City of Mopeds

Beep beep! Beep beep! Beeeeeep! We’re in Hanoi! Unlike Hong Kong, Hanoi grabbed us from the start, especially once the airport taxi drove into the Old City. Not like anything we'd ever seen before and just lousy with buzz! In some tourist advertisements, Hanoi billed as the Paris of the East or Paris

of the Orient. Yeah, no. It’s not a thing like Paris, but Hanoi doesn't need to be Paris; it has its own charms. We have named it (and I’m sure we’re not alone) City of Mopeds or City of Lawless Traffic. I know that sounds bad, but in fact, it’s part of Hanoi’s charm, its buzz. A local tee-shirt bears a logo with a traffic light and says: “Green means I can go. Yellow means I can still go. Red means I can still go!” True enough! While cars may pause briefly at red lights before turning right on red into moving traffic, mopeds apparently don’t need to mind the traffic lights at all, sailing blithely through any and all lights. And there are so many of them! Weirdly, this all seems to work. You rarely see a traffic jam in the Old City—and if there is one, it’s usually because a tour bus is blocking the narrow road in front of a hotel. This seems to be the only real no-no in Hanoi traffic; if the tourists aren’t ready, the bus has to circle the block instead of waiting.

This does make crossing the street a bit scary at first! On our first day, we came to a crosswalk to find two young European girls staring open-mouthed and terrified at the green crossing light and the scads of mopeds zipping right by. “We just have to go,” I said, and shepherded them across the street. Safety in numbers? Maybe, but really, you just have to go and everyone’s paying attention and dodging and swerving around each other. We didn’t see a single accident the whole time we were there.

There’s no walking on the sidewalks, either. Well, not much. Mopeds are parked everywhere, competing for space with restaurants and shops spilling out onto the sidewalks. You pick your way around when you can, walking along the very edge of the street when you can’t, where you’re still likely to get a BEEP behind you from a moped claiming its territory. 

So much to see, so much to do, so much to eat! I’m going to write a separate entry about food and food tours, but here I’ll mention again the preponderance of restaurants geared toward Westerners. Which generally translates to pizza, pasta, and club sandwiches on the menu in addition to local food. Our first night, the hotel recommended a popular place and it was one of those. Paul wanted to leave immediately but I was hungry and tired and we both knew that finding the right place (it takes a while to feel comfortable navigating the maze of the Old City) would be challenging. The hotel said that this place served traditional food, so I asked the waiter and he pointed out the page where these were listed. And again, the food was delicious! Our first taste of a Vietnamese specialty, Chả Cá Thăng Long, that includes fish, fresh herbs, bean sprouts and salad greens, peanuts, and a fish sauce with chilis. Here it was served with sheets of rice paper, and the idea is to put some of everything on a sheet of rice paper and wrap it up like a burrito. Vietnamese fajitas! Delicious! We had several variations on this dish over the next few days.

So what’s there to do in Hanoi?

Get clothes made! While the town of An Hoi is the tailoring capital of Vietnam, there is no shortage in Hanoi. Getting garments made to order is incredibly inexpensive. Paul found a shop near the

cathedral (yes, there is one in Hanoi) called Bambou. They had a dress on a mannequin outside the shop that I really liked but I wasn’t crazy about the fabrics they came in. Paul wanted some shirts, but was also not too keen on the available fabrics. The nice woman working the shop recommended that we go to the marketplace about a half mile from there. So off we went, stopping at another place on Hong Gai (Silk Street) that had a nice dress on display, this one black and red silk. I tried on one of the ready-made ones; it was just a bit too big under the arms so could easily be taken in, so we ordered one of those. I confess that I probably paid too much for it; my bargaining skills suck. But it was still very reasonable. Everything in Hanoi is almost ridiculously inexpensive. We headed off to the market and found

She wasn't the only one taking an
afternoon nap among the bolts of fabrics!

the second floor, where there is an overwhelming abundance of fabrics. Everything is in Vietnamese, no way to tell, except by feel, what the fabrics were. We selected some cottons for Paul’s shirts, and a lovely plum fabric for my dress. Eventually. The day was hot hot hot (as were they all). In this marketplace, unlike at the shops on the streets, there was no hard sell. No “how much you want to pay?” when you were just looking; in fact, if you wanted to buy something, you’d more likely than not awaken someone from their afternoon nap. Even the locals have a hard time with the heat and humidity.

