Yesterday was lazy, boring, and wonderful. Aaron and I passed several hours in our local favorite cafe, Coffee A. We sipped iced coconut coffees, wrote, and planned our trip. Coconut coffee is a Vietnamese treat that’s sort of like a Starbucks Frappuccino, but with coconut milk, condensed milk, and coffee that isn’t burnt to shit. We enjoyed ours at an indoor table on the second floor, the sound of traffic coming in from the open balcony doors. Honking here is more like a “hey, mate, just letting you know I’m here” than a “wtf are you doing?!” In fact, as I sit here writing this, I’m hearing at least one honk every two seconds from the street below. It’s almost a kind of white noise at this point. Road rage also doesn’t seem to be a thing here. I’ve seen people crash into each other (at low speeds, mind you), then just keep going like nothing happened. It’s kind of nice, even if Aaron and I struggle to maintain our cool as pedestrians.
After our lazy afternoon, we decided to check out the scene from the heights of the Lotte building, where you can get a bird’s eye view of Hanoi. You may pay some exorbitant amount (at least, by the affordable Vietnam standard) to go to the viewpoint, or you can do what we did: book a window table at Tim Ho Wan on the 63rd floor. Tim Ho Wan’s flagship restaurant is in Singapore, where it got a reputation for its excellent dim sum. The restaurant in Hanoi is just as good as the view its floor-to-ceiling windows provide. We ate an unhealthy amount of BBQ pork buns (2 orders), fried sesame balls filled with sweet egg yolk, and shrimp dumplings, while we felt the zooming traffic below fade from daily stressor to pretty, faraway lights. We talked about language and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the idea that consciousness is shaped by language). This led to an interesting experiment where we only spoke in the 1st person plural for the entire meal (it’s a lot harder than it sounds). It was a lovely date, and we returned to our hostel stuffed and satisfied.
The next morning, we wanted to visit the Museum of History, but we accidentally navigated to the Museum of Military History, across the street from a gigantic statue of Lenin. I find military history both boring and upsetting, so we corrected our navigation and set off in the direction of the Museum of (Not Military) History. We stopped for a beverage at the nearby Atelier cafe. Aaron and I both got nitro cold-brew concoctions because, as in Chiang Mai, the coffee in Hanoi is excellent and the specialty drinks are masterful. Nitro cold-brew, for the uninitiated, is coffee that has been brewed by steeping in cold water for a long time (this, I’ve been told, produces a less acidic taste) and had nitro-carbonation added (like Guinness). As you can imagine, our drinks tasted more like fancy sodas than coffee: mine had notes of salted caramel, Aaron’s was citrusy and vibrant.
By this point, we were hungry. Since hunger had cut our last Ethnology Museum visit a touch short, we decided to go ahead and eat before we got to the museum. Poke Hanoi is a hidden, but modern, place on the second floor of a building overlooking Hoan Kiem Lake. If you blink, you’ll miss the sign, but squeeze through the narrow alleyway and make your way up the stairs and you’ll find yourself in a cleanly-designed, light-filled space. It’s like Chipotle, in that you choose a base, a protein, and toppings, but instead of building a burrito, you’re building a bowl full of raw fish. Aaron and I both got “The Savory”: spicy salmon, fried shallots, quail eggs, mushrooms, and pickled red cabbage on a bed of rice. The fact that Aaron, my fish-hating husband, said it might be his favorite meal we’ve had so far should tell you how good it was. The fish was buttery like avocado, but also sweet and tangy and salty. And I’ve now decided I like pickled quail eggs. We got to enjoy our bowls at the only table overlooking the lake.
After lunch, we worked our way over to the History Museum.
Hanoimoon 