughed with these kooks for an hour, not really exchanging many details other than our names. But we just laughed and laughed. Riv told us how happy he was and Minh reminded us he was 73. It was a wonderful way to top off a Saturday night and we wouldn’t make such good friends again until we got to Tokyo a week later.
