Workcation in Vietnam
When we were traveling through southeast Asia nine years ago (nine years ago!), one of the highlights of our trip was Vietnam. The punchiness of the coffee. Drinking bia hoi out on the streets in tiny plastic chairs along with hundreds of other people. The banh mis. It's a place we've been eager to travel back to.
So after getting back from our trip to Italy, we talked about where we should go next and Vietnam was at the top of the list. With my birthday just around the corner, we figured that was as good an excuse as any for a trip. As a serial contract worker, my vacation days are limited. And as a fully fledged corporate executive, Marcus doesn't really get proper vacation despite having an overwhelming amount of vacation days. But given that my job is fully remote anyway, and that Marcus still frequently works from home, we decided to do the travel + work thing. And so commenced our first workcation of 2022.
We flew into Hanoi on a Friday night, a fairly casual three-hour flight that went far better than expected, considering we took the absolute most low-budget airline we could find. Great prices, horrible booking, and 2/3 flights were delayed. Probably won't fly with VietJet ever again, but hey, reliving those travel days, right? Anyway, we got into Hanoi on Friday night, checked into our AirBnB, and set out to find dinner for the night. A plateful of fresh herbs. Bia Hanoi. Rice wine. Friendly people at the restaurant. Absolute perfection.
Hanoi is a bustling city of +5 million people. There's a lot of activity, a constant hum of motorbikes that we were surprisingly still able to walk through (back to holding hands to cross the street). I was more appreciative of drivers' awareness of the traffic around them and the fact that there are is a river of bikes turning in, passing each other, pulling over, and generally mixing and changing positions, yet there are hardly any accidents. While it seems chaotic, we picked up on some of the driving norms and saw some method to the apparent madness.
There are skyscrapers tucked in amongst the townhouse-like buildings that make up most of the city blocks, many leftover from French colonization, many knocked down and rebuilt.
One of my favorite architectural details in our AirBnB is the motorcycle ramp up the stairs so apartment owners on different floors could park their motorcycles outside their front doors.
Roll of the dice number one--the art gallery tour. This one was a bit of a bust. Our guide took us to an egg coffee place which was pretty cool, actually, then we stopped at a couple of art "places" without actually seeing any artwork. Then we went to the Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum, which was actually a really cool museum, with ancient artworks and relics, and the largest collection of artwork of women I've probably ever seen. Not numbers-wise, but more saturation. The museum's collection was a decent size and much of the artwork centered on women. The commentary from our guide was that women are important to Vietnamese culture, which seems accurately reflected in this museum though left me wanting more information about that.
Then, in the last 30 minutes, we zoomed to three different galleries in the Old Quarter. Much of the artwork was from the same artists. And to the guide's credit, we don't know much about art, so I don't know what we were expecting.
The best part about that tour was definitely the museum, and getting around town on the back of a motorcycle. Can't recommend that tour.
The tour I can recommend--and roll of the dice number two--the bia hoi tour. Our guide, Lan, was a-mazing. A storm of energy contained in petite 20-something year-old college student, she had so much excitement and passion about these local breweries. Bia hoi is this fresh, lightly alcoholic beer that has around 24 hours of usability (so we were told) and while it was more widely available nine years ago, most beer in Hanoi now comes in bottles. These unregulated breweries are now fewer and further between and we didn't stumble across any outside of this tour.
Which made me excessively grateful that we'd booked this tour. When I asked Lan how she found these breweries, she said she'd initially searched online without any luck. So she set out on foot, combing the streets of the Old Quarter trying to find them, even asking restaurants and bars if they knew where the bia hoi places were. That was painstaking and a needle in the haystack type operation, so she came up with another method. She thought, who are the customers for bia hoi? It's older people! She literally started following old people around the old quarter. That is serious dedication.
She took us to four different breweries--or maybe five, my memory is a little hazy because, well, we were drinking a lot of beer. Lightly alcoholic or no. There were even shots of plum wine at one point, at my request. I'm a big fan of local and homemade. These breweries also served food and we had some of the best food of our trip on this tour. Stop one had dry pho noodles and fish cakes (cha ca) that were served with dill, thai basil, and other herby freshness. I don't even like fish cakes but those were so delicious Marcus and I went back on our own another night.
We also had banh xeo, Vietnamese rice pancakes with pork, shrimp, and beans inside. Wrapped, of course, with fresh herbs. I don't know what we ate in between, only that I was so full, and I remember ending the night with fried chicken and fries, tucked into a booth somewhere where you had to cross the street and dive deep into one of the city's many dark, tunneled walkways to find the bathroom. The whole city is full of mystery because you see these dark tunnels everywhere that dive deep into the buildings/city blocks with who knows how many rooms, other buildings, and courtyards lie within.
Feeling a little worse for the wear on Sunday, it was a quieter day of walking with our third roll of the tour dice in Hanoi--a street food tour for dinner. The food we had the night before with Lan was hard to beat, and this tour didn't really. And again, to be fair, we'd already hit a lot of the highlights. Banh mi, egg coffee, banh xeo, dry pho. There were a couple novel things on this tour that were good, though--pho cuon, these long skinny rolls that have beef and herbs inside and are rolled in these really long egg noodles. Those were good.
The coconut soft serve was also delicious, served with pandan sticky rice.
