#beer corner

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The Markt

The Beer Corner

Visit One Pillar Pagoda –  a historic buddhist temple in Hanoi:

Do Some Morning Tai Chi with the locals on Hoan Kiem Lake or “The Lake of the Restored Sword.”

Tai Chi on the “lake of the restored sword”

Visit the Temple of Literature.  The temple of Literature housed the first National University of Vietnam and is a Confucius temple:

Watch a water puppet show at the Thang Long Water Puppet Theater.  The shows last about an hour and include a band and woman singing the script along with the show, but it is translated into English on a screen to the side of the water puppets.

        Like I did this week, Visit the Famous Hanoi Hilton to see where the American POWs were kept during the Vietnam War.

Go see where Uncle Ho is laid to rest, at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum:

Eat, Eat, Eat!  For Birthday this week, I took an amazing Food on Foot tour through Old Town Hanoi and tried a bunch of items I never would have found on my own.  But there is sooo much amazing delicious food around Hanoi… I could go back again, just to eat street food.

Burn some incense at the Temple of the Jade Mountain, a temple dedicated to a Vietnamese war hero.

Take a picture of the iconic Flag Tower, which soars over the Hanoi citadel, a world heritage site.

Book a cruise on Halong Bay, one of the Worlds 7 Wonders of Nature and a Unesco World Heritage Site.

Visit the gothic St. Joseph’s Cathedral, the oldest Catholic church in Vietnam:

Have a beer a $.25 draft beer at  Beer Corner and watch the world go by.

And if you see one, stop and enjoy the lotus flower, the National Flower of Vietnam…

Do you have any other ideas of what to do in Hanoi?

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My birthday started with a breakfast that consisted of Phở gà (Vietnamese Chicken rice noodle soup), tropical fruits and fresh watermelon juice.:

Phở gà

We then departed on our Hanoi Street Food Tour which was mainly focused around the Old Town part of Hanoi.  We first walked around the market area:

We made some seafood and herb purchases to cook later and walked around trying different Vietnamese street foods…

Baby squid stuffed with egg

Street foods were interspersed with cold beers to wash it all down :)

Nice cold Bia

One of the strangest things I tried was sea worms mixed with egg and herbs and then fried into patties.  Actually, they weren’t that bad.

After we had walked around for a while trying different things, he asked if we had any special requests.  I quietly said… dog…. now I know that this is man’s best friend, but in Vietnam, dogs are farmed for meat and the Vietnamese eat dog at the end of every month because they believe it brings them good luck… so here it is… dog two ways, in a roast and as a sausage.

My opinion?  Thankfully not delicious.  I’d rather eat the sea worms.  We then headed to a restaurant to cook some of the items we had bought at the market and had this interesting meal:

I decided I needed another beer, so headed out to drink at Beer Corner:

Vietnam – where you can still get a draft beer for 25 cents and a bottled for .72 — at Green Pepper

After the tour was over, I walked back to the hotel, and found a package at the front desk from the Hanoi Street Food tour guide.  They had given me this cute little toy Rickshaw as a present which was very thoughtful.

Vietnamese rickshaw

I then went up to my room and I found this birthday cake on my bed waiting for me as a surprise from the hotel.  I had a piece and then brought it down to the lobby to share with the hotel staff.

Birthday cake from the hotel.

All in all, I went to bed obviously full and happy and my 29th Birthday was one for the record books.

Whats interesting about Hanoi Street food, is that there are venders every where as well as people walking around like mobile grocery stores, selling their produce:

While in Hanoi here are some of the other foods I have enjoyed:

My absolute favorites are Bun Bo Nam Bo, which I have gone back to eat 3 times and of course a fully loaded fresh Banh Mi (Vietnamese sub sandwich).

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Hanoi Eating

First of all, let me state that Hanoi is by far the most delicious city I have ever visited. At least, if you don’t mind eating all of your food off the street…and I literally mean, OFF THE STREET:

This gentleman is a grillmaster of Hanoi!

As with everything else in Vietnam, they cook off the street just like the fix motorbikes. Sometimes in the same square meter of space!

