Day 14 - Ha Noi | Main | Day 16 - Ha Long Bay
Dogs, Frogs and Chopping Boards
Hanoi is the most cosmopolitan city we visited, and possibly for this reason many people seem to make it the first place they arrive in Vietnam and migrate south, rather than the northern approach we took. In the old quarter where we were staying there is a focus on tourism, mostly of the backpack variety, this is not all about the glamour traveller - yet. But while there is this focus on tourism, there is also an incredible local community that live there largely as they have for decades, sure there is some technology change but much is the same. The streets of the old quarter are largely named after the the trade that takes place there, for instance there are streets that sell goldfish, others that sell, joss sticks and paper money, another that has people making things out of tin (like the large tin letter box we purchased) - the street our hotel was on features people who make grave stones. They do this principally with marble and they cut them with grinding stones (in the street - from early in the morning till late at night) and then fill in the pertinent details and add a photo or etched picture of the deceased, its quite artistic if a little noisy - still the grinders made a change in noise from the bike and car horns.
Hazy Lake
Our street also had numerous street food vendors who interestingly changed during the day, one lady would set up around 6am and make some kind of rice breakfast thing in a banana leaf till about 10am and then she would go, others catered to the lunch trade and others still set up for dinner from around 6pm. The amazing thing was the level of set up some of these portable restaurants would go to, setting up burners and wood fired stoves, small tables and signs.
Food in the street
Dogs...!
Friday morning we got up and headed out of the hotel looking for breakfast, somewhere different so we wandered down to the lake and ate at the café that is along side it looking over to the tortoise pagoda and the island - the coffee was incredibly strong and we ordered the local version with sweet condensed milk.
We wandered on alongside the lake where we again saw the man who sells goldfish on the back of his bicycle and met an Australian who had been in Hanoi for 15 years and married a local. We wandered on through the streets of Hanoi with him listening to the stories of expat life in Viet nam - which led us to Hanoi's oldest market (right near the old jail known as the Hanoi Hilton) here we saw plenty of dog and other treats being prepared for sale, we were the only non vietnamese in the market and this is where we found the chopping board, some would say the buying a 3kg chopping board in the morning and then carrying it around Hanoi on foot to be foolhardy, but that is what we did.
Temple of Literature
We continued our trip onto the Temple of Literature one of the nicest buildings in Hanoi and surprisingly one of the only temples open in Hanoi we spent a few hours wandering around before continuing our trip. We made it to Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum to find we had arrived on one of the days it is closed, so we took some photos (with our chopping board) and continued our walk slowly back to the hotel via the market.
Outside Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum with the chopping board
We had decided as this was our last night in Hanoi that we should splurge and go for a fancy dinner at the Metropole - the oldest and flashest hotel in Vietnam. So we frocked up and caught a cyclo down there, the cyclo rider had little english and decided that he needed to give us a tour of the old quarter before taking us to the Metropole so we took a lazy ride around town seeing most of the streets we had seen before and a few we had missed - actually it was a lovely experience.
The Metropole has 3 restaurants, one Vietnamese, one French and one more of a Cafe, we decided on the french restaurant which turned out to be one of the best meals either of us had ever eaten any where. We had foie gras, lobster, duck, truffles, you name it we had it and it was absolutely fantastic but then it would want to be with a bill of $370 USD (nearly 20 times the average dinner bill of $20).
pictures to come once they are uploaded!
Posted by crispin at January 4, 2008 03:09 PM