Getting out of Cambodia was surprisingly pleasant. First, when we’d dashed through the Siem Reap airport on arrival, after 30+ hours of travel, I think our eyes were too crusted over to properly appreciate how pretty the interior is. It’s a graceful homage to traditional bamboo construction, and is a genuinely beautiful space.

The second unexpected pleasure was checking in to our Vietjet Air flight. We’re always very careful about checking baggage restrictions for each airline we fly, because they vary so dramatically. In this case we were given a generous allotment of 30kg for one checked bag each, but our combined carry-on and personal item could weigh no more than 7kg each, which is nothing. Each of our carry-on bags, empty, is 3.5kg.

The only way we could figure to get our combined carry-on weight to 14kg was to cram full one of the bags we usually carry on and check it. According to the airline’s website, the extra bag would be about $19. I tried to add that third bag online but it wouldn’t work, so we’d have to negotiate that at check-in.

After getting the third bag weighed and checked, the agent shows me a calculator displaying 59. Which is outrageous, as it was $19 on the website. After some back and forth, I figure out that 59 is the combined weight of all three of our bags, and because we have a total allotment of 60kg between us, all good, thank you very much, everything is free.

Can you even imagine a Western airline reaching that conclusion? In your dreams. What a lovely introduction to Vietnam.

And, of course, they never weighed our carry-on.

The Old Quarter: Hanoi Rocks

We’re staying right in The Old Quarter of Hà Nội, and it’s pretty much the reason we came to Hà Nội at all. Much like the Medina in Marrakech, to which it bears more than a passing resemblance, The Old Quarter is a centuries-old commercial center, with plenty of callbacks to its historic past.

The area has been a commercial and arts center since the 11th century, with its current footprint dating to the 15th century. It’s also known as 36 Old Streets, although today there’s about 70 total streets in the jam-packed square kilometer that makes up the district. The 36 Streets refer to the 36 historic guilds responsible for individual arts, each relegated to a specific street. Echoes of those old guilds still reverberate in the shops that occupy the Old Quarter today.

These are just some of the streets where the modern mix of shops calls back to the historic guilds. Hàng Bạc Street: silver; Hàng Mã: religious goods and festival decorations; Hàng Gai: silk; Lãn Ông: traditional medicines; Hàng Thùng: bucket and barrel makers; Hàng Tre: bamboo; Hàng Đào: clothing; Hàng Đường: sweets… There is a Pudding Street. And, clearly, a god.

We are staying on Hàng Chiếu, the Street of Mats, historically known for the concentration of reed weavers. There are still plenty of shops specializing in mats and woven totes. Our doorway is literally flanked with vibrant reed weaving. Dorothy is in heaven. She has a particular fondness for totes made of woven reed or plastic, so she can satisfy that craving entirely within inches of our door.

We have six weeks in Hà Nội, with plenty of day and overnight trips planned to take advantage of the North’s ridiculous natural beauty and vibrant culture. But we won’t be neglecting the Old Quarter, and hope to report fully on as many of its 36 streets as we can.

This greeted us from the cab on our way in from the airport. I have been unable to find any information about it. Perhaps because it’s unexceptional? It was still a pretty cool welcome from Hà Nội.

Our Apartment

Let’s settle on quirky. Quirky is good.

It’s actually fine. But it does have a couple of notable quirks. The first is the entrance.

The next endearing quirk is in the apartment itself, the kitchen specifically.

I can hear you: “Well, that seems like a lovely kitchen. Adequate counter space, plenty of dishes, full size refrigerator, useful appliances. How nice.” “But, wait,” you continue. “On mature reflection, where the fuck is the sink?”

On the balcony, of course. You can be very, very silly sometimes. It’s why I love you.

The bathroom is probably more challenge than quirk. There isn’t a dedicated shower, it’s just the area between the sink and toilet. And that toilet is very close to the wall. I can sit on it properly with my stubby legs, but Dorothy’s more generous, less pliable gams force her to sit sideways.

Plus, we’re not supposed to flush toilet paper. We obviously had bidets all throughout our last leg, as we were exclusively in Muslim countries, but I have to confess I never used one. I was confused by the geometry. I was convinced that I would spray either up my back or front, rather than properly Down Below. You’ll be thrilled, I’m sure, to learn that I can bidet myself without getting the walls wet. And you’re welcome for that image.

