Dawn in Hanoi

I arrived in Hanoi Thursday afternoon, after the world's best airline delay in Saigon - I had a foot massage, and the airline unaccountably paid for a meal in the airport, presumably by way of apologizing for the hour and a half delay. Amazing! (I imagine United Airlines will start buying meals for delayed passengers the same day Starbucks startes marketing Weasel Poop coffee.) I spent most of my first night in Hanoi lost, wandering around in circles, trying to find either the restaurant I was after, or at least my hotel to recoup. The wandering would have been easier going had not all my energy and concentration gone into dodging motorbikes. It's not that there's more traffic than in HCMC, it's that the streets here are so much narrower (though I swear a few bikes have swerved at me). Finally I found my hotel, drew myself an idiot-proof map to the restaurant, headed out, and promptly turned the wrong direction again - idiot-proof, or proof of an idiot?! But I found my bearings and my quarry, a restaurant recommended by my guide book that serves only Cha Ca, which means fried fish. It's a hands-on affair, the fish cooked right there at your table on a little brazier, along with heaps of green onion and fresh dill. On the side are a plate of cold rice noodles (bun), a bowl of fresh herbs (cilantro and something minty), more shredded scallions, sliced orange chilis, peanuts, and thick, tangy sweet nuouc mam. You put a clump of the noodles into your little cup-sized bowl, then top with, well, everything. The servers at the restaurant were very sweet and kept coming over and adjusting the flame on my brazier, adding more greens to the pan, putting more fish in my bowl. I felt like a little kid which, come to think of it, I am, in terms of Cha Ca. Later, as I was taking notes on the dish, one of them came peeking over my shoulder and checked my work, made a few corrections. It was worth an hour of wandering around lost, but oh my I was happy to get back to my hotel.

Thanks to jetlag, I was up by 5:30 the next morning, and had to have the daughter of the hotel unlock the front door and gates to let me out. I was looking forward to walking around sans moto, but was a little surprised to find myself walking along in a very dark, no-streetlight dawn. First thing I saw was a large rat nibbling some refuse; we startled each other and both scuttled off on our separate ways. Dawn seemed to take forever, but as I walked down the tree-enclosed street towards the open sky above Hoam Kiem Lake, many others were out and about too: sweeping out shopfronts in the dark, setting up their big pots of pho broth, a few tangerine-and-yam sellers with their scale-like yokes heaped with wares. There was a sort of lovely anonymity in the dark, after 3 days of sticking out like the proverbial sore thumb; and I was just another dark faceless figure moving along in the dark. Compared to Ho Chi Minh City, with its broad boulevards and stark communist architecture, Hanoi is much more cramped, ancient, and beautiful. The signs of colonialism and communism are here, certainly, but Hanoi seems to have not been taken over by these things so much as allowed them in and then absorbed them. There's more trees and green here than HCMC, in fact at times it seems the city is a thin layer of civilization over the deep bedrock of the jungle, and the sinuous vines of trees that creep over rooftops and telephone lines, the roots that pop up between the sidewalk slabs, are poised and ready to take over again, once these pesky humans are done with the place.

I arrived at Hoan Kiem Lake: think of Greenlake, Central Park, Gold's Gym, and the Venice Beach Muscle Beach rolled into one. Bo Hoan Kiem means "Lake of the Restored Sword" (all that in 3 little syllables), and legend has it that a giant tortoise lives in the lake (there's much more to that legend, but I won't go into that now). Here the change from night to light was a little startling, and the sense of solitude and isolation evaporated instantly. There were hundreds of people at the lake, walking and stretching, playing badminton, and exercising en masse. One group of about 25 people stood still, eyes closed, tapping their faces as if trying to wake themselves up. In a large open plaza, about 60 people were bouncing away at aerobics, in front of a towering, sober statue of Confucius.

For breakfast I found my way to a street kitchen serving Bun Reiu Cua. This is a soup made of bun noodles, crab, spring onions, tomatoes, and big hunks of meat product that I might delicately call Vietnamese mortadella. Chris Hatch, ever good for a blunt, vivid description, would have called it "butts and beaks". Anyway, better to eat it than to think about it. I eventually figured out that the mossy scum-like stuff floating on the top was the crab - not what I was expecting after seeing the succulent crab meat at the market...! (In the cooking class I attended later in the day, I learned how the crab winds up that way: the tiny blueish crabs, plucked from the rice fields, are mashed up with with a mortar and pestle, raw, wriggling, shell and all, to a grey paste. Then you put the mush in a big bowl of water and "wash" it to separate the shell, then boil the liquid. The meat cooks and rises to the top to be skimmed off; the shell stays at the bottom.) On the side was a nice big bowl of chopped lettuce and herbs: sisho, basil, that ubiquitous mystery mint. I worried briefly about whether I should be eating raw lettuce, then said the hell with it (I say "the hell with it" quite a lot, and so far so good, knock on wood), reasoning that all the MSG I spotted her pouring into the broth would kill any microbes anyway. There was also a plate of fried stuff that looked like churros. Didn't taste like churros, though.

So, by now, it's 8:30.

There was a market going on nearby, so I plunged in. Again, I am just amazed by the variety of veggies available, so many things I've never seen before, and the things I have seen before, I've never seen looking so fresh or so good. Also mountains of fresh herbs, green and bright and wet. I saw a man ride in on a scooter with a gigantic payload of greens bundled into a brick that must have been 3' high and 3' across. Again, the live fish and crabs, a basin of squirming eels, another full of salamanders. A wire cage with 2 sweet grey and white bunnies NOT, alas, destined to be household pets. Still no live fowl.