Not anoyed with Ha Noi

Dec 13 2014

We spent the night at Leslie’s after taking a private car to BKK. I got a manicure while Ron ran an errand. We had a great meal in the neighborhood with Leslie and then played Scrabble . I won for the second time in my life, I think.

Dec 14 Hanoi

We were up at 4:30 AM to catch a taxi to the airport. Arrived in Hanoi,Vietnam after a 90 minute flight. It was cloudy and chilly so we pulled out our jackets before leaving the airport. We went to the Old Quarter and checked into our hotel, The Hanoi Elite. It is a small hotel with 11 rooms and the BEST customer service ever. They have thought of every detail. The staff all speak excellent English and all are extremely well trained to ensure a pleasant stay. We have stayed in the Four Seasons and Sofitel hotels and never have we experienced anything like this place. We had free snacks and fresh fruit in our room, were given a map with a shopping route marked and a walking tour as well as recommended restaurants and which taxis to use as not all are reliable or honest. They even had a computer in the room for us to use. When we asked about how to buy train tickets to Sapa they took care of it and when it was time to go a staff member accompanied us to exchange the voucher for the tickets and walked us to our train car.

We took the walking tour for 2.5 hours, had the classic pho ( rice
noodle soup with pork, beef or chicken, pronounced “fuh”) for lunch. Today is Sunday and the streets of this area are thronged with people, thousands of motorcycles, bikes and cars, all jockeying for space. Forget sidewalks as shops’ merchandise spills out into the street and the small eateries use the sidewalks for their wee 12 inch high plastic stools and tables that are about 3-4 inches higher. Sometimes in the alleys, the food stall is on one side of the alley and the tables on the opposite side. Every nook and cranny is utilized here. Early mornings the tables are full of people in their winter jackets slurping steaming bowls of pho.

Vendor are in shops, have carts, sell from bicycles, walking along carrying their wares, etc. We met one woman scam artist. Most street vendors are women who either walk or use bicycles to peddle their wares. We learnd that you can carry most anything on a bicycle, if you're creative enough.

The traditional conical bamboo hat is everywhere as is the shoulder carrier
with 2 baskets hanging low from each end of the stick. This woman approached me, put her hat on my head quickly and then lifted her shoulder carrier onto my shoulder. I was shocked at the weight of it. Ron took my picture; then she asked us to buy her fresh, sliced pineapple ( 2 pieces) which she quickly put into a bag and handed me. She then asked for 50,000 dong, the local currency (about $2.50). We said no, that was too expensive and gave her the pineapple back. She kept passing it back to us and asking for her money. We were persistence and a policeman approached her and she backed off immediately. Apparently there is a tourism police force here and we were grateful. Later in the day I saw the same action from another vendor with another unsuspecting tourist.

Ron did some work in Hanoi three years ago and said there are a lot more cars here now. That is amazing as there is a 200% tax on imported vehicles (cars and motorcycles). That means a $20,000 car would cost $60,000 here. I saw one Mercedes, one Porche on the street and one Rolls Royce in a showroom. OY! There are seven million people in Hanoi and four million motorcycles.

I fell in love with the chaos that is here. Everywhere we went today there were waves of people, a din

of noise (they use their horns all the time; not blasts so much as light warnings), there was an assault on the olfactory senses with all the street food. The scene was pure Asia. We peered into a couple of the large vats and were somewhat put off by what looked like floating scum on top of the broth. Hanoi has seven million residents in a small space and you really feel it in the Old Quarter.

Crossing the street is a learned art: you make eye contact with the drivers and just start threading your way across the street, don’t run or stop as the drivers anticipate your pace. It is amazing how they dart around us and how close they come. It is fun and scary as hell. One area of the Old Quarter is called 36 streets; here each street sold a particular product so there is shoe street, jewelry street, luggage, carved wood, toys, sewing thread/notions, etc. We were approached no fewer than 20 times by men who offer their bicycle rickshaw services for ‘cheap’. We politely declined. Twice men approached Ron and pointed to his athletic shoe and offered to glue a bit of material that was loose. These guys are shoe repair businesses on the move, carrying a small basket with thread, needle, new soles, and glue.

We visited the Ngoc Son Temple on Hoan Kiem Lake near the Old ^th century. We also visited a traditional house that was built in the late 19^th century and restored in 1999 with the financial help of one of the Scandinavian countries which I have since forgotten.
Quarter. We were surprised to see the temple was very Chinese in character. We later discovered that the Chinese dominated Vietnam for 1,000 years (about 1000 years ago). That explains a lot! Like the fact that the Vietnamese eat dogs and cats but not their pets. We also learned that the Vietnamese language is based on Chinese, but they abandoned kanji and adopted roman letters around the beginning of the 20

After dinner we went to a water puppet show which was great fun. The puppets are floating in the water manipulated by artists who stand behind a screen in the water. Some puppets were people in boats, some were water dragons or fish that jumped in and out of water. It was very entertaining. There were live singers and music played on traditional Vietnamese instruments.


We visited an ancient temple that was almost 1000 years old and an
old shop house that had been restored

The architecture here is different from Thailand. Because property taxes are based on frontage the stucco houses are narrow and usually 3-5 stories high. They are a bit more varied and attractive than the traditional shop houses in Thailand. Almost all homes in both countries have a business on the ground floor with multiple generations of one family living above the business.