Hanoi

Kathy and I are back in Hanoi for a few hours before heading down to the beach town of Nha Trang. We spent the last two days taking a junk cruise on Halong Bay, but before I get to that I'll give you some pictures of Hanoi.

Hanoi is a nice combination of a modern Asian city (now 6.2 million people) with a somewhat slowed-down, French Colonial overlay. We stayed at the Metropole, first built in 1901 and a favorite haunt of Graham Greene, and it feels exactly like the sort of place that Graham Greene would have liked (albeit, now with air conditioning).

Hanoi is a city of motorbikes and bicycles, there are more and more cars, but still far fewer than most cities. This first picture captures the feel of the street, as a single woman bicyclist slowly moves as as scooters flash by.

The Vietnamese like to drink beer, and every afternoon at 5:00 PM open air draft beer parlors spring up on street corners. A draft of Bia Hanoi costs about 35 cents, and everybody sits around sweating lightly and drinking a good, and cold, beer. If the police comes all the tables are swept up and put inside, 5 minutes later all returns to normal. The kindergarten sized chairs just add to the ambience.

Some images are so graven into our minds that they seem almost trite. Cone hats and the double hanging baskets are deeply embedded into my memory, this picture needs Walter Cronkite's voice in the background telling us how the war is going.

All in all, Hanoi is a lovely city, I can see why it is Kathy's favorite city in the world, I could easily see living here (now we jsut need someone to offer us jobs here...). This is a picture looking across Hoan Kiem Lake towards the Old Quarter of Hanoi, a rabbit warren of little streets and shops, selling everything anyone could want.