Don't believe what they say - it is entirely possible to cross the street in Hanoi. However, doing so means resigning yourself to unspoken traffic traditions and putting your health and very existence into the hands of a hundred people piloting motorbikes laden with children, vegetables, and 35 foot lengths of pipe. And that's just what's driving past downtown.
Take a drive even 20 minutes out of Hanoi and you will find the roads sparse with vehicles but edged with a thick bustle of random transport. Two hundred pounds of lifeless hog laid across the back of a motorbike, eerily pink in the sun and moving steadily along the road. A woman, her face shielded by the standard conical straw hat, holding equally tightly to the handlebars of her bicycle and to the five dead chickens she has in each hand; the birds picture perfect and moving only when the wind disturbs their feathers. Uniformed factory workers finishing their shifts and piling onto bicycles -- two friends onto a single bicycle, layering their four feet on the pedals and powering their way home together. A table and chairs balanced on a motorbike in the small chunk of seat left behind the driver.
It is absolutely no joke to be in the dead center of the road and see a motorbike that looks like a moving vegetable garden coming straight for you. Your brain locks and your body screams to run, but the only solution is to focus on the other side of the road and continue to put one foot in front of the other. Slowly. You must know and trust that the vegetables and their driver will either rush past your front, or veer to your back. There is no stopping for them and there is no stopping for you. There is only the constant flow. The occasional traffic lights only serve to create temporary parking lots in which hundreds of motorbikes pause - humming - and wait for the light to change and the streets to swarm again.
Hanoi is hot, so hot that people in the know resign their bodies to the midday swelter and sleep wherever it is that they find themselves. We walked through a small muggy market over which a random tapestry of striped fabrics had been hung. In the bright afternoon sun these fabrics cast watercolor hues on the marketplace below but the vendors didn't care; most were sleeping under their vegetables or alongside their eels. It was too hot to shop, and therefore too hot to sell.
Watermelon juice is one solution to these problems. Or better yet, a tall glass of watermelon juice and a fan blowing hot air through your hair and drying the sweat off your back. There are also delicious fresh lunches piled high with tangles of lotus root and banana flower, peanuts and bean sprouts. The taste is a mix of vibrant fish sauce and vinegar, and flavors that most westerners don't know how to begin to explain. And even in the heat there is delicious Vietnamese coffee, strong and syrupy with a basement of condensed milk. After swirling it all together the coffee is sweet and strong, and a reason to relax at a sidewalk café even if you're not yet tired.
Pho (pronounced "fuh") is the steaming bowl of beef and leafy greens known as the national breakfast of Vietnam. It is savory and wonderful and comes accompanied by tiny round limes that are squeezed fresh into your bowl. There are containers of hot and spicy sauces too, and if these seasonings aren't already on the plastic curbside table when you arrive, the regulars will pass them along. You might not notice because you'll still be trying to figure out exactly where to stash your legs as they most definitely do not fit under the tiny table; and your doll-sized plastic stool won't help because sitting on it started the problem by placing your knees up somewhere near your shoulders. But this is what eating somewhere else is all about - it's real food on the side of a real road sitting on plastic doll furniture with real people. And at the bargain price of a dollar a bowl I think I could get used to this.
Filling your days in the city is easy. There are art galleries in old decaying homes in which the interior gardens are often as beautiful as the art. There are haircuts and close shaves at a sidewalk barber under the leafy trees. There are lakes and pagodas and as many historic sites as you'd like to explore. (There are also people pulling turtles out of the picturesque lakes and shoving them quickly into their pockets but I doubt you'll find that on a postcard.)
It's possible to visit the infamous Hanoi Hilton with its well-known and unfortunate American connection. And while visiting the remainders of the prison, which now form a small museum, you'll discover that before the Vietnamese kept American soldiers there, they themselves were imprisoned there by the French who had originally built this place to hold Vietnamese political prisoners who resisted their rule. And yet even with the recent and violent history between America and Vietnam, there were still nothing but smiles from normal people on the street. Making eye contact with someone in Vietnam usually ends with a smile, unless of course you're wandering through the market at its peak and then you might get an encouraging shove to the side instead. In general practice it's best not to get in the way of people who've been up since 3:00am cleaning fish and killing chickens.
Once a year in Vietnam there is the Mid-Autumn festival celebrating not only the harvest moon but in more modern times, one's children and family. To the random foreigners who out of sheer dumb luck are wandering the streets during this magical party, it looks like a kid-pleasing combination of Christmas and Halloween. There are costumes and presents, candies and balloons; mice for sale by lantern light and fire lanterns intermittently rising into the sky.
The crowds were thick and motorbikes were constantly threading their way through the masses. But the feeling of this commotion, the mood in that sweltering block of humanity, was nothing but pleasant and light. I have never been in a crowd of people that was both so gigantic and so easy going, with children running the streets in devil horns and asleep on their parents' motorbikes by the end of the night.
Hanoi has that remarkable quality of looking as if a good solid thump on the back could make it all fall apart, while at the same time absolutely singing with the hum of life. The electrical lines that cross the streets like handfuls of long black snakes, and the aged trees that command so many patches of sidewalk manage - miraculously - not to intertwine.
The simple bowls of pho made in makeshift kitchens no bigger than closets and eaten every morning at the curb carry a country's well-deserved culinary reputation to places very far from here. And motorbikes that follow no rules successfully transport entire families through daily life while weaving through a thousand other families doing the same.
This is the place to watch chaos frizz into normalcy while a million moving pieces fall perfectly into place.
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