Day and Night Cafe

Morning of my second day in Hanoi, Vietnam. Today and yesterday, I woke up in my hotel, stumbled to the bathroom, and suddenly realized "Damn. I'm in Vietnam...." This epiphany has inevitably been followed by the realization that it's only 6:30 or 7 am. It seems I can't sleep any later than that, which is frustrating. Lately I've wanted to become a morning person, and it only took moving to Vietnam to complete the transition from night owl to early bird. I left my room before 8am this morning, walked a few blocks down to Day and Night Cafe and here I sit, enjoying peach iced tea, an oscillating fan, and free wifi.

Day and Night Cafe

Peach iced tea

view from my table

the cafe...more modern than most places here

Despite being pretty tired, my first day in Hanoi was perfect. I had arranged to meet this guy Keith, from my program, at 1pm. We were joined by Kevin, who had arrived at the hotel at the same time as I did the night before. I needed a meal--I'd barely eaten in the past 24 hours. Additionally, I had just taken a typhoid vaccine pill, which needs to be followed by food an hour after ingestion. I was relieved when we stumbled into a little open air restaurant, full of locals. To our good fortune, one of the men working there spoke enough English to translate the menu (which consisted of about 5 things) for us. I ended up with pho, a soup of light broth (made with some beef stock), rice noodles, basil, mint, and green onions. A moment to discuss the broth: A vegetarian for about 10 or 11 years now, I avoid meat-based broths in the States. But I've resigned myself to the pho broth because, well, I'd probably starve otherwise. Normally pho (aka "the meal that built a nation"--it's the national dish) is served with actual beef in it, but I managed to communicate "No beef! Just noodles!" to the super friendly, English-speaking server, who honored my request with a smile. I've had pho back home, but this pho was so much better. Lighter. And the broth was much less beefy (thankfully!). I quickly gobbled up the entire bowl of soup--noodles, broth, onions and all. And get this. My meal--the huge bowl of soup and a bottle of water--cost me 10,000 dong. With the exchange rate at 16,600 dong to a dollar, I paid about 65 cents for my lunch.

After lunch Kevin, Keith and I trekked a couple kilometers to the medical center at the Diplomatic Compound, where Kevin needed to get a couple vaccines. I love walking around a new city, but it is just so impossibly hot and humid here. We're several kilometers west of the Old Quarter, the tourist area and city center, so it's nice to be out in the "normal" city environment. On the way back from the clinic we stopped in a cafe for some "ca phe sua da" -iced coffee with sweet condensed milk. This stuff is the nectar of the gods. Espresso and sweet, thick, syrupy milk over ice......mmmmh! It's strong, and tastes like strong coffee ice cream (which is my favorite). I'm actually drinking one right now, having finished my iced peach tea.

Kevin and me

lake (cant recall the name....)

swan paddle boats on the lake

On the way home we also witnessed a little bike accident. It seemed that a child somehow got his shoe or something stuck in the gears or spokes of the bicycle his mom was driving. The child and his mother were screaming in the middle of the street. A police officer, in his Party uniform, rushed out to the middle of the big, busy intersection to help. He was followed by a skinny civilian, who ran to help with a sock full of tools. A mass of motorists accumulated around the scene--people stopping out of some combination of curiosity and eagerness to help--which in fact provided a protective barricade around the accident. The boy was eventually released from whatever hold the bike had on him, he and the bike were carried out of the intersection, and traffic resumed....

We arrived back at the hotel, rested for an hour (ie, I passed out and the boys had to come wake me up), and then went out for dinner. The area we're staying in isn't exactly the culinary center of Hanoi, and there aren't many restaurants nearby. We ended up walking blindly into a hole-in-the-wall joint (most places around here fit that description) that served just one dish. No choices. The establishment was staffed largely by young children--I'd say 9 or 10 years old. I assume it was a family-run restaurant, and the kids just helped out in the evenings, but I'm not accustomed to someone younger than my sister bringing my food. Actually, I can't say it was exactly my food. Because I didn't eat a single bite of it. The young boy brought us a plate of leaves (which looked as if they'd just been plucked from the tree outside), three small dishes of sauce, some rice paper, and a plate of mysterious strips of an unknown substance, covered in something that kind of looked like flour. He showed us how to take leaves and the "mystery food", roll them up in the rice paper and create a tight little spring roll. Kevin and Keith, brave souls that they are, dove in and started eating. I, assuming that the mysterious strip were some kind of meat, abstained, and busied myself trying to find in my phrasebook/dictionary what they could possibly be eating. I eventually came to the following conclusions. It was most likely some kind of pork, and was probably pork ear. Yes, pork ear. When I pieced together what I thought they were eating, I just started laughing. Kevin looked at me, concerned, and asked if he even wanted to know. I continued to laugh. Eventually Keith demanded I tell him....so I handed him the book and pointed to the listing for "ear" in the Vietnamese-English dictionary. The boys paused for a second, contemplating the possibility that they were eating pig ear, but then proceeded to make more spring rolls and keep eating. Kudos to them.

