We are staying in a hotel-cum-hostel in a period building in the heart of the Old Quarter. We have a massive family room with a balcony over-looking the street. The décor is a little tired but the place has character and there are some nice little extras like air con, a fridge and a TV with English language channels including football (plus Chelsea and Man United TV which is bizarre). So Andy was able to watch the Tottenham match yesterday, much to his delight. The building is in the typical style – tall and narrow, so our room and en suite is the width of the building – about 20′. We negotiate our way through the busy streets to Hoan Kiem Lake which is the focal point of old Hanoi and visited the Ngoc Son Temple which sits on an island in the lake. As we’re leaving it starts to rain and very soon we are experiencing a full scale downpour – with no ponchos and no umbrella. Of course, as soon as the rain starts the hawkers appear, as if from nowhere, selling…. ponchos and umbrellas; and they are very persistent. By this time we’re starting to get wet and there appears to be no let up in sight, so we succumb and buy an umbrella …and the hawker is suddenly gone. When we open the umbrella we realise why she disappeared so fast – the catch doesn’t work! We’ve been had! We have to laugh – we have a perfectly good umbrella sitting in our hotel room.
The Old Quarter is a maze of narrow streets bursting with the tiniest of shops and full of elegant, if rather run-down, architecture. It is buzzing with energy and vitality- all of daily life is lived on the street – cooking, eating, sleeping, and working. The names of the streets denote what they sell or make (or used to sell or make) like Hang Gai (Silk Street) or Bat Dan (wooden bowls) and so on. Our first daytime foray into the frenetic streets is overwhelming. The traffic is manic; motor cycles, peds, taxis and cyclos come from all directions in a chaotic jumble. There are no rules governing right of way and there is no place for pedestrians in this chaos. Parked motor cycles take up the pavements and pedestrians are forced into the road to take their chances dodging the honking traffic. Alongside the traffic are the women in conical hats carry baskets hung from bamboo poles. They sell all kinds of fruit, vegetables and cooked meat and some are very adept at catching people unawares, placing their loaded baskets on the unsuspecting person’s shoulder, a hat on their head and then trying to charge for the inevitable picture that follows. Of, course we fell for it – once!
The Vietnamese seem to be able to sleep anywhere – as well as the usual benches and day beds, we have seen people stretched out asleep on their peds (looks very uncomfortable) and we’ve even discovered a man sleeping in a small cupboard, no more than 4′ high, on the landing outside our hotel room!