Hanoi Impressions (plus soup)

Ah, Hanoi. It is too easy to use terms like intense, overwhelming, chaotic, surreal but they don’t communicate the specificity of the place, so I thought I might try in this entry to draw for you a word picture of what Hanoi is like by focusing on just two aspects.

Let me start with the street food vendors. All along the sidewalk women have set up shop with propane stoves, caldrons of soup or oil and pails of greens, noodles, broth, etc. In addition they spread out low plastic tables, perhaps 12 inches high and tiny plastic stools on which one can squat. The streets are quite dark and at night the vendors and their patrons are shadowy figures, surrounded by parked motor scooters and it is impossible to see where one woman’s territory ends and the next begins. Each vendor prepares a single dish with slight variations. Last night, I finally found the courage to patronize one. As I walked the dark streets, I paused at the corner of Duong Thanh and Hang Bong streets  (one of the few places where light from an adjacent store meant I could actually see the woman and her pails of ingredients. As I paused, she looked up and said “soup?” and I thought “why not?” She gestured at an empty spot and I sat down on the tiny stool, my knees up around my shoulders. After she finished preparing a bowl for another customer, she turned and shouted something at me in Vietnamese. I initially thought it might be  "sit up straight, running dog of imperialism!" but the young Vietnamese couple next to me kindly translated it as "fish or meat?" (I assume they left off the running dog part). It was a lovely large bowl of pho and the total cost for it and a glass of cold tea (also ordered by my kindly neighbors) was $1.25. I was certainly the only non-Vietnamese around - so now I’m ready to go (as long as I always have a young Vietnamese who speaks English sitting next to me).

Another aspect that is striking here is the architecture. It is architectural cacophony. The visual equivalent of a thousand-member chorus with each person singing a different tune (and many off key). It is my understanding that at some point in the past, houses were taxed based on their linear frontage. The wider the house, the higher the tax.  As a result virtually all the old buildings are one room (perhaps 10 feet) wide and very deep and high. To accommodate a very dense population, the houses are adjacent with no space between them. But each house is of a different height and with a distinctive architecture and color. The juxtaposition of angles, levels, materials, etc makes a physical crazy quilt. In addition, almost all the houses (both in the distant neighborhoods as well as here in the tourist district) have a commercial establishment on the street level. Tiny little stores that range from elegant and stylish to dark caverns filled with who knows what. The strangest aspect to this is the clustering of stores. I understood this to be true for historical reasons in the Old city, but even in the neighborhoods, if you see one copy store, you will find ten others adjacent to it. And when you turn the corner you suddenly find twenty storefronts  in a row, all with identical men’s suits in them.  I wish I could adequately capture it with the camera.

   Finally, much of this very large city is a gigantic construction zone on an almost unimaginable scale. I remember thinking the City Center Project in Las Vegas (the largest privately funded project in the U.S. with several hotels, high rise condos, casinos and entertainment centers on 67 acres) was large, but the areas here on which the concrete skeletons of high rise buildings under construction stand is gigantic. Mile after mile what was once rice paddy is now a construction zone. What I find most striking about this building boom is that it suggests that the density of humans in the city is going to rise astronomically!  Which brings us to the traffic – the topic of my next entry.