I’m really behind, so I’m going let the pictures do most of the talking.

Hanoi was overcast almost every day. Compared to Ho Chi Minh City (at the southern end of the country), Hanoi is drab and slow-paced. Westerners are much more abundant here, mostly French it seems.

Our second day in Hanoi, we went to the old street market area, where I saw foods I’d never seen before. I made some video, which I’ll have to upload later, but I know it can do no justice to the experience.

That night after a very good dinner of local food, Yonna took me to Café Một, owned by a Japanese expat. There we met the conductor Tetsuji Honda, who was in town to conduct the Hanoi Symphony Orchestra.

Upstairs we sat in a room filled with books and drank coffee. Nearly all of the books were in Japanese, but I found a banged-up copy of Wuthering Heights and savored reading a familiar novel in such unfamiliar surroundings.

I’ve pretty much lost track of the chronology of events, so I’ll just break it down into major segments.

We had coffee with the founder and owners of Zen Spa, a popular spa chain growing in Vietnam. Yonna is friends with Huong, the woman who started the business. The next day, we visited their Hanoi location by taxi. It was an interested ride out to the edge of town. We turned down a narrow alley, then suddenly we were in the countryside, then pulling into this amazing Zen garden…

It was a beautiful compound. I can see why many Japanese visitors come to Vietnam just to relax in a Zen Spa location.

Heading back into the city, I saw a view that reminded me of Chicago. I really couldn’t say why, exactly. I just wrote that in my notebook.

That night we went to see the Hanoi Symphony Orchastra (Tetsuji Honda conducting) perform two Baroque pieces by Schubert at the French Cultural Center.

One day, Yonna suggested that we skip breakfast and go to the Metropole Hotel for their lunch buffet. It was pricey, even by US hotel standards, but it was pretty spectacular. There was a seafood area with sushi, crab, caviar and other treats. A carnivore’s area with roasted meats and mustards, sausages, salamis, pâtés, and other things I couldn’t identify. The cheese table had at least two dozen cheeses and various breads and sweet relishes. A salad section, which I felt compelled to at least look at for a minute. And finally, a dessert island in the center of the room. I got at least one of every kind of dessert. The coconut mousse was my favorite (or maybe it was the homemade chocolate ice cream with slivered almonds). I was so sugared up I needed help making out the bill afterwards.

There followed a few days of wandering around the city…

The previous four pictures were all taken from the same block. As busy as they look, at the center of this block was the Hanoi Literary Temple (only one of the structures is shown)…

It was in Hanoi that I first had to use the antibiotics I’d brought. I ate a lot of really inexpensive local food (one lunch was only about $1.50 for two of us) but I’d prefer to blame the open gutter system throughout the city.

Dealing with your garbage is pretty easy in Hanoi. You just throw it out on the curb and workers come by at least once a day to sweep it up and haul it away. Many city workers tend to work late in the evening, when the weather is coolest.

Speaking of late in the evening, more than one occasion we’d return from a night out to find ourselves locked out of the gate again. There was a lot of waiting around for someone with a key to leave or enter.

In the following photo, notice the small loudspeaker on the utility pole (right side of the street near the top).

These loudspeakers are scattered throughout the city. There is one directly across from the terrace outside Yonna’s room. Public service announcements are made over these speakers a few times a week, starting at about 6am (an hour or so after the construction crew stops working on the building across the street). They remind people about the importance of things like cleaning their refrigerators on a regular basis to avoid contamination.

If you plan to go to Vietnam, bring earplugs. I’m not joking. I brought two pair on a whim and I was so happy when I remembered they were in my bag.

The day of the symphony (March 14) I took a taxi to the US Embassy to get an application notarized. It turns out I was supposed to go to the consulate instead. I was trying to open a brokerage account in Vietnam, because everyone is going on about how the market is down, but poised to really explode. In the end I decided the ridiculous fees weren’t worth it. But after passing through security and waiting around for a while, I got a cool, expensive, souvenir to remind me.

The large waiting room was completely empty except for one older guy wearing a shabby suit. He had lanky, white hair and looked like the the picture you would expect to see in the dictionary next to the term “wine-o.” CNN was being broadcast on a TV in the room, and he struck up a conversation with me about oil prices. He was literally dripping sweat (not from the heat, it was air conditioned in the consulate). At one point he mentioned something about a plan to go to Iraq to drive people from the airport to the green zone. I guess it pays something like $3000 a day (if you survive to collect the money). Then he was called up to reclaim his passport and wandered off. It was like a scene from a movie.

A few evenings I went with Yonna to the Hilton in Hanoi where she would swim. I tried wandering around outside, but the minute I left the hotel (literally) I was approached by women on motor-scooters offering to take me someplace for “much boom-boom.” The hotel had a feeble wi-fi connection, so I chose to wait for her while resting in the lobby. The connection was too slow to be of much use, aside from goofing around on Facebook. Yonna’s room had decent ADSL, but we spent most of the days out, and by the time we got home we were both too exhausted to open our laptops.

I’m really glossing over the experience a lot, and if I have the gumption, I hope to write a recap of Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi, comparing the two cities and summarizing what I’ve learned about Vietnam from the travel and from Yonna.

Eventually it was time to leave Hanoi. It was a comfortable place, if a bit dreary. It’s hard to point a camera anywhere in Hanoi and not take a stunning photo. (I have dozens that I’m not going to try to post here due to time constraints.) But, everything about the city felt a little stagnant after the vibrant energy of Saigon.

Yonna said that most people tend to prefer whichever city they come to first, so she isn’t surprised that I liked Ho Chi Minh City more. I’d be curious if anyone else found their preference leaning towards the first of the two cities they visited.

The morning of our flight we tried to race over to see Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed corpse, but when we got there, the line was two hours long.

So we went back to the apartment one last time and got packed up for our trip to Laos.

I snapped one last photo out of the window behind the shrine on Yonna’s floor in the house.

And then we caught a taxi back to the airport, passing dozens of massive billboards sprouting up out of rice paddies. It started to drizzle as we boarded the plane.

And then we were off to Luang Prabang, Laos.