Hanoi! Oh boy Hanoi. What I can say about you. Let’s start with nice things. You are a budget traveller’s dream. Bowl of noodles for a little over dollar? Yes please. Take a tour, watch a show, why not try a cooking class? Whatever, it’s all so affordable! Come and feel like a rich person. What else? Food is simple, authentic (duh, obviously), and it is good. You learn that there is more to Vietnamese food than pho, although uh, to me they all still seem quite similar from one dish to another, some combination of rice noodles, leafy greens, light sauce, and a bit of meat.
Noww, the stuff I just can’t get over. Sidewalks are actually scooter parking lots and roads are just free for alls, every man, scooter and car for himself. In the U.S. you drive on the right, Singapore on the left, and in Vietnam, there is no side of the road. Cross walks are pretty white lines drawn on the road just for funsies because they mean absolutely nothing. I have a heart attack every time I’m crossing a road. But hey, maybe you don’t cross roads “like a b*tch” like I do, as my boyfriend calls it. He is perfectly fine with these roads, walks right into oncoming traffic and even finds it a bit amusing how there is no law and order. If you’re like him, then don’t worry, you will be a-ok!
And perhaps if you go into this place with an open mind, you can say yeah, I’m going to get ripped off probably everywhere, but it’s not that much to me anyway. And sure, part of us believes this yet the other part of us is still going what the heck, I do not like getting ripped off. We had finished a bowl of noodles at a restaurant and wanted to pay. “40k” he says, and we’re already sure he’s inflated the price since a standard bowl of noodles has only costed 30-35k anywhere else. He points at the lady in charge of money who wasn’t paying attention and she says “45k”. Such blatant ripping off of us going on here I am flabbergasted. At least the man overrides the (we think) double price inflation and says 40k again. We’re usually careful to settle on a price beforehand but we never thought we’d have to haggle a meal too. This probably wasn’t the first time we’ve paid up, but it was definitely the most obvious. We come back and Victor goes down a rabbit hole of looking up scams in Hanoi and some people have had it super bad; we’ve been pretty lucky. Maybe it’s our problem that we have such a defensive mindset, but I find it unpleasant that everywhere I go I’m getting this slimy feeling wondering was I scammed, have I been ripped off?
Plus a few days in, we made an interesting observation. We constantly had headaches here, both of us. Originally we thought it was due to lack of sleep flying over from Singapore but after 2 days we still hadn’t recovered. Then we thought it was from lack of water, but I’ve never had headaches for like an entire day. As we were walking along the lake, I noticed the haze had not lifted in all the days we were here now. So it clicked: oh, pollution. Boyfriend pointed out ah, people do wear masks here. I hadn’t noticed before. And suddenly I noticed 5 at a time. We went ahead and bought a bunch of masks. Looking super local now, I believe this was my first experience wearing a mask for pollution.
Omg wait. I totally forgot about when I went to exchange money at a jewelry shop (the internet agrees you get the best exchange rates here) and when I counted I was missing maybe 40% of it. Btw bills are in like 8 different denominations and when you exchange, you get back millions of dongs, so it’s pretty hard to count. They come over, count my money, and goes to get the rest of it. Victor thinks no way they’d try to get away with that much, so it was probably just a mistake but… we’ll never know.
So cool okay, that was a quick intro covering some of the culture shock that was rather strong when I visited. And now for a brief intermission to tell a story about my stupidity.
Who goes to a foreign country and doesn’t check if you need a visa? Yes me, this girl. I’m going to put up a weak defense and say that in recent years, we’ve been traveling a lot without needing visas, so it totally slipped my mind this was a thing to do… oh this silly privileged American girl. So yeah, we showed up at the Singapore airport at 6am for our 8am flight. At the counter, the agent asks, “Visa?” We go, “Visa?” He confirms, “Visa.” Shit. What visa? What do we do now. An hour goes by where we’re frantically searching for rush visa options online, filling in sensitive passport information to whichever sketchy forms will take them, and the whole time I’m wondering if we’re being scammed. We’re at 7am, an hour before the flight and we manage to present some letter in Vietnamese that some rando agency sent us and it is enough to get us our boarding passes. By the end of this whole fiasco I am about $500 poorer now (my mistake so my wallet T_T).