mystery meat

When it came time to pay, which is always a challenge given the exchange rate and the tendency to get lost in all the zeros, the young boy who was so graciously walking us through our meal devised an ingenious method to communicate how much we owed. He went and got some money, and put bills up to each item to indicate how much it cost. I doubt he frequently encounters the problem of showing a foreigner how much the bill is, so I was especially impressed at his resourcefulness and cleverness. No one else all day--even adults--had done that.

Keith admitted, though, that he wanted to get some crackers or something on the way home. Since I hadn't eaten (I'm already losing weight here) I seconded his plan. We each bought a fresh baguette (for less than thirty cents). Chomping on bread as we walked home, we spotted something that virtually saved me from collapse--a GROCERY STORE! (Anyone who knows me at all knows that grocery shopping is possibly my favorite thing in the world.)Actually, it was more of an "everything" store--food, notebooks, toiletries, dishes, toys, watches. I bought cheese (think American singles), a small bag of potato chips, some "snack mix", lotion, orange juice, a drinking glass, a spoon, and what turned out to be possibly the best yogurt I've ever tasted. Strawberry flavor, and creamy.... And my entire purchase was about 7 dollars. I continue to have reverse sticker shock every time I buy something.

Back at the hotel, we met David, another Fulbrighter who had just arrived. We talked with him for a while before I retired to my room, ate the rest of my bread, some cheese and yogurt, tried my luck with the "borrowed" internet and eventually fell asleep. Day one over.

A moment to describe the city. Hanoi is unlike anything I've ever seen. The traffic is chaotic, apparently lacking any rules of the road, motorbikes stacked with people and goods zooming between cars, buses and bicycles laden with vegetables or flowers, everyone honking continually to scold traffic offenses that I cannot distinguish.... If someone realizes he's going the wrong way, he'll simply turn his motorbike around and drive the wrong way down a street. Crossing a street is especially terrifying--you just step out into the aforementioned traffic, walk steadily and hope the motorists dodge you--and I only accomplished it with the help of Keith, who has been here for 3 days already. I've spotted a couple people laughing at us inept Americans trying to cross the street, and they have every right to do so. We look ridiculous.

traffic!

colourful buildings....

The streets are kind of dirty, and the sidewalks are crumbling. Telephone and electric wires hang low in thick, gathered bunches, almost creating a screen between the two sides of the streets. Every now and then a stray cat or dog wanders by. (In fact, an emaciated kitten just limped into the cafe. It has started raining and he most likes seeks a dry refuge. No one here seems to notice him, or his searching eyes, or his little bones jutting out. It's hard for me to deal with. I guess animal rights are a privilege of only developed nations.)

It's evident, even in Hanoi, that many people here are still very poor. Everyone works very hard, and often in poor conditions. Work done by machines in the US is done manually here--repairing roads, digging ditches. Near my hotel a building is being demolished. The men work on it all day in the heat, wearing ragged t-shirts and flip-flops. No helmets, gloves, steel-toed boots. Even children work hard, like the boy in the restaurant last night, or another young boy I saw squatting in motorbike repair shop, tediously cleaning small gears and bike parts, or the girl selling produce with her mother.

It's difficult to see some of these things. But the city is beautiful, with all its imperfections. And the people are shockingly generous and friendly, patient with our inability to speak Vietnamese. Children--and even some young adults--yell "Hi!" or "Hello!" when we walk by, flashing wide grins. We're always being stared at, but the glances are innocent and curious. The only Caucasian people I've seen in the part of the city are the Fulbrighters.

It feels both strange and strangely comfortable to be here, on the other side of the globe, almost in another world....

More photos soon. I'm having some trouble uploading them and I have go meet Kevin, Keith and David (where are the other 5 girls who are supposed to be in my program?) in 40 minutes, and I need to shower first....