The Hanoi Airport is built away from the city. As we flew in, through the low clouds and sprinkling rain, we couldn’t discern where the city was located. The area around Hanoi has a different settlement pattern than I have seen in the rest of Viet Nam. Here, along the Red River, villages dot the land surrounded by rice paddies and farm fields. It reminds me of what I would see in Europe where farmers lived in the villages and walked to their fields to work. The villages weren’t far from each other, just 3 or 4 kilometers, but their houses were tightly packed. The fields around them, in contrast had few structures if any. This farmland would stretch to the next village and the pattern was repeated.
Diep met us at the airport, by now a familiar routine.
In the 45-minute drive to the city center, he handed us a map of the downtown area and told us about the locations we would visit the next day. The maps he handed us were photocopies. I couldn’t read the map well. Many of the names didn’t copy well or were obliterated by the maze of streets; in fact I could never find the name of the street that our hotel was on. Chrissy paid attention to Diep as I looked out the window. I tried to listen to the main points: our hotel and where the night market was. He also warned us about eating in various restaurants. There had been an outbreak of diarrhea in Hanoi in the days before our visit. Diep told us that only 50 people in the city had been hospitalized that day. Down considerably from previous days. Chrissy had read about this on the plane in one of our newspapers. Diep said, “The safe restaurants are the crowded restaurants. If you see many people eating there, it is ok.” Diep dropped us at our hotel. I gave the bellboy a paltry sum, 10,000 Dong, for his lugging our bags up to the 9th floor. He didn’t smile. The elevator took us to the 8th and then we had three short flights of stairs to climb to our room. We had arrived in Saigon with a bag for each of us, but we had both added bags. Chrissy bought a graduation present for Jess, a knock-off designer bag and I bought a knock-off North face backpack. We had filled them both with gifts and souvenirs and still had other shopping bags of things that wouldn’t fit. I wouldn’t have smiled either.
Our main goal for the evening was finding an ATM and withdrawing 2 million Dong, ($125). We had exhausted our cash in Hoi An and I didn’t want the bellboy or others scowling at me the rest of the time we were in Hanoi. We quickly found an ATM. Unlike Japan the Vietnamese have very convenient resources for getting money. Every corner had an ATM. Not all of them worked, but they were available. In Japan, we have found only one ATM, which will accept international debit cards. I have heard a rumor that there are others in Kobe, but I haven’t looked for them yet.
Our time to kill looking for dinner and the night market took us to the center of old Hanoi.
The center of the old city surrounds a lake with a park around it. In the middle of the lake there is a pagoda built on a marshy rise. To the north end of the lake is an island with a shrine built on it. Our tour schedule would take us to that shrine later. We walked south through the park and the many people who sat around gazing at the lake. The lake was small, but it was a lake like this in which John McCain landed after being shot down. The people McCain had been attacking rescued him from drowning, but they also beat him before authorities took him. As we walked around this little lake, I wondered where McCain’s lake was located in relation to the city.
Our walk took us completely around the lake. Back at the north end of the lake we ducked into the warren of streets to look for a place to eat near the night market. We found a restaurant that served some vegetarian dishes and went upstairs to eat. The table we sat at still had a beer bottle from the previous dinner. It stayed there for our entire dinner. There were other open tables, but this was the cleanest one we could find. Two other tables had people at them, a group of local people and another with a couple of westerners. As we began to eat, Chrissy started to question the wisdom of eating at this particular restaurant.
I assured her that we were in a fine enough restaurant and that she didn’t need to worry. Chrissy has a problem when it comes to food from sources not entirely known to her. In France years ago, she was convinced that we had crab in our spaghetti. The waiter assured us it was vegetarian. The old couple sitting next to us tried to assure us too, but their actions convinced Chrissy that we were eating some form of sea life that had lobster or crab. They kept on saying “Ai, ai,” and reaching out with their hand pinching the air as they said it. It made her sick. Later we found out ‘ai’ means garlic.
Even with Chrissy’s minor psychological problems we continued our walk through the night market. The sales people aren’t nearly as aggressive in Hanoi as they were in Saigon. No one drug us into their stalls to sell us anything. I even spent sometime looking at items more closely without anyone trying to sell things to me. They spoke English well enough. They answered my question when I would ask, “how much?” But they were just more relaxed in their sales approach.
On our way out of the market, we saw a group of about five police officers closing one of the lingerie shops. They were grabbing bras off of the rack and stuffing them into a big black garbage sack. The young woman running the stand protested, but evidently she didn’t have the right permission or paper work to sell on the street. She stepped into the store closest to her stall and tried to get someone who did have the right paper work to come out and help her. I never saw anyone come to her rescue.
We made it back to the hotel by about 9:00 pm that night and by the time we got there, my photocopied map had disintegrated. We had a busy schedule in the morning.
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