Thirty-Six Hours in the Old Quarter

Off the Plane

The heat hits you before you've cleared immigration. It's that specific kind of wet warmth that makes you wonder if your lungs are going to need a few days to recalibrate. We landed at Noi Bai at 2am, took a taxi through empty highways that slowly filled with motorbikes as the city woke up around us, and by 4am we were sitting in tiny plastic chairs on a sidewalk in the Old Quarter, eating pho.

That's the thing about Hanoi. It doesn't wait for you to settle in.

The pho was a bowl of bone broth that had clearly been going since before we were born — deep, slightly sweet, a little funky, the noodles silky and the beef barely cooked from the heat of the soup. We paid 40,000 dong each, about $1.60, and the woman running the stall refilled Hannah's broth without being asked. It was the best thing I'd eaten in months.

The Hoan Kiem Loop

There's a lake in the center of the city — Hoan Kiem — and in the early morning, before the heat gets serious, it becomes the city's living room. Old men do tai chi in slow motion along the promenade. Women in groups walk fast in matching exercise clothes, arms swinging. Kids run. A man feeds pigeons out of a paper bag.

We walked the loop twice before 7am, watching the city wake up in increments. The Turtle Tower sat in the middle of the water, slightly foggy, slightly mythical. Legend says a giant golden turtle lives at the bottom and once reclaimed a magic sword from a Vietnamese king who'd used it to drive out the Chinese invaders. I don't know. It felt possible.

The streets of the Old Quarter are organized (loosely) by trade — Tin Street, Silk Street, Paper Street, though these designations are centuries old and what you actually find now is a beautiful chaos of tourist shops, hardware stores, wedding dress boutiques, and pho stalls occupying the same blocks. We got briefly lost somewhere between Hang Bac and Hang Dao and came out next to a temple courtyard where a man was burning paper money as an offering. The smoke smelled sweet, like incense and autumn leaves.

The Traffic, Honestly

Here is what nobody tells you about Hanoi traffic until you're standing at a curb watching a river of motorbikes flow past with no apparent gaps: you just walk. Slowly. Steadily. Don't stop. Don't run. The bikes part around you like you're a rock in a stream. Once we understood this, crossing the street became weirdly meditative.

Hannah timed a crossing on our second day. We were in the middle of a six-lane intersection with no light, surrounded by about forty motorbikes, all moving. We made it in eleven seconds. She said it was the most alive she'd felt since we left.

Bún Chả at Noon

The Obama bún chả spot — yes, that one, the place where he sat across from Anthony Bourdain in 2016 in a very low plastic chair and ate noodles — was right around the corner from our guesthouse. We went. Of course we went.

The dish is simple: a small charcoal brazier in the middle of the table holds a bowl of slightly sweet, slightly funky dipping broth with pieces of grilled pork belly floating in it. You take the cold rice noodles and the plate of herbs — perilla, mint, sliced papaya, green papaya — and you build each bite yourself. The pork was charred at the edges and fatty in that way that makes you eat past the point of being full.

We stayed two hours. It cost us about six dollars each, including two Bia Ha Noi.

Night

At night the Old Quarter compresses. The streets that were already narrow get narrower, stuffed with people eating on sidewalks and drinking on overturned crates and watching Hanoi United play on TVs mounted outside the bars. We sat on the second floor of a bia hoi corner — the local draft beer spots that set up and tear down every night — and watched the intersection below us for a long time.

A man on a motorbike had a live pig in a crate strapped to the back. Two women shared a single phone, watching a drama, earbuds split between them. A delivery driver ate a bowl of something fast, crouching next to his bike, and was gone in four minutes.

Hannah said: "I think we're going to be here for a while."

She meant Vietnam. She meant all of it.