We just arrived back in Hanoi (from Vientiane, Laos) and we’re sitting in the lobby of the Hanoi Hilton (or Hilton Hanoi, as they prefer to call it). We’re mooching their free wi-fi and relaxing a bit after our hour-long flight and 50-minute taxi ride from the airport. I didn’t do a proper update once in the 14 days in Laos (five in Luang Prabang, nine in Vientiane). In Luang Prabang there wasn’t much connectivity. In Vientiane, our hotel had wi-fi, but it didn’t play well with Windows Vista (damn you, Windows Vista), so I couldn’t get online about half the time. And when I was able to get online, I had a lot of work to do for a client.

In a few minutes we’re heading out for some Italian food (I’m actually looking forward to pasta) and then we’ll head to Yonna’s apartment, where I need to work a bit before I can sleep. Tomorrow we’re heading to Ho Chi Minh City, and then to Tokyo as soon as we can. I have a ticket for the 6th, but we might try to fly stand-by if possible. I may extend my trip for a few days to stay in Tokyo, because as of this moment I fly into Narita at 6:00am and fly out at 5:00pm, which isn’t enough time to see anything (and it costs $50 just to get from the airport to downtown Tokyo, apparently).

Arriving in Vietnam I felt like I was back in some familiar place, which is really odd if you consider that I’ve only spent a month in this country. I hardly bothered looking out the window during the cab ride back. Instead I was talking to Yonna about business plans and learning some Japanese for business (Troy Brophy to-moshi-masu, yo-lo-shi-ku o-na-gai-shi-masu: “I’m called Troy Brophy, please treat me well, if you please.”)

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.

It’s amazing how on trips like this, time gets so compressed that events taking place just 11 days ago seem like they happened a year ago.

When I left off the narrative, we had just spent the night in some border flophouse and then caught a crowded bus for the three-hour trip back to Ho Chi Minh City.

We arrived, around 1pm, both tired and sweaty (actually, Yonna doesn’t sweat, I think it has never been hot enough for her here). But we officially had no place to rest and clean up, since all of her belongings were either in transit, or still stacked in the lobby of her former apartment building.

We called for a large taxi, and somehow managed to get all of the boxes in, and to the central post office in one load. I looked like a complete wreck by this time.

The Central Post Office in Ho Chi Minh is a major tourist attraction. And all of the tourists hoping to snap pictures seemed put out by the legitimate post office business that involved boxes stacked on the front steps of the building as we unloaded the taxi. It was weird. But once we’d gotten them all inside, we had to go through the long processes of having each box re-opened to check for contraband of some sort. It was “Woman’s Day” in Vietnam. I think this may be analogous to Valentine’s Day in the US. All of the men had taken the day off work to buy flowers and chocolates for their wives and/or girlfriends. Ironically, this left all of the women behind to do the heavy lifting.

When the last box was accounted for, we went back to the apartment building, were all of our combined luggage remained. I went to the Vietnam Airlines ticket office to change our flight, while Yonna stayed behind to consolidate the baggage so we could leave two large bags behind in Ho Chi Minh, for retrieval before our departure to Tokyo later in March. When I left the Vietnam Airlines office it was suddenly pouring down rain. I caught a cab back to the apartment one last time, using one of the few Vietnamese phrases I’d learned very well, “so high, no vahn nahm” (Number 2, Ngo Van Nam, Yonna’s former address). I’d learned to say it in the sing-songy way a parent would point out a particulary high-flying kite to their young child, “How high is that kite? Soooo high!” The trip back was quite lovely in the rain.

Yonna had an idea. We would take our bags to the Park Hyatt Hotel. This is the most upscale hotel in HCMC. We’d pay $32 each for a day’s pool membership, and ask them to hold our bags in storage while we swam, then “forget” to pick our bags up when we left for the airport. Sounded like a plan to me.

Even though it was raining, the $32 was money well spent. Pool membership included access to the changing room, showers, jacuzzi, sauna, and the outdoor pool. I started with a 10 minute shower, using the luxury gels and shampoos. Then grabbed some of the complimentary water and hit the jacuzzi. Then, wrapped in a light dressing robe, I napped for a few minutes in a cozy lounge chair before meeting Yonna in the outdoor pool for a rainy night’s swim. It was extremely relaxing.

Then I shaved, showered again, and changed into my fancy new duds.

We raced to the airport by taxi and arrived about 40 minutes before our flight to Hanoi.

