Today, I had a plan. I wanted to get tickets to the water puppet theatre, do a walking tour of the Old Quarter of Hanoi, eat some good food and arrange to go on a tour of Halong Bay tomorrow. I'm sure many of you wouldn't need definite goals for your sight-seeing, but I was strangely nervous about traveling alone and needed focus.This morning I experienced the most hair-raising adventure of my whole trip: I had to cross the street for the first time. I'd read about the streets of Hanoi and I'd been given good advice about it (thanks, Catherine.) But reading about it wasn't like doing it for the first time.
I'll have to describe it because I never was able to get a photo that really illustrated what is was like to see an approximately 4 lane road full of motor scooters, buses, cars and bicycles driving straight at you. They just kept coming and coming and the story is, you're supposed to just step out and walk at a steady pace across the road and let everyone go around you. I believed it would work, but belief doesn't make it easy to step out into the road. But I psyched myself up and stepped out. It was quite thrilling actually to cross in that chaos and live.
The Old Quarter is so great. I loved the architecture of course, but what was really exciting was all the life on the sidewalks. Women were peddling all kinds of food from place to place like pineapples, fish, shrimp, herbs, lychee, everything. The sidewalks were also full of restaurants, bicycles, parked scooters, shops, people washing their hair and clothes and rarely little boys peeing. There was so much to look at and there was so much energy. I totally fell in love with it.
I walked for hours despite the three or four men offering a ride on a scooter on every corner and the cyclo (pedaled rickshaws) drivers offering rides in the middle of the block. I got turned around a lot, bought a photocopied version of Catch 22, ate a lovely mid-morning snack, arranged to go to Halong Bay tomorrow, ate some weird deep-fried, stuffed tofu, and still had time to hang out and rest before going to the water puppet theatre at 4.
1 comment:
The spring rolls look yummy! They're one of my favorite things to order at Thai or Vietnamese restaurants here in California. I'm going to buy some of those rice wrappers and try to make my own.
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