Day 10 - More Hanoi
Our first scheduled activity wasn’t until 4 p.m., when we had a street food tour planned with a local food blogger. We split up for the first part of the day and Dave and I decided to head for the big park around Ho Chi Minh’s tomb and walk our way back.
If you want to actually take a gander at the avuncular mummy, you have to go between 8 and 11 a.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Since it was Monday, I was slightly relieved to be able to skip this pilgrimage with a clear conscience.
The tomb is absurd considering that Ho Chi Minh lived a very ascetic life and wanted to be cremated. It’s big, heavy, glowering and somehow super Communist, with armed guards out front and on the immense plaza that takes you past it. Dave and I were walking on what certainly appeared to be a sidewalk, but got barked at by an overdressed military type for being in the wrong place. The big, empty, colorless grimness of this huge complex is in stark contrast to the happy chaos of the Old Quarter.
Much more congenial is the little temple and pagoda inside the surrounding park. As we were peeking into the temple and admiring the food on offer in the little picnic area in front of it, we noticed a woman bending over a gently rustling plastic crate, untying some bits of string at its corners. She picked up the crate and moved quickly to the side of the temple -- we sprinted after her and were just in time to see her whip the lid off the crate and release about two dozen little sparrows into the air. This wasn’t done with any kind of flourish -- Dave and I seemed to be the only ones even taking notice. An addition to my long and growing list of “things you just don’t see at home.”
We headed toward the Flag Tower, part of the Citadel complex in the center of town. The military museum there was closed, but we were able to climb the tower and get an interesting view of the city, including a courtyard full of old military vehicles dating from the 18th Century right up to the 1970’s. In the center is a loose depiction of a downed plane constructed of parts from French and US bombers brought down by the Vietnamese. Fun!
Dave had been to a couple of interesting stores with Holly and Cait so we set those as eventual destinations and just started wandering. Here’s a far from comprehensive list of stuff we saw while walking through Hanoi:
A bustling block of little homes and shops with a railroad track running right through it
Clots of power lines so big and heavy, they drooped down to basically head height -- often with bird cages hung in them
A lady in a conical hat pushing a cart with approximately 250,000 porcelain dishes on it
Several ladies carrying what amounted to an entire pop-up restaurant by hand -- a half dozen little plastic stools, a little cooker of some kind and 8 or 10 plastic bags full of produce or other ingredients slung on the ends of a pole over her shoulders
An entire street of shops selling elaborate silk flowers and another selling nothing but decorative lights
We popped into a couple of very stylish shops (I ended up buying one of the dresses Dave had spotted the day before) and two or three places selling ceramics. It’s really hard to resist buying things in Hanoi -- the entire city is designed to put enticing stuff in front of you, then pester you into buying it. And it would take years to explore all the little hidden corners and interesting places tucked into side streets and alleys. On Cait’s recommendation we hunted down a very eccentric little coffee shop on the second floor of a crumbling beauty of a house only to discover that one of the ceramics shops we were hoping to find was tucked behind it.
We made it back to hotel in time to freshen up a bit before meeting our guide to the amazing world of Hanoi street food, Van Cong Tu (or Vietnamese God for those who follow him on Instagram). We hit it off with Tu immediately -- he was ready to talk smack about everyone and everything and we got great gossip about Tony Bourdain, the New York Times, several of the restaurants where we’d eaten earlier in the trip and our travel company. All while moving from place to place in the Old Quarter and through the astonishing outdoor markets. Here’s what we ate:
Quail marinated in local honey and grilled over charcoal. You get a little dish of salt, pepper, MSG and sugar and squeeze a tiny lime into it for dipping. Absolutely delicious. (Mary would want me to mention that she was the only one who ate a head.) (And yes, they use MSG there -- it’s one of the reasons the food tastes so freaking good.)
Duck embryos. This is a boiled fertilized duck egg that you peel like a hard boiled egg and chop up in a little dish with shredded ginger and cilantro and a fair dollop of sweet chili fish sauce. This was not nearly as gross as it sounds, but not quite delicious enough to overcome the little bit gross it is.
Herb-filled omelets with flake salt. Both the omelets and the duck embryos were made by one of those ladies with a hand carried restaurant, perched precariously on the curb.
Chewy little doughnut hole-looking things glazed in honey and sprinkled with sesame seeds.
Fried fritters seasoned with a lot of dill that turned out to be made with “sea worms” -- we were clearly supposed to be grossed out by this, but 1) they were really good and 2) after duck embryos, it’s hard for anything to seem all that gross.
Green papaya salad topped with slivers of sweet, chewy cured beef.
A delicious banh mi that wasn’t quite as good as the one in Hoi An, but was better than pretty much any sandwich you’re going to get in DC.
An absolutely delicious salad of very finely shredded (and impeccably fresh) cabbage, slivered green onion, ginger, mint and fresh poached chicken in a sweet and sour dressing. This was at a tiny counter that you got to through a pitch dark passageway that couldn’t have been two feet wide.
It had taken us a good two and a half hours to work our way through this adventure, with three or four beers on the way, so we were definitely ready for cocktails. Tu took us to the Unicorn Bar where we watched the amiable bartenders make their signature pho cocktails -- an intricate process involving a lot of flame and resulting in a very tasty drink with a little citrus and a little spice.
Dave, Glenn and I left Holly and Mary with Cait and Tu and wandered through more amazing Hanoi streets (including that sweetmeat street, which was quite sumptuous) to attend the very touristy but quite charming Thang Long Water Puppet Theater. This was one of those things that the guide books all recommend enthusiastically as a rare glimpse into traditional culture but that feels awfully contrived. Still, the music was very interesting and even if the plot of the puppet show could be summed up as “things chase other things. Sometimes they catch them, but usually they don’t,” it was a lively, colorful show and it only lasted 50 minutes. We were glad we went.
We walked back to the hotel through the teeming streets (I believe the word “teeming” was coined specifically to describe Hanoi at night). Glenn stopped off to do one more bit of souvenir shopping (some lacquered Buddha heads were calling his name) and I went to bed, but Dave reconnected with Mary and Holly and when I heard about their adventure the next day, I wished I had, too. They met up for a beer and were sitting on tiny plastic chairs in a sea of other tiny plastic chairs completely filling the street when the word spread down the block that the police were coming. Suddenly the advantages of tiny plastic furniture were made evident as every single table, chair and stool was whisked up and stacked in the doorways and all the people drinking at them were shooed under their respective overhangs. According to Mary, Holly and Dave, this took approximately 90 seconds. The police walked slowly down the block and around the corner and 90 seconds after that, all the tiny plastic furniture and the many beer drinkers were back in the street. Ohmigod, I LOVE Hanoi!
