Our first day in Hanoi was a Sunday, which we discovered was typically a quiet day, and Monday brought out a much livelier city. Venturing away from the still-relative quiet of the lake made us realize something very quickly - crossing the road in Hanoi is a hairy affair!
The streets, (and sidewalks!), are teeming with people, motorbikes, and cars, all in motion. Nobody stops, even for stoplights. If you are a pedestrian and you want to cross the road, you wait for a hole in the traffic, and just start walking. While it’s best to stop for cars, the motorbikes which make up the vast majority of the traffic, won’t so much yield as flow around you. This all results in a strangely beautiful, albeit rather dangerous, ballet.
As is our wont, we wandered around the city for a time, taking in the sights. Hanoi feels like both a southeast Asian and European city at the same time, and it was cool to see various styles mashed together. There were fruit hawkers and street food stalls next to big box electronic stores and European cafes, and old folks in traditional garb on motorbikes driving by cadres of young professionals who looked like they just got out of a Wall Street meeting. We found plenty of green spaces, and some of the most delicious coffee we’ve ever had, which was a departure from the instant coffee that we’d had to endure for our caffeine fixes in most of the countries we’d been to!
we didn’t have to wander far to find echoes of the past, including the Vietnamese empires, the French colonial regime, and of course, the Vietnam War.
When we went to museums about the Vietnam war, it was interesting, though at times difficult, to see this perspective. Hanoi was the capital of North Vietnam, and the US backed South Vietnam in the war. After the South lost, the two countries were unified. As history tends to be written by the winner, the US’s involvement is not kindly represented, and it’s never fun when your country is the Bad Guy. What is interesting however, is that more recent interactions between the US and Vietnam are shown in a very positive light, oftentimes in the next room of the museum.
The history of Vietnam goes back well over a thousand years, so we had a lot that to learn about it that didn’t have anything to do with wars in the 20th century. One of the more impressive places we went was the Temple of Literature, a Temple of Confucius. The temple hosts the Imperial Academy, Vietnam’s first national university, which was founded sometime shortly after 1225 CE.
After a few days in Hanoi, we hopped on a night train to our next destination, Sa Pa. We were looking forward to some trekking!