The rest of the apartment truly is fine, even comfortable. There’s a switch for the hot water heater, so we have to wait about ten minutes before there’s hot water available, but we’ve had that before, in Chetumal. We get it. It’s expensive to keep hot water heated 24/7, and we’re happy to help keep our host’s business model in balance.

It’s a 3rd floor walkup, which here means that you climb two flights. Some places, like Cambodia, don’t count the ground floor as 1, so a 3rd floor walkup is three flights. We didn’t know until we got here whether we’d be walking up two flights or three.

Since Dorothy’s mishap in Cambodia, we’ve adopted a new stair protocol: I am always below her. In front of her going down, behind her going up. We refer to my role as Meat Cushion. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

There’s another critical component of our Airbnb lifestyle in addition to the apartment itself, and that is, of course, our hosts. We have had many, many excellent hosts. Hosts who have helped us solve local problems. Hosts (sadly, plural) who have taken us to the hospital. Hosts who have brought us delicious baked goods.

But An, our Hà Nội host, is working hard to top that list. She and her delightful daughter, An Binh (both their names mean Peace), came to our apartment for its first weekly cleaning and stayed to provide a home-cooked traditional Vietnamese dinner. There was some kind of shrimp cake with whole shrimps baked in, several fried things in tubes, filled with delicious I-don’t-know, little patties of rice noodles and greens to wrap them in, dipping sauce, a dessert of sweet soup and sticky rice, and fresh longan on the stem. And green tea that had been stored in a lotus flower and made fresh.

Home-cooked meal #2, we are told, will be a traditional Vietnamese hotpot. Or as An called it, a food sauna.

Somehow we mentioned going to the flower market, and without looking it up I recalled that it was called Quảng Bá. I said Kwahng Bah, and both An and An Binh looked at me and then each other. They finally figured out what I’d meant to say, and after recovering from a fairly alarming fit of laughter, An Binh took some time to try to teach Dorothy’s mouth how to make the vowel sound in Quảng.

Which brings us to learning Vietnamese, or trying to. As the above clip demonstrates, Vietnamese vowels are slippery, due to the tonal component. In American English we use tones to modify the meaning of a sentence. A rising tone indicates a question, a falling tone indicates that we’ve completed a thought, but it doesn’t go much farther than that. A changed vowel tone certainly doesn’t indicate a completely different word in English. Or Southern drawls would be unintelligible. More unintelligible.

In fact, regional dialects in the US are all about shifting vowel sounds. A d is pretty much a d everywhere, but the vowels go every which way. When we moved to Rhode Island I was shocked to discover that sauce was a multisyllabic word. Suh-wass. But it still meant sauce.

Put another way, English has 19 different vowel sounds. Vietnamese has twenty-one vowel sounds (twelve basic vowels and nine diphthongs) and six distinct tones that modify the vowels and completely alter both the sound and the meaning of a word. Ma means ghost. Mà means but. Má means mother. Mả means tomb. Mã means code. And mạ means rice seedling. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard to get an accurate count, but most folks agree that Vietnamese has over 100 vowel sounds.

Even less of a surprise, not only can’t we make the sounds of those tonal vowels, as Dorothy proves above, we can’t even hear them. We’ve lived our whole lives only needing to hear and know 19 vowel sounds, and now we’re swimming in over 100? After Cambodia, who’s Khmer alphabet is completely alien, we thought Vietnamese might have an easier uptake since we share an alphabet. But do we? Really? Not when a, à, á, ả, ã, and ạ are all different letters.

Here’s a good one. Cảm ơn means thank you. Câm mồm means shut up. The biggest difference is the intonation on that last vowel. Rising and it means thank you. Falling, as I’ve been pronouncing it, and you’ll be heard to say shut up.

At the end of the day, it’s still pretty much like everywhere else we’ve been. Their English is better than our Whatever, and that’s how we get by. But we did way better with Turkish and the Arabic dialects in Morocco and Tunisia, so our utter failure with Khmer and Vietnamese is a little disheartening. Here’s to butchering Indonesian on our next leg.