We drank a lot of coffee, trying (unsuccessfully) to find the kind of coffee we'd fallen in love with during our previous visit. Coffee is now widely popular in Hanoi, and the drink variety has expanded greatly. No one likes to sit and wait for filtered coffee anymore. It's all pre-made, pre-sweetened and more sugary than we remembered.
Then there were the donut ladies. These sharp, artful, ladies who are quite forward in their efforts to ensnare tourists. I admit, I got had. I walked right into it, knowing I was contravening the tourist rules of getting a price before receiving the product. I asked the price, but had already said yes to the donuts. That bag of donuts was already in my hands before she told me the price, which was likely ten times the actual price. But again, unspoken rules--you don't really get to bargain after you have the product in your hands. This is especially true with food. That wily lady, I was both annoyed and admiring. And where that would have weighted heavily on the annoyed side nine years ago, as a gainfully employed westerner, it's not worth haggling over $4. She can use it more than I can. Though those were the last donuts we bought. Fool me once. That certainly didn't stop them from trying, though. One lady with particularly aggressive technique pushed her pram of donuts right in front of us, blocking our path one day. No thank you. No more donuts for us.
Otherwise, we spent most of our time working (hence workcation) and walking around in the stifling heat. Singapore is hot, and I was surprised at how overwhelming the heat in Hanoi was, yet felt better when our guides also had sweat dripping down their faces. Not that I want them to feel overheated, but more as affirmation that it's not normal to have this kind of heat, like they weren't adapted to it, either.
A part of this trip also involved checking out recommended restaurants or shops that didn't make it through the pandemic. Information we'd find online was old, inaccurate. Continued effects of the pandemic. Our guides told us about the lockdown in Hanoi, which had lasted...one month? Three months? During which they were only allowed to leave their house at appointed times to go grocery shopping (or I'm assuming to access other essential services) and they were liable to get stopped by the police and have their receipts checked to ensure they were out at their appointed time. If they were found in violation, they'd receive fines. They weren't allowed to walk their dogs. In a city so densely populated, and with an abundance of people living in small spaces, I can't imagine how difficult that must have been.
One of the other things that we were more attuned to during this trip was how people seemed to feel about our presence in their country, in their businesses, in their space. Many people were friendly and receptive, especially in restaurants and shops that cater much of their business to tourists. We also were approached by a number of parents with their children, wanting the kids to practice their English (which was always pretty solid). Then there were other places we'd go where people seemed really put-off by our appearance. We're pretty used to being the only white people in majority Asian spaces at this point--often people seem surprised that we're in a particular locale that's off the more typical tourist/westerner trail. Others, as I've mentioned previously, really seem to not want us there.
The last night of our trip is a good example. We were looking for a restaurant along the beach in Hoi An where we could grab some drinks and watch the sunset over the ocean. We walked into one restaurant and there was a table right up front with a view that was free. No reservation sign on it. The waiter tried to sit us off to the side, and tried to get us not to sit at this excellent table, but we redirected to this clearly empty table. A few minutes later, he came back and asked if we wanted to sit up on the second story instead. It felt so strange that he was trying to tuck us out of sight. Then a big group of men (Vietnamese) walked in and we got a lot of side glances and unfriendly looks. We were the only white people in the restaurant and we felt quite keenly that this group of people did not want us there. Instead of pushing on through an uncomfortable few drinks, we left. Went next door where we were treated like any other customer. We looked over later that night and the only white people we saw in the restaurant were tucked into the side, out of sight of most customers. Where on our previous visit to Vietnam, we were backpacking and unemployed, we're in a very different situation now with, I hope, more awareness of our impact on others. A better table or a lower price isn't worth the negative feelings.
I can surmise why people may not want us around--many white/western tourists have a certain arrogant attitude and don't treat people (often in service roles) with respect. That's just at a personal level. At a macro level, the history of colonialism in Vietnam is long and complex, having been colonized or occupied at various times by France, China, and Japan. Then there's the Vietnam war, which in Vietnam is the American war. The Vietnamese people who have talked to us about it while we were there, and how they feel about Americans, are younger and in the tourism industry. Those individuals didn't express animosity. But conversations with strangers, who are also customers, aren't exactly the kind that invite deep transparency.
Frankly, there's any number of reasons why people may not want us around. Which doesn't feel good, but which we try to respect. We don't want to make other people uncomfortable, or to feel uncomfortable ourselves. We like finding places off the tourist track, to try different restaurants, to see different parts of the city, and to have an experience that's less prescribed or curated to tourists. We want to see something more genuine and authentic to the place. And let's be honest, this is us--we love the prices outside a tourist area, and getting a better price for the same coffee/banh mi/etc. Which I also suspect may play a role in why we may be unwelcome, that tourist restaurants are for tourist dollars, and local restaurants and prices are for locals. Which again, makes sense. I often think that those of us with higher incomes and more privilege should be paying more for the same thing. But remind me of that when I'm buying something and someone gets a lower price than me for the same thing. I'll tell a different story. There's the gap between hypothetical ideas and lived experience.
All of this to say, during this trip, we were more acutely aware of where we were welcome and where we weren't. We were conscious of not wanting people to feel that we were invading their space, or that we were overstepping a mark.
Then there was Hoi An. That's for another day.
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