My wife and I spent a few days in the downtown Hanoi business district in Vietnam. It took a little while to catch on to the layout of things, but it soon became apparent that the town is much like a giant department store, with a block representing a department. A block (or sometimes two or three blocks for popular merchandise) is devoted to a single type of product. There is the clock street, toilet paper street, cell phone street, toys street, musical instrument street, etc. If you want to purchase an item, all you need to do is find out where the appropriate street is located and you will find LOTS of that thing. Unfortunately, most of the stores have identical items so the selection isn’t all that great. The problem is that this layout makes the shopping center very big, miles across in fact. It is a real project to fill your shopping cart.
The streets, and sidewalks, are full of things. The streets are lined with concrete sidewalks on both sides. The problem is that it is almost impossible to walk on them because they are full of things. The stores are open fronted affairs with roll-up garage style doors. Their merchandise is easily visible from the street, but it also tends to flow out onto the sidewalks. Then there are all of the scooters parked helter-skelter on the sidewalks. Thousands of them create an obstacle course that makes it almost tempting to use the street instead of staying on the sidewalks, if it weren’t that walking in the streets appeared to offer the prospect of instant death from being hit by one (or more likely, several) vehicles.
Many of the vehicles are motor scooters. It appears that the maximum number of passengers that can comfortably transported by a small scooter is five. I heard rumors about folks who could fit up to eight, but didn’t observe that many. Three or four people is very common. The typical family arrangement was a baby on the handlebars, two small children standing on the floor boards between the handle bars and seat, a father driving on the seat and his wife sitting behind. In addition to all of these people, they often were carrying large items (I saw one with a door being carried cross-wise to the direction of motion) that used up any additional space that might have been available.
In addition to the merchandise and the vehicles on the sidewalks, there are restaurants - hundreds of them share space on the sidewalks. Usually food is cooked on a tiny coal fired, one-burner stove that uses six inch diameter by four inch high fuel pellets. These stoves are vertical cylinders about a foot in diameter and 18 inches tall. They are just right for cooking a single pot meal – which is what you get at these street restaurants. Each restaurant has one or two tiny tables and chairs. They look like and are proportioned like our tables and chairs, but are much smaller. The seats of the chairs are six or seven inches high and the table tops are 16 inches high by a couple of feet across. Service is family style. A large bowl is placed in the middle of the table. Customers sit around the table and share whatever happens to be in the bowl. Each person gets a small rice bowl and pair of chop sticks. Usually the food was very tasty. You move from restaurant to restaurant to get a variety of dishes if you want more than one course. Meals on the street cost much less than a dollar. Bottled beer and water are usually available for an additional five cents or so. It is pretty easy to have a nice meal, with beer, for around fifty cents. Apparently, this is where almost everyone in town eats. I was told that the locals do not usually cook at home and can’t afford the in-doors style of restaurants which can cost as much as $4.00 for a many course meal with wine or beer. The food on the streets is good and very inexpensive. I didn’t even want to consider sanitation, but managed to avoid getting sick while in Vietnam.
Getting across the streets was high on my list of terrorizing activities in Hanoi. (The remainder had to do with riding in vehicles of all types and possible sanitation problems.) The first thing that becomes immediately obvious while walking in Hanoi is that there are a lot of vehicles on the roads. So many in fact that there are always at least ten or more vehicles lined up side-by-side across street. The biggest space around vehicles is about three feet front and back, and a foot to the sides. Normally, they are much closer than this. The traffic is mixed, consisting of motorcycles, scooters, trucks, bicycles, oxen, donkey carts, cars, pedi-cabs and pedestrians carrying two baskets held on the ends of a stick over their shoulder. The speed of the traffic is not too great. I would guess the average speed is about 25 mph. It seemed like about 80 percent of the traffic moved on the correct side of the street, leaving interesting patterns in the traffic flow when someone was working their way upstream against the flood of traffic. The first time I had to cross the street I stopped to wait for a break in the stream created by a stop light or something. This was a silly thought. There are no stop lights or stop signs except on the major thoroughfares. On the majority of the streets traffic just keeps on flowing along.
Realizing that it was futile to wait for a break, I just stood there in utter confusion. Luckily, we were with friends who told us the trick of crossing the street. It was simple really, just step into the flow of traffic and walk across! Nothing to it really. The only rule was DON’T STOP. If you stop, you will undoubted get hit. I was never brave enough to just step off the sidewalks without taking a peek at the oncoming traffic. I would wait until there was a space big enough to get at least one foot on the ground before the oncoming traffic got to me. This would sometimes take several seconds, but gave me the feeling of confidence needed to perform this operation. Once in the traffic it felt like being in the middle of a school of fish. All of the vehicles managed to flow around both sides of me without so much as a bump or “close call” (less than an inch or so might have been considered a close call). I didn’t notice any piles of corpses on the streets, so I assume that it works most of the time.
In order to perform this maneuver I found it necessary to first come to grips with my life, and impending death. I finally decided that it was as good of a day to die as any, so I might as well not worry about it. Death in Hanoi would be a bit of a problem for folks, but so be it. I got pretty good at this after a bit of practice. I finally got to the point that I no longer had to come to peace with my death; I was permanently ready to die and could walk right on across without hesitating. That is, until I came to my first intersection with a stop light.
On the main street through town, very close to the old Hanoi “Hilton” (prison), are a couple of three and four-laned streets with stoplights controlling the traffic. The interesting part about the traffic lights is that there doesn’t appear to be a consistent pattern to them from street corner to street corner. The location of the “stop” and “go” lights isn’t consistent, and as far as I could detect the meaning of the lights varies from place to place. Of course, since I am color blind it might just be that the shades of color weren’t consistent so I got confused. At any rate, I found it difficult to interpret the meaning of the lights.
At one point I came to a one-way, three lane street that I had to cross at a light. The street was FULL of vehicles from sidewalk to sidewalk, filling the entire length of the block. Approximately forty scooters were lined up with their front tires exactly up to the crosswalk line (there is a very steep fine for crossing the line while parked, which includes having any part of your vehicle over the leading edge of the painted line). As usual, no vehicle in the queue was more than about a foot from others in any direction. I had noticed that the traffic doesn’t start off from a light like we do in the States. We allow the vehicle in front of us to go a short distance before we start, with the result that once everyone is up to speed there are spaces built in to the traffic. In Hanoi this isn’t necessary because there is no space between vehicles. All of the vehicles take off at the same instant, maintaining the spacing that they had while stopped. It is much more efficient in getting people on the way, but has the feeling of the start of a race about it.
As I approached the intersection it appeared that I had lucked out and the traffic was waiting for me to cross. I confidently strolled to the middle of the road in front of the waiting vehicles, when much to my horror the light changed! It didn’t fiddle around with a yellow phase, but went directly from stop to go. The entire pack of traffic immediately bore down upon me, at which point I grabbed onto my sides and let out a loud scream, having visions of being turned into hamburger as hundreds of vehicles bumped over my crushed body. My attention was yanked back to the moment when a girl on a scooter passed very close to me. She was laughing joyfully at my predicament.
Her laughter pulled me back to reality and I remembered that the solution was to just walk on across the street, which worked. As I approached the sidewalk I noticed an amused policeman, armed with an automatic rifle, watching my progress. He looked pleased to note that I managed to get safely across the intersection.
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