Mercados

For convenience, this may be the best shopping location we’ve ever had. Obviously we’re at Ground Zero for handicrafts, but we are, more importantly, hard by the largest traditional market in Hà Nội, Chợ Đồng Xuân, the Đồng Xuân Market. The Đồng Xuân offers three floors of shopping, with the first floor given over to wholesale and retail vendors of all stripes, from fresh meats to hard goods. Hats, cosmetics, sunglasses, backpacks, souvenirs, handbags, bras…

We had seen pictures and we’d noticed that the upper floors seemed to have quite a bit of fabric. What we hadn’t realized is that half the second floor was textiles, with the other half and the third floor given over to ready made. We wound up a three minute walk from one of the largest textile bazaars in Vietnam. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

Which won’t keep us from going to Hom Market, the largest textile market in the city. It’s only a mile and a half from us, and will probably be a full-day field trip of its own.

We also visited the mall on our first full day here, which isn’t in the neighborhood. While we love the traditional markets, it’s hard for Dorothy to cook without the stuff available in a hypermarché, and the nearest mall was so blessed. Plus, while we’re not enamored of mall culture, it’s always interesting to see its vernacular expression. The Lotte Mall West Lake did not disappoint.

For starters, it’s pretty fucking big. Even by mall standards. Five stories, with more focus on children and experience than I expect from a mall. Not that there isn’t shopping and eating. There’s the full complement of upscale retail, from Polo and Lagerfeld to Hermès and Chanel. There’s restaurants, from food court to fine dining. As expected.

But there’s also Kidzania, where you can drop Der Kinder off by the hour. And a metric buttload of DIY crafting shops, where you can make jewelry or ceramics or embroidery. I’m sure you could enjoy it as an adult, if you like that kind of thing, but the target was definitely children. Also plenty of arcades and toy stores, nicely splitting the difference between mall and playground.

Oh. And an aquarium. Because, sure. And an outdoor park on the fifth floor.

The Neighborhood

I’m going to do a whole post on the 36 Streets from a handicrafts perspective, but the Old Quarter reminds us most of Mexico City, both in the ridiculous density and the retail specialization. For example, our apartment in CDMX was in the lighting district, but the clustering there was a naturally occurring phenomenon that happened over time. Here, the effect was very much intentional, with the Guilds being assigned to specific streets. It was believed that both merchants and shoppers would benefit from the close proximity, and thus it was decreed.

But don’t worry. I’m not going to make you wait until the 36 Streets post before sharing some of the photos. That would be mean. And you know how fundamentally kind of heart I am. Here’s a little amuse-bouche, compliments of the chef.

Part of the Old Quarter’s density comes from the fact that there are effectively no sidewalks. The sidewalks are either used as extended retail spaces for restaurants and shops or as parking lots for the hordes of scooters, which soak up whatever square footage has been left uncolonized. Pedestrians are left to share the road with scooters, cars, rickshaws, and commercial vehicles. It’s like a game of Frogger where you only get one life.

Even though they ban the tuktuks ubiquitous in Cambodia due to their diesel spew, the vehicular density has contributed to the designation, just a few months ago, of Hà Nội as the most polluted city in the world. Who says communism can’t deliver wins for the People?

You could save a lot of money here if you smoked. I can’t imagine anything less necessary. The pollution fills the pulmonary niche of a burning cigarette’s chemical compounds, and if you miss the nicotine kick you can just cross the street. Zero reason to spend on cigs here.

The Old Quarter’s vehicular density is matched by its population density. The last information I could find was from 2020, which pegged the Old Quarter’s square kilometer at 66,000 people. If the district’s population grew by as much as Hanoi’s overall (15%) since 2020, you’d get a 2024 population of about 76,000.

The current densest city on the planet is Manila, at 46,000 people/km². Even without estimating growth since 2020, The Old Quarter’s 66,000 people/km² would make it the densest city on the planet, if it were an entire city. Which is, unsurprisingly, exactly what it feels like here.

I’ve already reported on the local custom in salons, and you can be sure I’ll be covering local spa culture. The sacrifices I make for you all…

Hoàn Kiếm Lake

The Old Quarter also abuts Hoàn Kiếm Lake, which means Lake of the Returned Sword. As the story goes, Emperor Lê Lợi was boating on what was then known as Hồ Lục Thủy, Green Water Lake. When suddenly a Golden Turtle God breached the calm waters and asked the Emperor to return his magic sword, Heaven’s Will, as it had been appropriated by the Dragon King to help the Emperor defeat the Chinese Ming Dynasty.

