Slow Days in a Fast City
“I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can't.”
Midnight in Paris (2011)
By the time I’m leaving Sri Lanka, I’m exhausted. The early mornings and late nights have caught up to me, the dregs of my month-long flu are still lingering, and I’m staving off another mild stomach upset, all the while facing down a solid day’s worth of travel and then two weeks down the coast of Vietnam.
I was starting to think I just wasn’t cut out for this much travel anymore.
Maybe the universe agrees – or at least, it has other plans for me. The ongoing flooding in the central part of the country has me rerouting to remain in Hanoi for ten days. Ten, glorious days in which I can finally unpack for a little while. I can rest, reset brain and body back to a place where I can enjoy this time travelling again rather than feeling as though I am in a constant battle to keep going, one day to the next.
It’s morning when I finally arrive to an overcast Hanoi. I’ve slept a few hours between two flights and a half night in a capsule hotel in a Malaysian airport. I’m still congested enough that the air pressure has left me temporarily deaf in one ear. I am desperate for a shower, and clean clothes, and a proper meal. I stop to get cash first, and the ATM crashes mid-transaction and nearly swallows my card. Stepping out of the airport, I am immediately lunged at by an array of men offering taxi services. I blearily shake my head and fight them off, heading for my pre-booked car.
Only once I am ensconced in the calm of my fourth floor hotel room can I breathe again. I open the window and peek my head out over the cluster of oddly arranged buildings. A few men sit on a rooftop a few buildings over eating soup together under the heavy sky. Flags still flutter in the breeze from the independence celebrations two months ago. I am suddenly, involuntarily, filled with a rush of joy.
Vietnam was a country I had wanted to visit for so long; once again, a country like none other I had stepped foot in before. I had so much to see. But thanks to some inclement weather further south, I need not rush to do so.
Hanoi is a fast city. It is a rush of motorbikes and scooters in tightly packed streets and cars valiantly trying to find a way to fit through it all. It reminds me of Rome, but I wonder if that is just all the scooters. It is street vendors selling fruit or baked goods from carts with a pre-recorded sales pitch reeling off on crackling repeat from a battered radio nestled in with their goods. It is a delightful mix of the new and the old; the modern and the traditional.
But it is also a wonderful place in which to slow down. To sit at a street side café with a coffee that will give me the jitters the first time I drink it, and simply watch the world go by. I am happily mesmerised by the sway of colourful lanterns hanging from shopfronts. Endlessly engaged by watching women cook the same dishes their families have for generations and serve it up to locals and tourists alike at tiny plastic tables that dot the streets.
I don’t make it all that far on my first day, tired and disorientated as I am. I wander briefly around the Old Quarter, my home for the first few days here, and stop for a light dinner of bánh mì steps from my hotel. It’s early still, and the street is still relatively quiet. I am just finished eating when the cry goes up from somewhere down the street. All at once, the street springs to life.
Tables are folded away at lightning speed, chairs piled up, as the shouts echo down, vendor to vendor. I still don’t know the cause of the alarm but I am hurried to my feet by the owner of the tiny restaurant I’m eating out of. I hold my iced tea clumsily in one hand and help her stack chairs with the other. She ushers me inside to watch from the doorway as the source of the commotion nears.
A military vehicle creeps slowly down the street, with uniformed guards either side. It’s little bigger than a truck and going at snail’s pace, but at this time of the night, the restaurants tumble onto the street, leaving barely enough room for a motorbike to pass through – let alone a vehicle of this size. The guard catches my eye as he passes and I wonder what he sees: a bewildered, bemused foreigner, still clutching her glass in one hand?
The panic has passed and a sense of jovial camaraderie floats down the street. Vendors laugh and call out to one another. I wonder how often this happens.
After my first few days, and a brief outing to Bai Tu Long Bay (the lesser known but equally beautiful sister to the famous Ha Long Bay), I settle into an apartment a little further across town. For the first time since I left for India almost a month previously, I feel like my feet finally touch the ground again. Like I have finally landed.
I catch up on little life tasks that had fallen wayward in the preceding weeks. I take the days slowly and as they come, dipping my toe in and out of Hanoi as I wish, the rush and pressure easing. I knit myself into the fabric of the city, if only for this short while, crossing the frantic streets with the ease of a local, and riding through crammed traffic on the back of a scooter with only the mildest hint of panic coursing through my veins each time.
When I’d first arrived to Hanoi and the hotel receptionist had asked about my plans for my time there, he’d warned that by day ten, I would be bored of the city. I smiled, but I didn’t believe him even then. I was right not to. Hanoi was the kind of city that I could spend a decade in, if I had another lifetime to spare. It had become a part of me; left an impression in its way as Udaipur had in India. All these places, far and near, engrained into the person I would be going forward.
To be so lucky, to bring them with me wherever I went.
