Day One in Hanoi

First things first. I am writing this from the Hanoi Youth Hostel in Hanoi (duh), and I'm eating pineapple, because this is an OK picture:

Clearly I will not be returning from Hanoi as I have found employment here.

A young lady was selling pineapple and bananas, and asked me to take her picture. Seconds later she was taking mine, and given that exchange, it seemed only logical to pay her something like five dollars for some pineapple.

I also ate some street food in a very busy street-side restaurant, where there I was seated on a plastic chair not much more than one foot tall. The restaurant had quite a few more Vietnamese than it had westerners such as myself. Our height could have something to do with it, but the food was good, and the people were kind. I used chopsticks! And somewhat effectively, at that. The men next to me during the latter part of my meal were drinking vodka with their food, so I toasted them with my water bottle. Confusion is only temporary. Friendship is forever.

Speaking of friendship, the people in Hanoi are generally very friendly; that or they just ignore you. Most of them are friendly because you've got money in your pockets and no sense of the value either of the currency or the merchandise it can buy you...but some people are just nice; I sat down to a number of dishes during lunch and the two men sitting with me immediately handed me chop sticks, a spoon, and a napkin, as if they worked there. They smiled more than the actual servers, no less.

Having walked the streets for a few hours now, I think I have some grasp for how things work, if only that. It seems as if a blind man would just as likely survive the streets of Hanoi as a seeing man, because of how the traffic simply flows around you. Cars and larger vehicles make things complicated, because they can't maneuver as well. They, much like pedestrians, are slow enough that motorcycles just pass around them. The streets are barely wide enough for two cars to pass each other, so I think most streets are one-way...

But let's face it, only major intersections even have stop lights, and I'm skeptical that more than 50% of the population is aware of their existence. If you want to cross a street in Hanoi, your best bet is to start walking. It's not like someone's going to stop for you, anyway.

This will probably be my last night in the Youth Hostel, but I have yet to find another place to go.

The conversion rate I got at the bank/currency exchange place was actually exactly that which Google now displays, which surprised me. I was expecting to trade dollars in at a pretty big loss, but instead I exchanged $200 for a bit over 4,000,000 dong. I proceeded to spend about $30 on the Lonely Planet's guidebook for Vietnam, some donut-ish things, and my lunch. I feel like I'm doing fairly well when it comes to expenses, though, as I've already paid for the Hostel for three days well within budget, and my purchases have yet to push me beyond my daily quota. Anyway.

Expect food to be different. The donut things I bought weren't the sort of thing you'd get in Dunkin' Donuts, or the sort of thing you might get at home or a grocery store; they actually had an outer shell of donut-ish stuff, rather hard, and an interior with some sort of filling, pieces of something or other. They were sweet, but the tasted more like molasses than your typical donuts or pastries in the US. They were all rather harder-shelled than our kind of donuts, as well. They were good, but I'd prefer something from back home, or more like it.

The city is strangely quiet at night, and if you stay up late enough, you'll see the streets empty and silent, clean even. It seems the city takes responsibility for itself, cleaning as it goes and as they go to sleep. There are women walking around with dumpsters, shovels and brooms, picking up garbage as they go, making the place a little cleaner. It'd be interesting to see the most busy streets at 3-4AM, when there are nearly no motorcycles out and about.

It's a bit hilarious, but all the establishments with stairs at the front also have ramps going up them. Not the sort of ramps a handicapped person would need; these typically one or two feet wide at most, and are angled such that it would be difficult to get up in a wheelchair.

The reality is that most storefronts and even hotel fronts (even the high-end ones) function as parking lots in the night for the multitudinous motorcycles, mopeds, and scooters in Hanoi. It's rather a shock to walk down the streets in the night, and be able to walk on the sidewalk, which would usually be covered in parked bikes, and to walk throughout the entire street unrestricted, as there is so little traffic at night. It's kind of a give and take sort of thing. Grating hustle and bustle of the morning, noon, and afternoon is balmed by the silence, openness, and cleanliness of the night.

Why do so many people in Vietnam wear face masks? Hanoi is primarily populated with three smells: motorcycle exhaust, cigarette smoke, and alcohol fumes.

I walked around and visited some slightly more distant locations still near the Old Quarter in Hanoi, but turned myself around far too many times on the way back. Streets are far more difficult to navigate when they fail to adhere to simple north-south-east-west directions. Alleys sometimes look like streets, sometimes it's hard to tell what street you're on, and on every single street corner there's a man with a strange bike + seat contraption just begging you to take a one hour tour of the city. And I really should. They'd probably charge me ten or twenty dollars for it, but I'd see a whole lot more, and get some good pictures on the way. Maybe tomorrow.

The simplest recipe for not buying something is to say no, thank you, and start walking away. It's a bit startling the first time someone tries to clean your shoes; some guy walked up to me, started pointing at my shoes, and I examined them; they were tied, and didn't seem to me to need attention; however, said guy thought they could use some superglue, which they will wear to their dying day. He was halfway through untying my shoes before I realized what was happening and stopped it. He was convinced that him cleaning my shoes would keep them clean for far longer than I believe it would. Anyway, I managed to fend him away and retie my shoes. I thanked him and walked away.

Oddly enough the sound of screeching tires is somewhat foreign to Hanoi; there's almost nothing in Hanoi as common as honking. Cars honking at bikes and pedestrians, motorbikes honking just so you know where they are, trucks honking because they're big and impatient. The character of honks is pretty interesting to think about. There are low-end taxi honks, limo honks, motorbike honks, and truck honks. You can usually tell which is which, but it doesn't really matter. Most of the time the driver knows how to avoid you anyway.

In the US and perhaps elsewhere, honking is basically for A. situations where you did something wrong or B. situations where you might do something wrong soon.

In Hanoi it seems like honking is just a necessity of the road; half or less of how people don't get hit is because they see the vehicles, and the other (greater) half is because they can hear the vehicles.

I've written enough, I think. I remain well, haven't gotten sick or gotten drunk, smoked a joint or gotten run over.

!Noah!