We were about to buy some food at the airport, but they closed as we approached the little shop. No meal on the flight either. Luckily I had some chocolate and a crushed sandwich that Yonna had bought for me that morning while we waited for the bus back from the Cambodian border. It was so hard to believe that this day had started that way.

Finally we were on the plane, looking exhausted, but I was happy to be on my way.

We arrived in Hanoi around 11:30pm, and after waiting for luggage, we were on the sidewalk around midnight.

Unlike our arrival in Ho Chi Minh (at around the same time) the reception outside Hanoi airport was bleak. The few taxis that had been there had already filled up with multiple parties and driven away, and new taxis were arriving at the rate of about one every 10 minutes. These guys were charging high rates for the 50-minute drive into the city. Apparently, Woman’s Day was having an impact here, as most cabbies were home with their wives/girlfriends. But then, Hanoi is the heart of socialism in Vietnam, so there is never the race for buck that you experience in HCMC. The cabbies wanted to be home in bed, not driving out to the airport.

Finally we managed to get a cab for ourselves. Yonna negotiated a price with the driver. I was too tired to even remember what the details were. But I was happy that the weather in Hanoi was much cooler. Almost to the point of being a bit chilly (or maybe that was just the carry-over from the muggy heat of HCMC).

As we drove, she explained that in Ho Chi Minh, there would have been a lot of back and forth in negotiating a price, but Hanoi, being so strongly socialist, the driver named a price, she went lower, and he didn’t even counter her. He just grimly drove us for 50 minutes into the heart of a maze of narrow streets and bleak buildings light by cold streetlights. At one point, Yonna pointed out a place advertising dog meat for sale. I felt my heart sinking a little.

When we arrived at her apartment, she asked the driver to back up a little and wait for us. We were confronted by a big, green, metal gate. This gate was chained and padlocked, and Yonna had about 50 keys on various key rings. The real problem was that the key she was almost certain was for the gate wasn’t working. Eventually the driver got fed up and drove off. I can’t blame him — he’d been waiting for at least 10 minutes by that time.

But we were still locked out, and it was becoming obvious that the lock had been changed. It was after 1am and we were standing on the sidewalk in Hanoi with our luggage. Yonna sent a text message to the building owner, who was currently travelling out of town. A few minutes later she got a call. Thankfully, the owner was awake, and had called another lodger to come and open the gate. This turned out to be a young woman from New Jersey. For some reason that struck me as really odd.

We took off our shoes at the foot of the stairs and walked up to the second floor, where Yonna’s apartment is. It is a small landing that is open to the general traffic of the house. On this landing is a piano, a bookcase, a couple of chairs and a shrine to some deceased member of the owner’s family. There is a small door leading into the bathroom opposite the door to Yonna’s small room. We conked out for the night.

I woke up to the sound of a dog squealing and crying like I’ve never heard before. I immediately thought of the place we’d passed in the dark the night before. I didn’t want to be lying there listening to a dog being killed for food. It made me really sad. But it turns out that the dog across the street is just deranged. It squeals and cries almost constantly throughout the night and day. I didn’t see any evidence that it was being mistreated. Maybe it was just retarded, or maybe it was trying to immitate the sing-songy way of the Vietnamese language.

I climbed out of bed and peaked out the window at my new surroundings.

It was pretty drab after what I’d seen in Ho Chi Minh City.

We left to find some breakfast. Yonna noticed that the first shipment of her boxes had arrived and were stacked up in the little architect’s office immediately across the alley from her building. The gate that had confounded us the night before was meant to close off this entire alleyway of apartments, offices and what I think was a daycare center.

A couple of buildings down the little side street was a restaurant called “Le Petite Bruxelles,” where we enjoyed a very large (and somewhat pricey) lunch of salads and pastas. After a very short stroll we walked back towards the apartment, turning down an alley just a few dozen meters from the green gate. We came to a hidden café where journalists had gathered to write pro-North articles during the war. Now it was a quite place for students (and dogs) to hang out and drink delicious iced coffee with sweetened-condensed milk (another thing I eventually learned to pronounce correctly).

We went back and unpacked a few boxes until it was time for dinner.

Then we took a taxi (the driver was just learning to drive!) to a small shop that Yonna wanted to visit. It had some pretty cool stuff, including a lamp that I really wanted to bring home (only $50).

Dinner was at an Indian restaurant (Tandoor, I think it was called). The food wasn’t nearly as good as what we’d had in HCMC, but it was pretty OK.