Hanoi has treated us pretty well so far. We arrived pretty exhausted on Feb. 1, after 3 flights from our last island in the Philippines. We immediately noticed how different Hanoi was from our previous adventures: it is much cleaner, the highway from the airport was a relatively nice road, and the traffic seemed much less aggressive.

 
We booked a home stay on Airbnb, which turned out to be really nice. The room was much bigger than any other place we stayed at so far on this trip, and had everything we needed, and everything was in working order! For only $20/night!! It even had heat which was great because Hanoi is much colder than we expected – the nighttime temperature was getting down to around 40 degrees, and we hadn’t really planned on cold weather so we didn’t really bring the right clothes for it. 

 
After a good night’s rest, we set off the next morning to find breakfast in the old quarter. We found a busy shop selling what we thought was pho, but they pointed to a photo menu that had our only choices for ordering and we pointed at things to just get something. Thom ended up with some sort of eel soup, and I had glass noodles with I think deep fried eel.  

  
  
We then spent hours walking in circles around the old quarter. It was a lot of fun for us; many of the streets have a single thing they sell – there is a sewing street selling lots of sewing things, a tin street selling tin pots and chimneys, a doorknob street selling nothing but doorknobs.. It seems like there is a street for everything. We also found lots of delicious Vietnamese coffee, strong, concentrated coffee with sweetened condensed milk in it. We even tried egg coffee, coffee with whipped egg in it. Thom was in heaven. 

  
In our walking we also found lots of shops selling fake North Face jackets. From afar they look great and are really cheap – like 350,000 dong (about $15) for a Goretex raincoat! We did not bring a lot of cold weather gear, and it is pretty cold here, so we started looking around for deals on the coats. Since I have done quite a lot of sewing with rip stop nylon and outdoor gear fabric, I inspected them probably way too carefully, but really a lot were of crappy construction and many of the raincoats did not look like they would actually keep us dry – the seams weren’t taped and had a lot of needle holes in them, which would have let in a lot of rain if it were really raining a lot. Not to mention that the logos were sewn poorly and they just looked really fake. We think that people just steal the patterns from the factory (a lot of North Face is actually made in Vietnam, but they export all of it and don’t sell any here) and make them on their own, probably in fake factories in China. 

After a lot of searching, we found some better looking and nicely constructed coats, and found a few that were down puffy coats, actually filled with down and with quality zippers and some actual (stolen from the factory? or much better fake) North Face parts on them. Since we were going to Sapa (a town in the mountains that is significantly colder than Hanoi) in a few days, I needed to get a coat, and we found one that I really liked, that actually fit me well (difficult since I am not really shaped like a skinny Asian woman..) and was a nice color, but the first shop wanted to charge us $95 for it – which seemed like way too much for a fake coat that we weren’t sure would perform properly in the cold weather. We talked her down to like $75, but I thought that was still too much. 

So we walked away, and found the same coat in a shop a few doors down. The starting price at that shop was $75! Good thing we walked away from the first shop. The second shop didn’t have the size I needed, but we ended up talking her down to about $45, and she went to get the right size from another store for me. I have to wonder if she went to the first store we went to in order to get the right size.. In the end I am pretty glad I bought the coat, I would never be able to get a down coat in the US for $45, and it is very warm and worked out really well for our trip to Sapa. 

  
We also picked up some gloves and hats for our trek in Sapa, we were scared that we didn’t have enough to keep warm, but luckily the clothing is so cheap here that we could basically buy whatever we needed. 

  
Red lantern street.

  
Dong Xuan market. 

  
Kumquat trees are apparently lucky for New Years, and the more fruits on the tree, the luckier they are. Lots of people would buy them and take them home on their motorbikes – we even saw bigger ones on bikes but they were kind of hard to take photos of. 

  
There were also lots of people buying cherry blossom sticks to put with their family shrine to honor their ancestors. 

  
One night for dinner we found hot pot street, and got a Thai hot pot soup! It was our first time eating hot pot (the soup is cooking over a burner and you cook the meat/seafood/veggies in the soup before eating it) and we didn’t realize that Thai soup was ever used in hot pot, but it was delicious and entertained us for at least 2 hours.

We went to Sapa (there will be another post for Sapa) then came back on an overnight train to Hanoi for Tet, the lunar new year. A lot of businesses close for a week for Tet and we were afraid to stay in Sapa and have nothing to do in such a small town and maybe not be able to get back out, so we came back to Hanoi to celebrate in the city. 

The overnight train dropped us back in Hanoi at around 5am – a really annoying time to get back to the city, as our next hotel room was not ready yet. We did get some sleep in the beds on the train, but it is hard to get a restful night of sleep on the moving and frequently stopping train, and it was exactly an 8 hour train ride – we did not get to sleep right away and they woke us up an hour early to make sure we would get off at the end. Plus our our last hotel in Hanoi who we booked the Sapa tour through forgot to pick us up from the train station, so we walked to the hotel in the dark Luckily it was a short walk, and he gave us some money back for forgetting and also gave us a Chung cake –  some sort of rice and meat mixture wrapped in banana leaf that is traditionally eaten at New Years. 

After getting our bags and Chung cake at the first hotel, the sun came up and we walked to our new hotel, but they did not have the room ready yet as it was like 7:30am. But they were really nice to us and let us keep our bags there and gave us coffee and let us wait in the lobby. We had breakfast and ended up having to wait until around 11 for our room, but it was still nice that they let us check in early (check in is actually at 1pm) and they upgraded our room to a much nicer one than what we paid for – we paid $20/night and got a room that is much nicer than the one we peeked in next door.

  
  

   
There was a big fireworks display at midnight, and we met up with some of the people we met in Sapa to hang out for the New Years night. (Some of these photos were taken by other group members; I didn’t want to bring my nicer camera out into the crowds)

  
   
 

After we got back to the hotel after the fireworks, one of the hotel workers had bought some snacks and beers for the guests and was really happy/proud to share his holiday with us. We met a guy our age from Northern California and hung out for awhile before retiring for the night. 

We’ve mostly been hanging around the hotel catching up on sleep since a lot of businesses are closed for New Years. We did manage to meet up with the California guy and his girlfriend for dinner as well as one of the Sapa trekking friends for drinks, it’s been nice making new friends to hang out with around town 🙂 
Next we are off to Da Nang to maybe teach/help people practice English!