The Cardi B of Coffees
We again—for reasons I cannot quite ascertain—agree to arise early on Sunday in order to meet up with the rest of the group to go grab coffee at Café Giảng, a world famous egg coffee shop, and proceed from there to walk around Hanoi. We agree to meet in the lobby at the ungodly hour of 11AM. We are 15 minutes late*, but at least we let everyone know via WhatsApp.
Victoria, on top of her shit as ever, even has an itinerary for us:
We successfully arrive at Café Giảng and file through the small, dark hallway that is its entrance. We emerge into a bustle of a coffee shop, with a central staircase that spirals up a few stories. We fortuitously find a space for the lot of us as another group of tourists is leaving, and we sit down while James places our order.
While we wait, I learn that egg coffee evolved—like most things of its nature—out of wartime food shortages, this time as a result of a fresh milk shortage in the 1940s. It’s fabulous and I want more even as I’m typing this. My hot coffee, served in a small cup set inside a small bowl filled partially with hot water to keep the coffee warm, is thick, rich, foamy, and somehow both bitter and sweet at the same time. It is the Cardi B of coffees.
Coffees downed, we meander out through the French Quarter, the touristy part of town set in what I assume was the downtown part of Hanoi during its French colonial occupation. The architecture reminds me a little of New Orleans, but a bit more crowded and with more greenery.
Victoria reminds Matthias to beware old women. By day, they will act as if the baskets they carry—hung from either end of a pole that extends over their shoulder—are too heavy for them to hold, and will gesture for strapping young men to alleviate them of their burden. And then they will demand payment for having done you the courtesy. Matthias assures her that he will trust no woman approaching him on the street with greed in her eyes.
In a larger, presumably weekend pedestrian zone street that borders a small lake, we see a ridiculous sight: dozens of little baby boys and girls driving along in those battery-operated cars. There are even little mopeds, tiny plastic replicas of one of the 80 million that grace this city’s streets.
We walk to the path that circles the lake. Naturally Matthias can’t resist climbing some trees, much to the shocked horror of the people sitting on the ground next to them.
We keep wandering, and stumble upon some kind of Korean-Vietnamese cultural fair, which is extra ironic because Victoria’s family is Korean. There are food stalls, and because Victoria is also a foodie, she leads us towards the things that we really should try. Two-for-one street food here in Vietnam, nice.
We continue our culinary circuit and head to the famous Kem Tràng Tiền for ice cream. I get a taro ice creamsicle and I couldn’t be happier to lick the purple, not-too-sweet stick.
After shopping for some souvenirs, trinkets, and other gifts for those back home—and after seeing far too many communist-looking shirts to be to this capitalist’s liking—we decide to wrap up the day with drinks. I look up a promising place on Matthias’s phone and we head there. Luckily the place, Drink Up, delivers: It’s on the second floor of a building, with a balcony that overlooks a side street in the French Quarter, so we can peacefully people watch. The drinks we’re served are some sort of beer float cocktail, with a beer flipped over up-side-down in a sweet mixer. Matthias gets the beer mojito and I get some tropical-sounding one that turns out fabulous.
After drinks it’s time to head back to the hotel to prepare for the week. We have to be in the lobby at 8AM to be picked up by our ride to the office. In order to have enough time to eat, this means that we have to be at breakfast by 7AM, and I can’t even think about what time that means we’ll have to set our alarms for.
* In our defence, Matthias’s** international data plan was giving him trouble, so we spent a good amount of the morning on the phone with Sprint.
** He hates this spelling of the possessive version of his name, but I insist it is grammatically correct.