First stop: Hanoi! I knew very little about Vietnam before going and these days I do very little pre-trip prep. I figure once I arrive I’ll be on the internets and guides and looking for stuff, so as long as I get there in one piece, it’s all good. This time we rented an AirBnB which turned out to be very nice, with three floors and three separate bedrooms. I planned on doing only eating in Vietnam so I needed lots of room to sit around doing the day/night in the house.
And sit I did, as quite a few nights were spent LoLing, especially since Margot and K left me for a few days to do an overnight trek to Sapa and also a Halong Bay cruise. So for half of Hanoi I was basically on my own! (Okay not really, but more on that later.)
Since I wasn’t in Vietnam to sightsee, it turned out our AirBnb was the greatest place to stay as it was fowl street, with chicken pho up and down the block and a delicious duck place that served incredible roasted duck and duck congee. Waking up and walking just a few steps outside for pho was the dream and is the absolute way to live!
I did hit up a few museums in Hanoi, as we all went to the National Museum of Fine Arts and Remembrance Museum together. I did the Museum of the Revolution, National Museum of History, and Women's Museum solo. I’d recommend the Fine Arts museum above all, with the Museum of the Revolution and National Museum of History being good for a quick sweep. I found the Remembrance Museum off-putting (ostensibly it’s about the awful things Americans did in Vietnam but also it sort of seemed to glorify some aspects of it. Look into the history of the museum, it’s basically made by the government to entrap tourists) and wanted more from the Women’s Museum. Overall Hanoi was full of cultural landmarks and interesting things to look at, just as advertised.
On our second night, while looking for a quick late night eat, we wandered into the Old Quarter and its raging bar/club/food scene. Even on a Tuesday the place was packed, and there were expats and backpackers galore, as well as many locals. We perched ourselves on the ubiquitous little plastic stools alongside Bia Hoi Junction / Beer Corner and ate delicious soft-shelled crab and people watched.
While I did explore the club scene a little bit, most of it consisted of ten minutes in a club before walking right out. Margot’s friend had told her to “book a table” at clubs and now it all made sense. The three clubs I visited in Vietnam were all the same, with little tables up front that had to be stood at and reserved, and then a holding pen in the back for the plebes. Basically, it was not fun and there was absolutely no dance floor. In theory Saigon had some, but I never got a chance to look. Also, there is no dress code and no door security or cover which means you just waltz in and out. That was nice. (Our big draw was this place called "The Toilet," which turned out to be fancy but terrible.)
Some other things I did in Hanoi: randomly visited a Bulgaria Rose Festival at Ho Tay Water Park, tromped through much of the Old Quarter, took in the night market on a weekend, and also just wandered around the city, getting a decent grasp of it I think. Overall Hanoi was a lovely laid-back city, which had a nice combination of big and small place charms. Also, I used a lot of Foursquare to find food, lucking into following some of my trusted check-in friends’ places. The pho overall was amazing of course, but the banh mi was very different from what our American palettes were used to and so it was disappointment all around.
Also I realized I know nothing about real Vietnamese food, since all we have back home is the Americanized stuff!
The short answer to the first question is that the original written Vietnamese language is basically Chinese lettering and then when the French took over, everything got Romanized to the extent that I never even saw any Chinese letters except in museums.
I guess I just stupidly expected to see the Vietnamese lettering we’re used to in the States alongside whatever their “original” writing was. Turns out, I knew nothing! As for the little plastic stools, the answer I was given was that by not having proper chairs and tables, the restaurant and cafe owners don’t have to pay a certain type of tax. Also I had not anticipated how so much of the Vietnamese culture was Chinese-influenced, not knowing that China had ruled Vietnam for like a thousand years. So the art, the foods, the iconography, all very familiar. Answer #3: It’s “Saigon."
And of course, the boba! I found a ton of boba in Hanoi — and even more in Saigon — and it was like daily boba for me, so much so that my Foursquare friend was alarmed at my plentiful boba check-ins, and I think I had more boba than Vietnamese coffee during the trip. We cleaned up Hanoi with a great karaoke spot, named Tom Karaoke after Tom & Jerry, and while the selection was just okay, the room was very swanky and we sung our hearts out, leaving me with “Stop” by Spice Girls stuck in my head for the next few days.
And then, it turned out that one of George’s San Jose friends was in Vietnam at the exact same time and she saw me on Tinder because of, well, George aka Jette, and I met up with S immediately the next day after a 2AM digital meet-and-greet. A Vietnam native who immigrated to the U.S. when she was seventeen, S turned out to be a tremendous resource and brought me to so many delicious foods over the next few days and then even had simultaneous plans to be in Saigon the same time we were so she joined us down there.
You never know who you’re gonna meet, especially while traveling, so you gotta just always get it swiped, keep it right!