It turned out that the fabric I’d chosen for the dress was much too heavy, so we’ll send it home and save it for something else. I picked out something in the store, a navy print in a rayon blend, and both our measurements were taken. Paul ordered two shirts from Bambou, one a short-sleeved print, the other a long-sleeved shirt in a pink cotton fabric. Two more in the other shop: a long-sleeved number in this lovely light white cotton and another in a gray fabric they’d had in the store. The turnaround is incredibly quick. The next day, we picked up my dress, which was perfect. Paul’s short-sleeved shirt also fit perfectly (though the buttons on the sleeves are on the back instead of the front) but the pink shirt needed adjusting. Both shirts at the place on Hong Gai needed adjusting, and my dress was now too tight. No problem! An easy fix. And it was. The one disappointment had to do with the lovely white fabric for one of Paul’s shirts. There were weird rust-colored lines in the fabric. The shop’s owner shook her head—they’d sometimes had problems with fabrics bought at that marketplace. Flaws you couldn’t see until it was too late. She’d done a great job of placing the worst of the marks on the back of the shirt, so that it could be worn with a vest if the marks didn’t come out.

Shop! There’s no dearth of things to buy in Hanoi, and things are, as mentioned, incredibly cheap. We went to the night bazaar the first night and there was no missing the many shops all over the Old City. We did buy a few souvenirs, including a traditional non la hat for SpiderPig (they came in a pyramid of sizes!). I was a bit concerned that the saleswoman might be offended, but when I put the hat on SpiderPig, she thought it was hilarious.

Go to temples! On our last day, we went at last to the two temples that Paul wanted to see. My sweetie is an atheist who loves old cathedrals, medieval religious art, sacred music, and old temples. Go figure. We got a taxi through the hotel. Apparently, the taxi drivers will try to cheat non-locals, giving a price much higher than it should be. It’s pulling teeth to get them to actually run the meters. This would be much more annoying if it weren’t for the fact that a taxi ride is so insanely cheap, you wonder how they can afford to pay for gasoline. We got there and the place was closed for lunch. Just as well, as we realized that Paul’s shorts were too short to get into the temple anyway. (You’d think the very helpful tour person at the hotel would have known both things, but not so much. Oh well.) No worries, lunch first. Paul had found a place he wanted to try in this neighborhood outside the Old City. Walking up the street it was on, we thought we had the wrong street for sure. Kitchen supplies, one-person beauty salons (seriously, a hole-in-the-wall so tiny that the manicurist or hairdresser and client were both perched on tiny stools on the sidewalk), run-down residential housing. But no, we did eventually find it, up a few blocks, attached to a surprisingly prosperous-looking hotel. After lunch, we went back to the main drag, which had had a few men’s clothing stores. Too bad there were none of the shops selling loose cotton pants that are everywhere in the Old City. These were strictly for locals. Paul is very slender, but is much taller than pretty much any Vietnamese man we’d seen. He finally found a pair of sweatpant-like trousers that fit. Well, they fit in (shall we say) the Italian sense. That is, skin tight. In my opinion, much racier than a pair of longish shorts. Pretty funny, actually.

The ancestors are very fond of sweets!

Vietnam is not as awash in temples as is Thailand, but we did see two temples that afternoon, the first a smaller one that charged admission. Buddhas everywhere, of course, but what was really striking was all the offerings to the

ancestors on the altars. Particularly popular, in addition to fruit, are sweets—cookies, candies, and sodas. In Vietnam in particular, it seems, the ancestors have a sweet tooth.

The main event, Tran Quoc Pagoda, was built in the 6^th century, is on Hanoi’s lovely West Lake. Sure enough, we saw no knees here, so Paul was wise to don his tight trousers. A prayer service for the anniversary of a death was in progress in one area, and the temple and outdoor area were awash in offerings of snacks, sweets, and sodas. After the prayer service, paper replicas of clothing and money were burned in a brick-enclosed fire in the back.

Water puppets! One of Hanoi’s most beloved attractions and rightly so. We went on our last evening in Hanoi, after taking a rest when we got home from the temples. Did I mention that Hanoi is hot and humid? Stunningly so, to the point that we had to take breaks in between sights, going back to the

hotel for a cool shower while waiting for the air conditioning to kick in. Evening are cooler but not that much, and the humidity isn’t any better. The water puppet theatre is on the main lake on the edge of the Old City. Bars and fast food restaurant proliferate, with some nicer restaurants high up in nearby buildings. The theatre is blessedly air conditioned and the performance was so much fun. So what’s a water puppet? Just what it sounds like. The stage is water, 3 or 4 feet deep, I’m guessing.

The puppets appear from behind a curtain, acting out scenes played out on the nearby lake. Fishermen, women, fish, a tiger, soldiers telling the story of the return of a sword involving an Emperor and a Turtle God. It’s in Vietnamese, so you don’t really understand the dialogue but, like a Punch-and-Judy show, it’s pretty easy to follow. It’s charming and lots of fun and a happy way to spend an hour. Still not entirely sure how the puppets are manipulated: the actors came out to take a bow after the performance, standing in water up to about their waists. They must be on sticks, manipulated from behind the curtain. Some trick!

We really enjoyed Hanoi, humidity and all, and would be happy to return someday. Maybe not in the summer, though.

The lovely centra