For breakfast today I had a bowl of rice noodles with a little shredded chicken, some green onions, and cilantro, all in a light broth. It settles the belly and warms the insides, a good thing because it’s much colder than we’d planned on it being and we’re all feeling a little sketchy. We skipped our evening plans last night and crawled in to bed under piles of blankets, finally warming up and passing out around 830. We are up early because we have to hop a bus to Halong Bay; we will spend the night on a junk cruising around the karst peaks that punctuate the bay.
I wish I could post pictures because Hanoi is a vocabulary defying experience. We spent a good part of yesterday afternoon in the Old Quarter, the streets are all themed – there are the tailors and banner makers and the place where they hammer little charcoal stoves out of sheet metal and then around the corner, the place where you buy stuff for your altar or get a tombstone made or buy buttons. The noise is unbelievable, the shouting, the honking, the pounding, the touts, and then there are the smells from the streetside cooking or the coats of varnish being applied to crappy souvenirs or the rotting produce leavings.
Around lunchtime we plunged into one of those classic backpacker joints where you can get veggie entrees and odd things like French toast or nachos. I had the Hanoi pho (soup) because well, we’re in Hanoi, right, and ginger tea, but then we were just overwhelmed by all the everything and headed back to the hotel to convene with our fellow travelers.
It’s going to be a few more days before I get a shower, I think, unless the water on the boat is hotter than the water in our current digs, but whatever, I can’t smell any worse than the streets of Hanoi. Apparently, excellent seafood is on the menu for tonight, Fish Wednesday, take that.
It’s odd to be in a group, but we are such gringos here, such standouts, that it seems nearly an unavoidable feeling that we are part of a group whether we want to be or not. So far, so good.
It sounds just fascinating, even the lack of showers, noise, and cold. When I went to Beijing and Hong Kong I became just fascinating with Asia. Would love to go back, any country.
We miss you guys! Hope you & J have a splendid trip. Baby V thinks bathing is overrated.
I am so grateful you’re there and writing this…I had my first class yesterday with the group who’s going with me in March. We’re going to have student visas, not press, but we still have to write stories/do a web package.
It sounds like we’ll have a lot to work with.
Wow! The Hanoi story was just like reliving breakfast there again. I’ve also traveled in Borneo (Sarawok, Brunei, etc.)and the Middle East, and would love to share some of those stories. I lived in Saudi Arabia for a year, and was taken prisoner during a business trip to Iraq. Keep on keeping on!