After fueling up at Garden House Restaurant, we were ready to chew some sidewalk– except Hanoi doesn’t so much have sidewalks as it has scooter parking and fruit stand space. Our first stop was the Heritage Tea House in Old Town Hanoi, a restoration of a traditional merchant’s home. It was small, but intricately detailed and historically accurate. It also had a lovely tiny courtyard. Why did we stop putting tiny courtyards in middle-class housing?
Next up was the temple at House 102, which is both a real house and a real temple. It was a bit hard to find, tucked behind buildings and only accessible through a narrow hallway/alley. When we arrived, there were several groups of people working on putting together decorations for Tết. Tết is the Vietnamese New Year celebration, and it’s sort of like Christmas here– at least in terms of importance, decoration, and the necessity to buy a lot of shit. Upstairs, we found the shrine. It was a tall, technicolor, tangle of statuettes, flowers, vases and candles. Once again, I was not 100% certain that I knew who or what the shrine was for. Definitely need to do a bit more research on the local religious beliefs.
Tạ Hiện is one of the famous pub streets of Hanoi, and it’s where we headed next. It reminded me of Bourbon Street: flashy, ugly bars with flashy, bad drinks, an overabundance of tourists, and some very pushy panhandlers. Fortunately, we were able to find a bar serving craft beer a bit away from the hubbub. The Hill Station Bar was quiet, but we still had to deal with several shoe-shiners approaching us as we sipped our passion-fruit wheat beers outside. We were pretty beat after a morning of playing real-life Frogger with scooter traffic, so we headed back to the hostel.
For dinner, I wanted to check out Binh Minh Jazz Club. Apparently, jazz is kind of a thing in East Asia, and many of the cities we’re visiting have popular jazz bars that fill every night with locals and tourists alike. I wanted to beat the crowd, so we headed over early to eat dinner and wait for the show. The earliness was entirely unnecessary; the joint was completely empty when we arrived, and apparently the band did not start until 9. They served us mediocre Italian. The red sauce was sweet and Caesar dressing could have just been mayo. But we did get to have an interesting conversation with our waiter about the 53 ethnic groups that make up Vietnam. He told us about his village and his people, the Mường. They are the third largest ethnic group, and they live in the mountains of North Vietnam, though not in the highlands. In fact, the Mường’s name for themselves means “people who live in the middle,” to distinguish themselves from both highlanders and lowlanders.
When we finished dinner, it was still an hour before the show would start, so we thought we would grab a drink at nearby Tadioto and wait. Tadioto’s vibe was very bohemian, but also, very affected. A page-long introduction to the menu described the poets, artists, and academics who started it all. I could have done without all the pretension, but the rum and passion-fruit cocktail they made me was dangerously drinkable. Aaron and I agreed that passion-fruit was an underappreciated fruit. We decided to grow some at our house in North Carolina when we got back, and put it in all our cocktails. By the time we finished our drinks, it was after 9, but we were also pretty tired. We made a deal: if we returned to Binh Minh Jazz Club and the band was playing hot jazz, rather than the easy-listening cool jazz that neither of us are really fans of, we would stay. No such luck. We heard the first few notes of a Kenny-G-like sax solo and hightailed it back to our hostel.
In an effort to return to the hip, young selves we previously were– rather than the jet-lagged, bed-at-9 losers we had become– we forced ourselves to stay up for one more drink at the Cocoon Inn’s always-happening bar. We met another couple on a similar holiday as us, and traded stories and recommendations. Our hostel may not be as Instagrammable or hospitable as the previous lodgings, but it’s a great place to meet fellow travelers. There’s always someone in the cafe-by-day-bar-by-night lounge.
We got a late start the next day. Both of us had become accustomed to a routine of one glass of wine, then bed, that we dared to violate the night before. Now we were both paying for it. Nothing some Aleve and a nap wouldn’t take care of, but that would have to wait, because this morning we were going to the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology. After at least an hour searching for an ATM machine, we finally gave up and decided to just share one audioguide. The museum had excellent signage, anyway, for its impressive collection of artifacts, outfits, crafts, and ritual trappings. We learned more about our waiter’s group of Mường. We marveled at the traditional garments of shamanic and funerary rites. We learned how different groups wove different kinds of baskets. My personal favorite artifact was a giant wooden phallus that the Tay people attach to themselves during a ritual dance meant to scare off female ghosts. Because, as we all know, female ghosts cause all the problems in the world and are also terrified of penises. Behind the main museum building, they have full-scale representative houses and communal spaces for many of the larger ethnic groups, built by the groups themselves using traditional methods. We climbed into the stilted, extremely tall-roofed communal house of the Bahnar and the long, bamboo-floored house of the Ê Đê. The trip was both educational and fun, and I recommend it to anyone who visits Hanoi.
For lunch, we had a driver take us to the street stall of Bun Cha 34. Bun cha is the unofficial (or maybe it’s official?) municipal dish of Hanoi, consisting of ground pork meatballs that are charred over a grill, rice noodles, and broth. I keep having to say broth here, and it really doesn’t do justice to what the Vietnamese can do. When I say broth, you are probably thinking of the kinda savory/kinda salty water we use as a base for soup. Vietnamese broth is to our broth what our broth is to water. Vietnamese broths are explosions of flavor that are downright addictive. You could have nothing but a bowl of this broth and be entirely satisfied that you had eaten a full meal. I could probably eat nothing but this broth for the rest of my life and be happy. That is how good this broth is. With the grilled meatballs and the sticky rice noodles, it was a faultless meal. As Aaron put it, it was, in a word, “dope.” We made our way back to the hostel for that nap and Aleve, and prepared ourselves for the evening’s adventure.
Hanoimoon 