Heh, whew okay I think I’ve gotten the bulk of my ranting out ^^
We had some good experiences too. I really enjoyed talking to the locals and learning about life here and their perspectives on things. To be clear, “locals” refers only to the extremely biased and small sample size of 2, the student tour guide and our cooking teacher, but it was still informative. Boyfriend’s favorite fact is that at 27, unmarried girls are deemed.. no good anymore. Why does he love that? Anytime he wants something now, he likes to remind me that I will be expiring soon. -.-
Speaking of culture, we caught a water puppet show here, apparently something you’re supposed to do in Hanoi. While it may not be for everyone, I thought I got something out of it. They play six different ancient instruments and the music they made was pretty and unique. When the water puppets come out, the whole music ensemble along with puppeteers backstage start telling a story so there’s a lot going on here, albeit in Vietnamese. I had read on tripadvisor that some people could generally guess what’s going on, but we definitely could not. So I just enjoyed the music and the puppets for what they were.
Much of the things to do in Hanoi are museum after museum, and there is good reason for that. There is a lot of history to be learned here. We learned about the countless other countries that came to take a piece of this place, oftentimes more than once and right after Vietnam had just fought off the last country that wanted it for whatever reason. It’s shocking to realize that it all ended but a few decades ago, and I’m very happy for their hard-earned independence today. Most of the things in the museums we chose to visit were rough to learn about, of course, it being about military history and all. But there was a lot of humanity they displayed as well, the bravery, the solidarity. There was a picture of an aging mother reuniting with her son who came back from the war that really gave me some watery eyes.
But back to some lighter subjects. Since y’know, things are relatively cheap here, we paid for a hotel that was maybe $55/night and the service for that price tag was amazing. They had complimentary afternoon tea time! Doormen and bag carriers, people I am not really used to lol. My favorite story is from when I went up to fetch breakfast because sleeping beauty was still in bed. The staff asked if I’d like some eggs and toast and I’m like sure. Before I knew it, two staff members are following me down to my floor in order to help me carry our breakfast. Two whole staff members! How embarrassing. Then they noticed I had some soup and asked if I’d like them to run up to grab some spoons. No, no, we’re good thank you! If you’re interested in the hotel we stayed at, it was called Serene Boutique Hotel, highly recommend.
We went to see the Hanoi train. Four freakin’ times, because it required an attempt almost everyday we were here before we finally succeeded in seeing it. What is this train? There’s this picturesque little alley with train tracks running through it. Cute cafes are set up here for you to relax and take photos as you wait to see the 3:30 train to come by, or so we were told. Thursday we waited 40min before we figured something must’ve gone wrong that day. Friday we tried again and when the train still didn’t come, we knew something was up. We couldn’t find an official timetable online but some blogs seemed to say that weekday and weekend train schedules differ, with 3:30 being a train that came only on weekends. Saturday we came to see it and spotted a 5min detour when we discovered a boardgame cafe, not something I’d imagine to see in Hanoi. We arrived to the alley at 3:24 when we overheard someone saying the train just came by. T_T What is our obsession with seeing this train you ask? Well, Victor already has strong FOMO tendencies to begin with, and to make matters worse, the Hanoi magnet he chose for his collection was one of the train, this train that we have failed 3 consecutive times to see. So we went back to the blog we found and see there’s supposed to be a 7:15pm. Yes, of course we tried again. We were fully committed to see this train.
This time we went back, the air felt different. There was a barrier set up on the intersecting street. A local elderly man told us where to stand (we had read the train gets really close to you and these very nice locals spend round the clock preventing tourists from getting run over). choo choo, we hear. Ohh my godd it’s happeninggg, and in three minutes it’s over. Wait what’s that? There’s another one at 7:45? We worked so hard for this, sure we can stay for another round.
We always try to plan our trip to perfection, but this time, serendipity altered our plans more than usual. Learning about the Hanoi train from hotel staff was one instance. Another was from conversations with our local tour guide, when we learned that Vietnamese people love to eat hot pot. We never would’ve guessed given how we’ve always considered it to be a Chinese thing. So we did an impromptu lookup of the best hot pot places in Hanoi and just showed up. Little did we know they did not speak a word of English. The lady tried increasingly to dumb down her Vietnamese before she realized we did not speak a word of it, at which she point she shouted somewhat endearingly in exasperation while her family/co-workers(?) chuckled. She takes out her purse to put 30k dong on the table. We gratefully bob our heads yes to show the price is good and thank you for bearing with us. But it was worth it- the hot pot broth along with its ingredients were really different ingredients than what we were used to and really tasty!
All in all, I enjoyed the great service, the affordability, and appreciate knowing more now about their unbelievable history. Our adventures chasing down the Hanoi train is one we’ll always look back fondly on. At the same time, this city stood out for putting me out of my comfort zone. From language barriers to fending off scammers, to fending off motorcyclists, to money doesn’t even make sense to me here, I was just out of my element. But hey, it’s not so bad to experience some variety in life. It keeps you on your toes.