I will be heading to the Noi Bai International Airport in a couple of hours. In the last 24 hours, I have spoken at an industry seminar, met with officials from the largest news portal in Vietnam, exchanged notes with the operators of the biggest social media platform here and dined with the founders of the newest celebrity website. Along the way, I also found the time for two memorable local meals to boot!
As I tweeted yesterday, Hanoi is hot, humid and crowded. Today it is just crowded. Apparently warm winds from Laos was the cause of yesterday's heat blast and its effects have largely worn off.
Don't ask me why, but the first thing that struck me about Vietnam was that the cars were left hand drive. I always associated Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia with Thailand and for some reason, this little bit of information threw me off a bit. There are many similarities to Thailand in my mind, but things here feel a bit dated - as if fashion and development froze in the 70s. Like all cities, land is a premium. Houses and buildings are packed together in one giant patchwork of confusion. This confusion extends to the streets where cars and (lots and lots of) motorcycles dance around each other in some form of orderly chaos.Compare this to Delhi and Shanghai but replace half of those cars with ten-fold the number of bikes and you get the idea. What surprised me was the calm demeanor of drivers and motorcyclists. Despite traffic conditions, people went about navigating traffic as if driving in the countryside on a quite Sunday morning.
I have not seen a single fat person here. Food is not especially oily and they use a lot of herbs and sauces. Dinner was a fish dish called cha cha... or something to that effect. A traditional favorite, slices of fish were served with greens and fish intestines on a small wok placed on top of a gas cooker. The fish was then dipped into a bowl of shrimp sauce and eaten with a small helping of rice noodles. I understand the shrimp sauce is an acquired taste but if you fancy fish sauce, this should go down fairly easily.
Lunch destination was a spring roll shop located a few doors from last night's diner. This shop is famous for square spring rolls filled with crab meat before being deep fried. Felt more like a traditional fried dumpling but it was tasty nevertheless. This was served with a bowl of fish sauce and slices of preserved carrot. The side dish, if one could called it one, was a plate of pork slices. Everything was dipped into the fish sauce but the end product was simply excellent! My one regret was having breakfast this morning...
Vietnam is supposed to be a communist government system. Looking around, you don't get any sense of that except for the occasional uniformed officer clothed in unmistakable red army cuts.
One can only do much on a 24-hour business trip but Hanoi seems interesting enough for another trip...
Don't ask me why, but the first thing that struck me about Vietnam was that the cars were left hand drive. I always associated Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia with Thailand and for some reason, this little bit of information threw me off a bit. There are many similarities to Thailand in my mind, but things here feel a bit dated - as if fashion and development froze in the 70s. Like all cities, land is a premium. Houses and buildings are packed together in one giant patchwork of confusion. This confusion extends to the streets where cars and (lots and lots of) motorcycles dance around each other in some form of orderly chaos.Compare this to Delhi and Shanghai but replace half of those cars with ten-fold the number of bikes and you get the idea. What surprised me was the calm demeanor of drivers and motorcyclists. Despite traffic conditions, people went about navigating traffic as if driving in the countryside on a quite Sunday morning.
