Traveling Back in Time: A Month in Hanoi, Vietnam

West Lake

It’s mid March. I sit in the upstairs garden with a cup of camomile and a Marlboro. It's cold enough that the mosquitos aren’t out. Kaysha’s inside with the yellow light on. We haven’t seen blue sky for the 10 days we’ve spent in Hanoi, Vietnam. Three days ago I ran around the lake. I passed a dozen fish that flopped around my feet on the sidewalk. Fishermen were sprinkled along the edge of the water.

Today, Kaysha and I ran our lake loop in the hazy afternoon. A woman at the lip of the water, a conical hat shading her eyes, washed out her dishes. A few yards in front of her, a man pulled his pants down, squatted and backed slowly into the same water. His bowels emptied, and the Fishermen seemed unaware, unphased, or nonconfronataional. 

Our own upstairs pocket of flowers

My office

Kaysha and I are spending one month in this ancient world of cafes and motorbikes. We rented a two-story home, down a narrow alley in the heart of Hanoi. We are both teaching children in China online (Contact me if you’d like info on teaching English). That takes up most of our evenings. Our days are spent jogging around the lake, coffee shop dwelling, readings our way though our suitcase library (highly impractical to travel with this many books), painting, and trying our very hardest not to get hit by a motorbike. 

There’s a gecko living among us. It’s been leaving me trails of wall dust. I see it scurry across the yellow-starred wallpaper as I work. I wonder if my student notices my eyes flash wide, scanning something above their head. Hopefully they’re too focused on conjugating the proper verb “to be”—“IS, Cindy, The dog IS happy.” Our house smells like a cave, and when the power went out it looked like one too. My feet chill up to my sock-line from walking on the tile. I’m never far from a pair of blue house slippers—our house has seven pairs. Gray mold is making its way across the bathroom ceiling. Kaysha works upstairs. I can hear her through the ceiling, singing children’s songs. The sharpness her voice takes when she’s annoyed with a student. We are having a hilarious time together. We have this magical way of always being on the same page. She puts up with me when I get hungry or grumpy or over caffeinated or under caffeinated. Once a week we get drunk and life plan. Sitting street-side in a cafe drinking cheep beer, we watch the near miss collisions or actually collisions of 8 million residents of Hanoi as they make up their own rules about how to get a motorbike through a crowded intersection. 

Our beautiful Vietnamese hosts made plans to show us the city. They took us on motorbikes through the web of Hanoi traffic. We drank cà phê trung in a crowded upstairs cafe—a popular spot that hides like a secret down a dirty back alley. Cà phê trung or egg coffee is a Hanoi specialty where condensed milk whipped is with egg making a frothy, sweet foam. This is dolloped onto of a strong shot of coffee and presto—delight! They took us to a street stall with an aged sign “Ốc Chao”—or Hot Snail. My knees pressed against my belly and chest on the remarkably small plastic stool—a trade mark of Vietnamese dinning establishments. We ate boiled snails on the side of the street. We fished them out with metal picks, plunked them in a well balanced chili sauce and then into our mouths. Our hosts also ordered fertilized quail eggs, to which I had to hold up a hard “No thank you.” The small snails were tough and earthy. The big snails were blubbery and packed an unsurprising punch of slime. In the light drizzle, my hands were cold. 

Our food mishaps have been too many and strange to count. Meaty compressed nuggets, half grown quail eggs, glass noodles with ketchup, dark blood sausages—like brownie batter and cilantro in a skin casing. Our bellies have sullenly come along with us on this culinary rollercoaster. 

Bun cha is our saving grace. Tables and stools are arranged on the side of a small dark alley. For 40,000 VD we get a plate of blubbery, fresh rice noodles, a bowl of gentle, clear, slightly sweet broth with ground pork patties and grilled pork shoulder, and two crispy pork/mushroom spring rolls. On the child sized plastic tables there’re community bowls of mint, basil, cilantro, bean sprouts, and rice patty weed. Smaller bowls of fresh chopped garlic and chili sit next to a vase of worn wooden chopsticks. The ground under the tables is soft with fallen herb leaves and squished rice noodles. Like most of the city there’s the damp smell of decay in small spaces. The building’s fuse box looms on the wall above our heads, looking particularly risky. A motorbike squeezes by. This is my current happy place. 

Skyline

Rosie had us for dinner. We were welcomed into her family’s home. They had more blue, plastic dad-sandals. Everyone already had on a pair, we followed suit. A large stark living room with throne like wooden chairs were pulled semicircle around a small TV—playing Vietnamese soaps. There was the largest mirror I’d ever seen. Not only in a home, but anywhere, ever. It was the kind of mirror you have to build a house around. 

Rosie’s parents didn’t speak English, but we had the interaction and conversation of people who are just genuinely happy to experience each other. They made us a beautiful meal. As we ate, there was a continuous circuit of food being reheated. Mom would grab the bowl of pork off the table, heat it and put it front of us, Rosie would translate, “She said eat this one now, it is the most flavorful.” Dad kept refilling our beer glasses—even when it was only an inch from the glass rim—and cheersing us with a chipper “Doi!” We think he was just glad to finally have drinking partners! It was an awkward, lovely evening of sparse conversation and warmth. Just getting to sit at the dinner table with a family, makes you feel like you’re part of something soft and precious. That same love and kindness even though they are not your own blood.