Hanoi Time
Dave Says:
Hanoi is three cities in one, three distinct phases of human necessity squeezed into a few square kilometers of the Old Quarter. From the early morning to mid-afternoon the streets belong to regular commerce. Store fronts are packed with goods to sell. Unlike western shopkeepers, having a differentiator seems to be bad for business. All the shops that sell shoes, for example, are situated on the same street. Store after store of the same shoes, cheap Chinese imports and knock-offs of popular western brands. The same is true for all things the average Hanoi resident might need to either survive or portray a greater sense of wealth than their neighbor. It is often easier to name the street by what it sells rather than by the name on the map. There’s Towel Street and Bag Street, Lamp Street and Candy Street, Shoe Street and Washing Powder Street - every store selling exactly the same goods as the one next to it, stacked on the sidewalk in the same manner. In this part of the world to be different is to loose business so the store that survives is the one that can drive the better wholesale price and the better bargain from the customer. Shop work is a family business, the whole family not only works the store but also lives in it. Hanoi’s Old Quarter has narrow shop fronts but the buildings extend deeply backwards to provide housing for tens of people per store. Sanitation is basic and families share one squat toilet and use their narrow side alleys as kitchens often many familes sharing these basic amenities.
Around 4pm the normally difficult to navigate streets become impossible. Traffic increses ten fold as scooters fill every square inch of road space. Everyone is in a hurry to get where they’re going and getting where they’re going is probably on the sidewalk three feet from your nose. Parking regulations in the Old Quarter are self policed: as long as you don’t block in another motorbike you can park anywhere and most choose the sidewalk with no regard for pedestrians. This would be OK except that every sidewalk also becomes a restaurant. About an hour after the scooters hit the streets, the store fronts pull out red or blue plastic chairs and start serving food to the locals. Remember, nobody has a kitchen so the locals eat out every night, inches away from the gutter and passing feet. The more popular of the thousands of places that sell fried rice, pho, pig, dog and beer can have upwards of twenty diners further blocking foot traffic. When foot traffic has nowhere to go it spills into the street and into the path of on-coming traffic. But just like everything else in the madness of Hanoi, it just seems to work. Everything hits fever pitch around 9pm. Street vendors push carts selling food, ladies walk around burdened with heavy baskets on the either end of a bamboo pole balanced on their shoulder, boys try and sell lighters and cheap knock off copies of Lonely Planet books to tourists and all the time the honking of horns provides the soundtrack to the mahem.
Strangly though, come midnight the streets are deserted. Even more strangly, they are remarkably clean. Trash is worth money and there appears to be a hierarchy to trash collection. Anything that can be salvaged and sold is loaded on the back of bikes or in the baskets of the vendor women and the rest is picked up by city employees dressed in reflective vests. The vests aren’t really necessary though because the traffic has all but disappeared. Now the sidwalks are empty, no people, no goods and no scooters and you can see just how wide some of the streets are. For a few brief hours all is quiet until the dawn chorus of motor horns starts the whole cycle again.
January 28th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
so if everyone sells the same things, then everyone essentially looks the same, too? no thigh-high fashions in Hanoi? a culture of the collective all the way around?