After defeating the Chinese, the Emperor acceded to this very reasonable request and returned Heaven’s Will to the Golden Turtle God, renaming the lake in honor of this singular event. Today, there is a multi-media show presented on the lake multiple times per week, retelling the legend. Cheesy tourist WTF? Sure. But we’ll still do it.

The Man On The Street

Our first night out on the street was great. We were outside the city center in Siem Reap, in a comparatively bucolic setting, but we’re right in the thick of it here, which is swell. We got a little tired of swimming with every other fucking salmon at the same fucking time in the Medina of Marrakech, and the Old Quarter’s charms may start to similarly fade by the end of six weeks. But for now we’re loving the night markets and street food and finding something new around every corner.

The first thing we discovered, on our very first night out, was how to present as chumps. Which turned out to be primarily a math problem.

The exchange rate here is tricky. There are ~ 25,000 Vietnamese Dong to the dollar. At least it’s not a completely random number, like 17,000, which would be an unmitigated disaster. But it’s still a fair amount of math to wrap your head around. VND 1,000,000 is $40 USD. It makes the currency a little tricky, too, as a result of all the bonus zeros.

So we’re out wandering around and enjoying the warm evening when a nice woman comes up and offers us pastries from a rolling cart. Sure. A little bag is VND 120,000, almost $5 USD. I know we’re being overcharged, but whatever. We’re here to leave our cash. I pull out a 100k note and as I’m fumbling for bills that add up to the other 20,000, she reaches into my hand, plucks out a 500,000 note and hands me the change. By the time I figure out that she’s handed me only 80,000 in change (hey, it’s a lot of zeros to keep track of) she is literally nowhere to be seen.

So that’s about $17 USD for a bag stuffed full of pastry and lesson-learned. What’s galling about is that I knew that the street vendor change hustle was a thing, and I got stung anyway. Whatever. We’re here to leave our cash. And it’s not like we didn’t receive something valuable in return.

I don’t drink coffee, but Dorothy, who will cheerfully ingest offal, will have nothing to do with it. Who knew she was such a delicate flower?

Buildings

We always love exploring a new location’s vernacular architecture. Hanoi’s defining feature seems to be narrow. And not just the Old Quarter. The whole city is made up of narrow buildings, known as tube houses. The tube houses can be as narrow as two meters, as deep as 100 meters, and up to twelve stories tall. Going back to feudal times, property was taxed by its width, rather than its area, which was the driver behind the creation of the tube houses, whose origins date back to the 10th century. They are the method by which the Old Quarter’s density is possible.

One night, after the restaurant that uses the alley closed, I followed our alley back, but I gave up before I found its end. I tried again, during the daytime, for a better view, and was angrily shooed away by the restaurant staff. I’ve read that it’s not uncommon for a family to occupy the interior housing and run their business from the street front, and I suspect that’s what’s going on here. It would certainly explain how they were able to set up an outrigger kitchen right in the alley.

The tube houses are also a likely contributing factor to a quirk of the local retail landscape. There are no big box stores here. To be fair, an Ikea is coming, but that’s about it. Mexico City has Home Depots and Walmarts, Costcos and Sam’s Clubs, all of which peacefully coexist with smaller, traditional retail. Hanoi is noticeably a big box desert. Retail is all very small-scale and local. OK, there are a lot of Circle Ks here. Which is weird.

I’ve read that one of the inhibitors to big box stores is that the narrow buildings make it difficult to accrete enough real estate to shoulder a Walmart in. And that’s a more than plausible explanation. But I have to believe there’s more to it than that.

Vietnam is nominally communist, but primarily in the sense of one party rule by the Communist Party of Vietnam. The CPV plays a significant role in central economic planning, but lets a thousand flowers bloom when it comes to private enterprise. That doesn’t just sound like capitalism, it smells and tastes like capitalism. Private enterprise may be small-scale and local, but it’s also riotous and dense. Where a Western commercial street might have a dozen businesses, that same street in Hanoi might house fifty or more.

I think the absence of large-scale retail isn’t just the result of the limitations of the physical infrastructure, but is also driven by a profound preference by the state to avoid succumbing to the rampaging megafauna of Western capitalism. They tend to trample what’s inconveniently underfoot, and reasonable people can agree that they’re evil.

