Hanoi for the holidays.

Where is the hate?

Everyone I talked to in Saigon–locals, expats, and passers-through alike—had something bad to say about Hanoi. The people were nasty and aggressive. The city was boring. The simplest transaction was an exercise in gougery. Yet somehow these tales of belligerent cab drivers and rapacious shopkeepers only served to fill me with a sense of anticipation. I mean, isn’t this why we travel? To go somewhere different? I was actually eager to visit this strange and exotic place, this city of assholes.

Sadly, Hanoi turned out to be a disappointment on the asshole front. Aside from a woman who stiff-armed me into a supermarket display and a hotel clerk who so transparently tried to overcharge me that we both started laughing, the people were . . . ordinary. Friendly even, if not as smiley and outgoing as their southern counterparts. What a letdown. Maybe your luck will be better.

I learned to love Hanoi anyway. The first thing that struck me was the change in weather. It was cool & overcast, and as in Dalat, where I visited a few months ago, the colder temperatures triggered the strongest sense of nostalgia. I wouldn’t call it homesickness, but just kind of an achy wistfulness, not at all unpleasant. I don’t think I’d ever felt the Proust-response that weather can trigger quite this powerfully before. So many memories came rushing forth from the winter part of my mind as I arrived in Hanoi: a cableknit sweater with a tear in the sleeve I used to have ; my first overseas trip, to Europe in the winter; smoking cigarettes; a particular window frosted over, and on and on.

So, Hanoi. I liked being underneath gray skies and seeing people wearing hats and sweaters and scarves. And berets. They haven’t gone out of fashion in Hanoi. Scores of goateed and van-dyked Vietnamese men wear them, smoking and strolling the winding streets of the Old Quarter or the wide boulevards around Hoan Kiem lake like so many Communist flaneurs. (Somewhere, deep within the burrows of my heart, my long-dormant francophilia began to stir.)

I liked drinking coffee on a cold morning more than I think I ever have, and fogginess, and looking over old Hanoi rooftops from my hotel, and hot showers. I also liked just being a traveler/tourist again. The expat life in Saigon has been relatively stationary. That tingle of excitement from landing in a new airport, riding into a new town…it seems an ever-renewable resource. I toured with a vengeance, unapologetically hitting the guidebook trail. A few sights:

Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum: Ho Chi Minh’s preserved body is on display in an enormous marble mausoleum. Kitschy, creepy, and solemn at the same time. Of as much interest as the waxy body of Uncle Ho was watching the Vietnamese making their way through to pay respects. The man in front of me on line was almost overcome with emotion as he bowed fiercely to the glass sarcophagus and then took his little son’s hands and pressed them into the praying shape and showed him how to bow too. Many Vietnamese still make a daily early-morning pilgrimage, I was told.

Hoa Lo Prison Museum: The infamous Hanoi Hilton is a museum, but it’s dedicated almost entirely to the prison’s many years of service to the French colonial regime. (Here my francophilia rolled over and went back to sleep.) Disturbing stuff; a highlight/lowlight is the guillotine on display–there’s a sinister, sculptural beauty to it, all sharp and polished. I spent an evening in Hanoi talking to a British journalist about who the bigger bastards were as colonizers, the French or the English. Hard to say, but the guillotine suggests to me a sort of sadism, an almost aesthetic cruelty that I’m not sure I would ascribe to the Brits.

Temple of Literature: I recognized this place from the back of the 100,000 dong bill. It’s a Confucian temple complex that once housed the first university in Vietnam, founded almost 1,000 years ago. Lovely and well-preserved and right in the middle of town. I am inclined to like any place called “The Temple of Literature,” especially one that features a “Literature Lake”, and arches with names like:

Suc Van: Crystallization of Letters Gate
Bi Van: Magnificence of Letters Gate
Dai Thanh: Great Synthesis Gate

Meet you guys after class at Great Synthesis Gate! Why wasn’t I born in 11th-century Vietnam? Life is so unfair.

Art Galleries. I dropped into several art galleries, and despite lots of international press touting Hanoi’s art scene, I wasn’t especially impressed. A few interesting pieces share gallery walls with countless variations of the same tired scenes you see all over Vietnam: women in ao dai or conical hats, a single canoe on a lake, etc. My favorite works were by an artist named Nguyen Quang Huy: watery, slightly out-of-focus portraits of women in shades of blue & grey. They reminded me a little of Gerhard Richter’s photo-portraits, and I began to wonder if I liked them because they were familiar & derivative. Contemporary art as comfort food? Discuss.

I would suggest, from my limited experience, that Saigon may actually be developing a more vibrant art scene, fueled by a bigger international community. It hasn’t gotten the press that Hanoi has, but I think it will emerge over the course of the next few years.

(The Hanoi Fine Arts Museum, on the other hand, is infinitely superior to Saigon’s amateurish, ramshackle affair.)

I took an overnight trip to Halong Bay, and slept on one of the tourist junks that crowd the waters of Vietnam’s most famous natural wonder, a bay with thousands of limestone karsts & tree-covered islets jutting out of the water. A huge tourist attraction, but one I’m glad I saw. Plus, sleeping on boats is a great thing to do.

More museums. The Army Museum, The History Museum. Water Puppets. Great food. Cha ca, a famous northern dish of fried fish with noodles and plenty of mint, dill, and other herbs is very good, if surprisingly oily–an uncommon complaint in Vietnamese cooking. (For what it’s worth, the oldest cha ca restaurant in Hanoi, Cha Ca Va Long, is listed in that giant “1,000 Places to See Before You Die” book.) Also, bowls of steaming pho for breakfast…makes so much more sense in the colder climes of the north.

I walked around and took pictures (with my new camera! A Nikon D40), and had long conversations and late-night adventures with new friends. I decided to stay in Hanoi for New Year’s Eve, instead of returning to Saigon as I had originally planned and had a blast. The next day at the airport, I was literally pulling confetti out of my pockets as I looked for my passport and tickets.

Hanoi really filled Vietnam out for me. As much as I love Saigon, it is the kind of place that can feel disconnected from itself–speeding into the future, a vertiginous shot into the atmosphere, an untethered balloon. There is a great energy in Saigon and it makes things exciting, but for me there are times this energy can be draining. Hanoi, while also changing rapidly, feels calmer, more rooted in Vietnamese history: Chinese temples and shophouses, French buildings and boulevards, Communist citadels and party members carrying plastic briefcases all co-exist alongside the new.

I sense that Saigon is a better, or perhaps just an easier place to live as a foreigner, but it would be ludicrous to come to Vietnam and not spend some time in Hanoi and I am so glad I finally did.