Elusive Street Food and Knock-Off New Balances
Saturday night we all meet to go explore the night market. This turns out rather amusing for me overall, caught between the two worlds of keeping up with Matthias and keeping tabs on my coworkers, and the struggle not to abandon them all just to take pictures to document everything.
The night market in Hanoi is open only on Fridays and Saturdays. It overtakes a main shopping drag and fills the center of the street with stalls and carts selling all sorts of things, but mainly knockoff clothing and apparel and food (surprisingly little of which is vegetarian, disappointingly). The lanes that form around the stalls in the center of the street—between those stalls and the curb with your typical day-to-day shops on the other side of them—are packed, and it’s the kind of place in which unseasoned tourists would feel unsafe and problematically hide their valuables.
We walk along, but stop at the first bahn mi cart we encounter. There’s a vegetarian option—egg—and Matthias orders it. It’s delicious, and makes me lament how hard it is to find good Vietnamese rolls in Boston. I’ll have to look harder. It costs 20,000 dong; 1 USD is 23,000 dong.
Matthias can’t get over the knock-off sneakers, which include their fair share of New Balances. The knock-offs are so good they’re more expensive than cheap sneakers back home, even after you haggle. An expensive pair (think fancy Nikes, which would typically retail 7-10x) goes for 750,000 dong, or about $30.
I’m too scatterbrained to buy anything; I’m new to this country and don’t know what the cost of living is, and I don’t want to get ripped off. Instead I watch others, or watch other people watching others, to see what decent prices are, and I otherwise just try to enjoy the sights and sounds around me.
I see what can only be described as a cone of French fries on a stick*, and resolve to find one at one of the food stalls. We locate what seems to be a popular stall (which may also be two stalls, each with identical food?) but there’s no French fry stick-cone in sight. We settle for what looks like a soft spiral potato, but it is crispier than we thought—almost a potato chip-like crispiness—and I make a mess picking at it. I snag a napkin and sweep up the bits I’ve spilled in an effort to keep things (i.e. the street) tidy.
There’s so much food to be had everywhere. Diminutive women walk around with baskets of fried dough products, shoving them in people’s faces. Matthias—a true and honest gentleman—is too polite to wave one such a woman off as she literally pops a munchkin-looking thing into his mouth. (Naturally I am being a horrible girlfriend and hanging back to watch this.) He nods awkwardly and tries to smile while simultaneously trying to choke down a dry, crumbly, unsweetened, presumably hours-old and dusty bit of dough. She sticks out her hand to demand currency in return for her favour. He waves her off and keeps walking. She follows, tapping him on his shoulder that she has to stretch to reach in order to get him to turn around. He doesn’t. I—and here I am being really, truly horrible—watch as she winds her arm back to smack him and delivers a blow with the flat of her palm to the back of his shoulder with what I’m sure is all of the might her tiny, bent body can muster. He turns around in shock, shakes his head no again, and resumes walking.
I should have warned him, but I hope the story is worth it.
We continue to pick our way through the market for blocks and blocks on a very gentle curve—so far that we wonder and worry for a second that we’ve come full circle. We haven’t, but we’re hungry, so we resolve to determine what to do for dinner.
‘Shall we do things the old-fashioned way and just walk into somewhere?’ James asks.
‘I was thinking we’d do things the old-fashioned way and look something up on TripAdvisor,’ I joke, poorly, as James works at TripAdvisor.
We reach the end of the night market and start towards busy streets again. Matthias and I are in the lead, except when I stop to take pictures, which is less often now that I’m looking for food. We turn down an alley in which over a hundred people must be sitting, all on low plastic stools around low plastic tables, eating food from disposable tin pans that are placed over small open flames and used as a makeshift frying pan to fry whichever veg, bread, or meat you like. I’m desperate to try it and there are better veg options than I’ve seen thus far, but eating in an alleyway is met with a resounding veto from everyone else. Their loss. Mama Di’s is still one of my favourite lunches on the planet.
Eventually we encounter a street with what seems like our best bets for food. In the middle of the drag is a place called Yummy something, but Victoria doesn’t trust anywhere with Yummy in the name and I trust Victoria. We walk up the street and check out the menus. One place has a play place. Another closes at 10 but refuses to seat us at 9:30. The other half of the road is too far.
I throw out that Yummy seems like the best bet and we settle on there. We order drinks which takes a bit, and food which takes a bit more. Matthias and I share reduced options of French fries, some tofu with century egg, and ‘mixed fried rice’ which I hope I’ve ordered vegetarian. Typically my move is to find a relatable vegetarian cuisine and use that as an order, but I don’t know whether ordering a Hindu meal here would work.
Our food turns out well, but I’m afraid that the others were disappointed. Victoria and James ended up with some creative interpretation of spring rolls, and the barbecue that the others prefer isn’t quite what they were expecting. Victoria—as always—is right not to trust places with Yummy in the name.
After dinner, and after awkwardly squaring up the check each like the foreigners we are, Victoria calls a car back to the Lotte, our hotel. I’m not sure about everyone else in our group, but as soon as we get back, we face-dive into our pillows and sleep soundly.
*I never got a picture and Google can’t help me out here
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