Our Final Days in Hanoi

We returned to the Movenpick ahead of schedule on Tuesday afternoon, so we decided to take a taxi to the banks of the Red River to see the Hanoi Opera House.  The Opera House was built by the French in 1911. It was here in 1945 that the Viet Minh proclaimed the August Revolution from the balcony.

We spent a short amount of time walking around the gardens.  Everything is so nice and green and the flowers are already in bloom – a nice contrast from the scenery when I left New Jersey.

Across from the Opera House are several high-end stores – Gucci, Louis Viton – all the places that I don’t shop.  We checked the travel guide to see what else was in the area and found that there was a street of “foreign language” (i.e., English) bookstores nearby.  One of my biggest complaints about Hanoi is that it has been impossible to find an accurate map.  I feel like we’ve spent half our time walking around lost as was the case when trying to find the bookstore.  After walking around in circles for quite some time, an elderly gentleman stopped us to ask if we needed directions.  His English was perfect.  It turns out that the street for which we were looking was directly adjacent to the Opera House.  On the map, it appeared to be a few blocks north.

From the bookstore, we walked north along the east bank of Hoan Kiem Lake.  We passed a park with a statue presumably of a prominent individual from the early communist movement.  The kids were using this as a skateboard park.  We wandered around some different areas of the Old Quarter, for once, not getting lost, and decided to eat dinner on the third floor of a restaurant overlooking the Tonkin Free Movement Square. 

For dinner, we chose some local Hanoi dishes – caramelized pork and Cha Ca Hanoi, a soup-like broth with large chunks of banana fish.  It was served in a pot cooking over an open flame (similar to hot pot).  Once it came to a boil, we added vegetables and served the soup over noodles and peanuts.

While we were waiting for our dinner, we sat at an open-air bar that overlooked the square.   I thought that traffic was crazy from street level.  From an aerial view, it looked like carefully choreographed chaos.  I think that the trick is no one drives very fast and people are actually willing to give and take.  Basically everyone just doges one another. 

Wednesday morning we had scheduled a cooking class.  Our taxi driver for this trip was the first personable driver we had encountered during our entire trip to Hanoi.  He was eager to practice his English and when he heard that Karen was from the UK, he began telling us about his favorite football club, Manchester United.

The class started with a tour of the market.  Our teacher, Li, told us that the markets in Hanoi are government regulated and of course taxed.  To avoid the taxes, Hanoi has what are called “frog markets.”  These are simply impromptu places where women bring their seasonal fruits and vegetables to sell.  The location constantly changes to avoid the police, hence the name frog, because both the market and the patrons hop around from place to place.  Li said that about once a week, the police come around and close down the frog market, but for the most part, the police look the other way because the prices are much cheaper and the police prefer to buy their food at the frog market as well.

Li then led us across the main road running into Hanoi to the official local market.  There was no way we would have made it across without her.  The market sold everything you could possible imagine – fresh fruits and vegetables, a half-dozen different types of eggs, warm baguettes, fresh meats, live fish and seafood that they cleaned on the spot, and fresh rice noodles.  Li bought some ingredients that we would need for our dishes.

 

Before we started cooking, Li spent a half-hour talking with us about traditional Vietnamese cooking.  In Vietnam, the majority of the cooking is done outside over a charcoal fire.  Most houses don’t even have a stove inside.  The woman cooks a full meal of multiple dishes for both lunch and dinner, so for breakfast she asks the family what they want and then goes out to buy it from a street vendor.

Our class focused on a street food menu.  We made more spring rolls, this time with pork and prawns; two kinds of barbequed pork, one that was sliced thin and then marinated and the other a ground pork which we made into mini burgers; and a “dipping sauce” with vegetables which was more like a soup in which we put the barbequed pork.  The soup was served over rice noodles.  It made a nice meal.  Since I now have a barbeque grill, I can try to make this meal at home.

There was a French couple taking the class with us who were traveling through Vietnam for a month.  The woman was three months pregnant with her first child.  I couldn’t even begin to image taking a trip like that three months pregnant.

After our cooking class it was time to bid farewell to Hanoi.  The flight from Hanoi to Siem Reap, Cambodia was short, only an hour and twenty minutes, but we still had full dinner service and in-flight sit-coms, I guess because it was an international flight.  I’m finding that Asian airlines are far more conscientious about hospitality than US airlines.