But boy, is that cooking tasty. There are approximately a zillion people selling food this way - much in the form of soup or noodles, served in a bowl. Sometimes it’s random things cooked and dumped over rice. The broth tends to be exquisite. Even the worst dish I had still overflowed with enough flavor to make a french chef weep. I have a feeling it’s because it’s the same broth that’s been cooking since the war ended…so it’s got the kind of richness and depth of flavor that only a decade or two of simmering in the air, redolent of life, can bring it.

Remember the picture of the meat delivery in the last blog post? There seems to be a lot of that going around; I can’t tell you how many times I saw somebody delivering a huge chunk of pork, or beef, or chicken to a waiting cook. The women deliver meat, veggies, noodles, etc. Sometimes on foot, sometimes on motorbike. It’s then chopped and prepped from those same little stools on a cutting board resting on the sidewalk, or if it’s a higher-end place, on a small plastic table. One or two big pots are involved, either over a propane burner or often a type of cast charcoal burner.

Lots of cooking is done over charcoal, actually. As you walk around town, you can see lots of the clay charcoal burners discarded (and picked up for recycling) next to the little mini-BBQ stations that people are rustling up their tasty vittles.

Even though the places go from nothing more than a chair on the sidewalk all the way up to an actual “restaurant”, with a tiny prep kitchen to go along with a few tables wedged into a space scarcely a couple of meters across, they all have a pretty similar feel, and I would qualify all of the same as the same fabulous street food that Hanoi has become noted for.

So - how do you order? Well, you sidle up, find a seat (or indicate your interest in the general area, at which point somebody will identify themselves as the proprietor and find a spot to plop you down, usually knee-to-knee with everyone else already chowing their meal). There might be a written menu - in vietnamese - but what I have been doing is just pointing to something that somebody else is eating, and they bring me that. English tends to be limited to prices and a common courtesy. You must know how to say “bia hoi”, which is the name for the local light brew that’s served with pretty much anything (say beer hoy with a bad fake British accent, and you’ll be about right).

People on top of the stool, cats underneath, please.

A BRIEF DISCUSSION ABOUT SANITATION. Actually, let’s not and just say that most of these places are not going to pass any sort of health inspection. EVER. Between the lack of refrigeration, the cooking directly on the ground, the non-potable water, the questionable mixing of utensils, etc., I would recommend accepting it as it is and noticing that it doesn’t seem to be killing any of the people eating it. It has not killed me yet, either…I haven’t even been inconvenienced, shall we say, even after eight square meals directly from the street.

Do not ever complain about the lack of space in your kitchen triangle again.

So, what have I had so far?

- Many, many bowls of phở, which is what I consider the national dish of Vietnam - thinly sliced beef, chicken, or other mystery meat, in a fantastic broth, with rice noodles - A variation on that theme, for breakfast, but lacking the broth - Several random meats and tofu, served over rice with green veggies - An amazing grilled seafood dinner, consisting of geoduck, sea snails, clam congee, and the largest two shrimp I’ve ever seen (although to be fair, this was the most expensive meal I has in Vietnam, almost $20) - Squid…just, squid. More Chinese, I would say, but tasty none-the-less

The price…ah, that, my friend, is the best part. You can eat a proper vietnamese meal for $2 without even trying hard. Add on a cà phê sữa đá to start your day off for $1, a beer or three for $0.75 a pop, and you are well on your way to three square meals for $10/day, with room left over for your $2 pack of Marlboroughs.

Phở on the way home from beer corner, my last night in Hanoi

I would be remiss if I did not talk about the coffee in more detail. I am enchanted with Vietnamese coffee. It’s a little odd to think that a coffee snob like me would be so silly as to enjoy a fine, dark, coffee mixed with condensed milk from a can (of all things)…but damn, you take that and pour it over ice, and you have the most perfect drink in creation. Women are set up everywhere, with their pail of ice, a thermos or bottle of coffee, and a can of milk to whip that up for you. I also learned that when you run out of coffee, they will bring over a bottle of tea, which you pour over the ice and then drink to mop up the last of the flavor. Yummy.

DISTRESSING SIDE NOTE - I saw a bike with a cage of cats on the back. This caused me to raise an eyebrow. I later found out that cats are a delicacy on the menu here. Along with their canine brethren. Caveat emptor.