Museum Madness: Part 2

Now where were we? Ah…

We ate lunch at a cute little restaurant opposite the Temple of Literature that had been recommended by Lonely Planet as not only a place with good food, but one that helps out in the local community as well. KOTO, Know One Teach One, is a restaurant that employs street kids from a shelter, teaching them how to work in the restaurant industry in various capacities as waiters, managers, chefs, etc. The food was simply stunning, a wonderful array of traditional Vietnamese food. I ordered and devoured a plate of fried wontons, served with a traditional sweet Vietnamese dipping sauce and fresh vegetable salad. It was a relief simply to be inside with air conditioning and out of the heat of the day, which felt like an oppressive weight on our shoulders, pushing us slowly into the ground until each step was difficult. Our time eating, drinking lemonade (still limeade, but it’s no use telling them that), and resting under the A/C was very rejuvenating and after a leisurely time at KOTO we headed out for the next activity on our list.

I feel it is important to tell you at this time that we were not eating in the traditional Vietnamese way. While the restaurants we patronized were often serving traditional Vietnamese food, the restaurants themselves were in no way traditional, being very westernized sit-down places. Most Vietnamese restaurants are small hole-in-the-wall places with no English menu and no real English language. You simply walk up to the woman who appears to be in charge (the one next to the clay cooking pot on the ground in front of the shop is usually a good bet) and ask for food. If you are brave you can ask for a particular dish, but do not hold your breath that you will receive it, for odds are that you will get something completely different – whatever they happen to have left. There are no adult sized tables or chairs in these places, but small plastic tables that three year olds would appreciate and plastic stools that sit one foot off the ground. These are where you dine. Your food will arrive, what you ordered or not, and you will sit at your little doll-sized table and eat whatever has been prepared, springroll soup, pig ear, dog, you name it, they will serve it. To be perfectly honest with you all, I simply could not get myself to eat in this manner and stuck to places where I could sit down at a table meant for people above three feet in height.

Our final planned stop of the day involved heading out by taxi to the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, which is dedicated to the display of traditional ethnic tribe cultures of Vietnam. While the main Museum building looks fairly impressive, it is really the grounds that are worth the 15,000 Dong admission price. (Roughly 19,050 Dong = $1 US, giving Vietnam the highest gap in value with the dollar.) When we arrived at the Museum we immediately began walking towards the main building that stands behind the white metal gate guarding the driveway, but our attention was caught halfway to our destination by a large sign off to one side of the walkway. Heading over to see if any information was pertinent to our visit, we discovered that in addition to the Museum building itself, the Museum of Ethnology includes extensive grounds where various building reproductions have been built that display structures and lifestyles of traditional Vietnamese rural cultures. Deciding that we should take advantage of the slightly cooler atmosphere that had descended on us as clouds had rolled in after noon we followed the path around the side of the main building toward the first of 25 building exhibits.

We wandered around the buildings for over an hour, enjoying our time outside even though the heat was increasing exponentially as the cloud cover moved away. We climbed up impossibly steep ladder-stairs to reach meeting houses on stilts and explored compound style homes that would fit generations of families in a space that would only fit one traditional family in North America. When we finally got around to exploring the Museum later we were a bit disappointed and rushed through, eager to go somewhere cool for a break from our day of exploration.

Somehow we had managed to finish Lonely Planet’s “A Day in Hanoi” by 2 pm (as the Museum of Ethnology was the last visit on our list) and had nothing much left to do that evening. We headed back towards our hotel and after a stop for some sorbet at Fanny’s we wandered into the Old Quarter, content to simply meander our way through the winding streets. Like many of the other SE Asian countries, Vietnam’s main streets are very wide boulevards reminiscent of their French colonial period (all except Thailand, which was colonized by the English - those dummies drive on the wrong side of the road!); however, the Old Quarter of the city is a different story altogether. Jammed into a space only 10 or so blocks square, the Old Quarter is full of twisting winding alleys and narrow lanes. Every bit of land is filled with shops of one kind or another making the small area seem even smaller as wares from the shops that can be as narrow as a three foot opening in the wall spill out onto the street. Every bit of sidewalk is commandeered by the hundreds of motorbikes used by the Vietnamese residents, forcing pedestrians onto the streets where they are incessantly honked at by angry cars trying to wind their way through the maze.

It is impossible to get lost in the Old Quarter of Hanoi as it is simply not big enough to get lost within and there is always something new to see as you wander down the same streets you have visited before. We wandered around the streets of the Old Quarter for a few hours, stopping anywhere that caught our fancy and at several cafes for lemon juices and water. That night Laura and Abbey were unable to come out with us, so Bobby, Zenia and I remained in the Old Quarter, dining at a small restaurant with more traditional Vietnamese food. After eating Vietnamese off and on during my time there I can now attest that it is my least favorite Asian food. I simply don’t like it. The only Vietnamese that I ate during our time in Hanoi that I actually enjoyed was at KOTO and I suspect now that was simply a fluke (probably Westernized Vietnamese). It is hard to pin down what I don’t like about the food from this country, something about the blend of flavors does not sit well with me and I will be happy not to eat Vietnamese for a long time.

That was the end of that evening and as Zenia and I were quite tired and Bobby needed to get home, so we called it a night and headed back to our guesthouse (Bobby went home in a cab). Now, many of you may recall that Zenia and I were supposed to travel to Halong Bay for an overnight on a junk boat on Saturday morning. Well, it was canceled. Why? A typhoon blew into Vietnam specifically to ruin our fun! On Friday afternoon we heard that there were typhoon warnings for Halong Bay and that our overnight was no longer an option. We decided that it was a good thing as we had no desire to be on a boat in the middle of a storm. After visiting a travel agency, we decided to schedule a day trip to Halong instead on Sunday and content ourselves with one afternoon on the Vietnam coast. Therefore, Saturday was filled with more touring of Hanoi…