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Death, Ice Cream, and New Coats: Exploring Hanoi

We’re staying in Ecopark, a little outside of Hanoi. We’ve been feeling a little removed from the reality of the city, so we made it a priority to begin to explore central Hanoi this past weekend.

We were paired with a set of guides from Hanoi Free Walking Tours, who will match you up with a college student (or two, in our case) willing to show you around Hanoi in exchange for the opportunity to practice English. We registered for the Old Quarter Walking Tour, but between our rambunctious three-year-old and our lack of preparation for the freezing weather, we ended up less seeing sites and more wandering around trying to stay warm, fed, and sane. With the help of our very adaptable guides, we accomplished all three of these – along with a wee bit of sightseeing!

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Crossing the Street in Hanoi

In Delhi, I didn’t really see many pedestrian crosswalks, which made traversing the road feel like a dangerous game of frogger.

There are crosswalks here in Hanoi. However, the cars seem to keep going to at least 5 seconds after the light changes. After that, turning traffic pours through the intersection, completely ignoring the crosswalk. All of this is probably makes crossing more dangerous than in Delhi, since I get lulled into a false sense of security by the familiarity of a crosswalk… that is actually ignored by the vehicles.

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Preschool As We Travel

For a little more than four months, we have been enrolling Theo in local preschools as we travel. Thus far, he’s attended school in New Zealand, Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Vietnam.

We aren’t particularly worried about keeping up with the academic aspects of school. Theo is young and seems to be soaking up information from the wider world in a very sponge-like manner. Instead, we like that school gives him an opportunity to learn to socialize with people who aren’t us on a regular basis. Just as important to us, sending Theo to school gives us adults extra time to work and explore independently.

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Shoe-free Playground

The nearest playground is two minutes walk from our apartment building’s front door. During dry weather, it buzzes with children from about 5 pm to 6 pm, as they burn off post-school energy. In wet weather, it’s almost empty.

It’s the first playground we’ve found where we’ve needed to remove our shoes before entering – presumably to keep the fake grass clean!

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Chợ Tết

Vietnamese New Year (Tết) is approaching, and last weekend we visited a holiday market near our home.

Theo most enjoyed the faux fishing and the faux sandbox. (Instead of sand, it was some kind of grain, I think. It was better than real sand in that it didn’t stick to everything). Brian and I enjoyed the music and the opportunity to buy inexpensive, tasty local port that was funneled into a plastic water bottle for us to take home.

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Egg Coffee

While Hanoi has many interesting coffee options, egg coffee  is what I’ve heard about the most.

The first egg coffee I tried was just a little foamy syrup inside of some pretty typical coffee. Not bad, but not anything exciting either. However, the egg coffee pictured below, at The Hanoi Social Club, was excellent: rich, creamy, and slightly sweet on the top with strong coffee on the bottom.

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