It will be interesting to see whether the incoming Ikea is a sport or a harbinger. My money is on sport.

Temples

Hà Nội is a festival of little temples and pagodas all over the place. While we didn’t get any good pictures of the exterior of King Le Thai To’s Temple, there was plenty to love inside.

The Ly Trieu Quoc Su Pagoda is just another little temple along the shore of Hoàn Kiếm Lake. In case you’re concerned, I asked permission before taking pictures. As is my habit.

Here’s one more temple we didn’t even get the name of. These are just everywhere here. The critter in the middle is the Vietnamese version of the Cambodian Moon Eater. They’re all over the Angkor-era temples, and share a Hindu/Buddhist origin story. They tend to sit over doorways as protectors.

Street Food

You don’t truly know a place until you know its street food. If that’s what it takes, we’ll rise to the occasion. For you, of course. We do all of this for you.

The Temple Of Literature

Just outside the Old Quarter, the Temple of Literature beckoned. Like Tunisia, which reveres Ibn Khaldun, the famed Arab polymath who, among other accomplishments, invented sociology in the 1300s, the Vietnamese have a genuine love of the arts and sciences.

What we weren’t expecting was how crowded it would be. There were buses parked in front disgorging tourists by the long ton, and even the site’s generous 13+ acres couldn’t absorb everyone comfortably.

Most places we’ve been there have been a couple of sites on The List. Marrakech had Le Jardin Secret and the YSL gardens. Istanbul had the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia. Places that would be packed like a mosh pit no matter the time of day or day of the week because they were on literally every tourist’s itinerary. We just didn’t think the Temple of Literature would be one of those places in Hà Nội.

Adding to the tourist crowds were a ridiculous number of school groups. We think it must have been graduation day, because there were literally dozens of school groups and their teachers, all dressed formally and posing for group pictures. What better place to bring the little dears for end-of-year pictures than the Palace of Deep Thoughts. “Look, kids. They built this whole building just for thinking!”

It’s obviously been rebuilt and restored multiple times over the centuries, but the original temple, on the current site, was built in 1070. It has always been a temple to learning, as Vietnam’s first national university, the Imperial Academy, was hosted in the temple from 1076 to 1779. Take that, Harvard.

What I love most about it is that all of the various courtyards and gates have inspirational names. There’s the Courtyard of Great Success. The Star of Literature Pavilion. There’s the Gate of Great Synthesis. The Gate of the Crystallization of Letters and the Gate of the Magnificence of Letters. A pool called the Well of Heavenly Brilliance. There are slogans carved throughout, such as “The country is peaceful and prosperous thanks to respecting culture,” and “Just as the Khuê constellation shines in the sky, the humanities shine everywhere.”

If you think I’m making sport of this, you’re wrong. That undertone isn’t snark, it’s jealousy. This is a real place that has those statements as shared values. What the fuck is wrong with us? I’m not sure we actually have any truly shared values in the US anymore, but if we did we wouldn’t be wasting our breath on extolling learning and the humanities. That stuff is for pointy-headed losers. Fuck Don’t Tread On Me. Our flag should read Hand That Over, Bitch.

Not that we have anything to learn from Commies.

Uncle Ho

Ho Chi Minh is still a revered figure in Vietnam, for his tenacity in ousting the Japanese, French, and Americans, but also for his humble lifestyle and his teachings. More Ataturk than Pol Pot. No one refers to Uncle Stalin. Unless Stalin was their actual uncle.

I’m not an apologist for brutality. In Vietnam’s case, both North and South engaged in repression, assassination, and ruthlessness. Ho’s struggle was both a revolution and a traditional war. Eggs were broken, and I’m not arguing that the tasty omelet made it all worthwhile. Today, Vietnam is notable for both repression and corruption, not exactly a Denver Omelet of governance.

But the founder of this state is beloved. Maybe nostalgically, as an avatar of a morally simpler time, when independence was an inarguably worthwhile goal that hadn’t yet metastasized into a self-perpetuating regime. Still, it’s pretty tough to walk through a revolution without atrocities clinging to your pants, so you have to give Uncle Ho credit where it’s due. He’s a legit father-of-our-country hero to the Vietnamese people.