OK, it doesn't help that I contracted some pretty vicious food poisoning when I was in HCM, but vomiting my guts out aside, I remembered the city as noisy, polluted, and various shades of grey and brown. Its main saving grace was the food - it did make me wretch out my insides at one point but it was cheap and it was awesome.
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| If you lunch with me in Vietnam, you'll need to get used to seeing empty spaces where your bowl of noodles used to be. (Read: I forgot to take a picture BEFORE I started eating, drat.) |
On planning my Big Asia Trip, I decided that I'd make time for Hanoi, for its reputation as HCM's more glamorous and cosmopolitan sister city, as well as to give the place another chance - far too many Gap year students have fawned wistfully about their time traipsing around Vietnam for me to ignore the possibility they weren't all pretentious gits. Fortuitously, EK had found a bargain Groupon for a hotel as well as round trip and tour to nearby Halong Bay - as I'll now describe, it was a great piece of luck as Halong Bay turned out to be the stand out highlight of the trip.
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| Hanoi: Ho Chi Minh, but more glamorous. |
Hanoi was definitely a more comfortable city to be in than HCM - a more spacious city, resulting in less psychotic moped drivers, resulting in two innocent tourists having a perfectly pleasant time ambling around. There's a big freshwater lake plonked in the middle of the city which was surprising and which definitely made for a more relaxed feel around the place.
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| Hanoi's West Lake |
I could pretend that Hanoi lived up to the expectation of being "a fascinating blend of East and West, with Chinese influence from centuries of dominance, and French design from its colonial past " (Source: Wikipedia, ripped off from somewhere else probably) but that would be flattering the place. I didn't find the style and architecture to be all that fascinating - but that's not to say I didn't find aspects of Hanoi to be fascinating.
It was little eateries like the one above that I found interesting. Yes, this is pretty much a corridor. And yes that's a staircase leading up to someone's living quarters.
This place served cold sweet drinks, made of ice and random colourful jelly things. I managed to spot black grass jelly, mango chunks and nata de coco, the rest of it I had no sodding clue. As is the method for sampling the local delicacies, for us it was a case of check out what everyone else was having, point enthusiastically, nod and eat whatever's given to you.
I admit, it doesn't look very impressive when I ate it already, but I can affirm to you it was tasty!
Speaking of food (as often I do), I also couldn't resist picking up a giant steamed bun on the roadside. Huge steaming fluffiness, and the fact that I had no idea what was inside (red bean? roast pork? food poisoning?) actually made it all the more alluring.
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| Mmmm giant steamed buns! As it turned out, the bun was lightly made with coconut and contained minced pork and a single quail egg inside - here's the best shot I could get using one hand whilst greedily stuffing my face with the other. |
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| Now you see it.. now its in my gob. |
Now aside from sampling the food, one of my other interests is to pick up on cultural habits wherever I go - I always think of these as mini Eureka moments when you feel you've made a big step in properly getting to know a new place. This is when you finally understand the meaning of a new chapter in this great big book I'd call Civilisation As We Know It, instead of just reading the words to get to the next page. They might be a little meaningless to someone else but to me they're valuable, and they stay with me longer than any picture postcard.
One of those moments occurred in Hanoi when we began to mooch more and more around the city streets. Back in London, you might catch up with your best friends at the pub over a pint of lager and perhaps a packet of peanuts. In Hanoi, the centres of all enduring friendships, blossoming romances, and casual poker games revolve around little red and blue plastic stools scattered on the sidewalk. Lagers turn into glasses of Tran Chanh (lemon tea) and your peanuts are - well, still peanuts, but you shell them yourselves and chuck them onto a pile on the pavement.
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| A casual scene on the sidewalk at 10pm in Hanoi |
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| Tra Chanh |
I drank about five glasses of Tra Chanh whilst I was in Hanoi - when I'm only there for two nights, consider that a drink I approve of. Lemon, ice, lime, job done. It was cheap (about 60p a glass), plentiful and thirst quenching, no wonder why all the cool kids were drinking it.
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| Cho Dong Xuan Market |
Whilst perusing the various pieces of usual market fodder at Cho Dong Xuan (mobile phone cases, 'Gukki' sunglasses and the like..), we sat down for yet more Tra Chanh at this pokey little stall. I did wonder, with the haggle of semi-interested locals manning the stall, whether this was their livelihood, or whether it was an evening job meant to bring in a little extra cash? Either way, it was their way of life - chopping and squeezing lemons casually, barely glancing in my direction after my usual maniacal pointing and prodding spectacle, chattering on with idle interest with their friends. Later on, squatting on those small plastic stools, wincing as we sipped our botched drink order attempts, we watched as they sat huddled in a circle behind the stall, munching on boiled chicken wings.
I've also popped in a few pictures here of a small shop from the market which got more than a few interested glances, and a lot of camera snapping. Depending on which way you looked it, they were either elaborate and original works of art, or someone spending far too long playing with their dried, preserved foods.
It was, as demonstrated by this post, a rather fleeting trip to Hanoi. Quite disappointing but not altogether unexpected. After the let down and bowelriffic event that was Ho Chi Minh, I really wanted Vietnam's second city to redeem itself. Sure it had its semi-scenic spots, the food was again delicious, and there were some genuine cheap knock-off shopping to be found, but the main appeal I found was in observing the local traditions - something I could observe with equal contentment elsewhere that had a more appealing landscape.
In the end,my thoughts around Hanoi can be neatly surmised in the above picture - my experience of the city being nothing more than a pleasant, fleeting, passing trip.
