Changing the Guards

We struggled a little finding the right place for breakfast and ended up with overpriced coffee and cake on the Cathedral Square before getting into our stride, seeking out the Ba Da Pagoda, hidden in a nearby side street, and then walking round the top of Hoan Kiem to explore the Old Quarter. We visited the temple at Hang Bac and then, just around the corner, the ‘Heritage House’ on Ma May, a fascinating reconstruction of a traditional Vietnamese ‘tube house’, built long and thin, backwards from a narrow façade and split with courtyards and shuttered rooms to allow fresh air to flow through. Then we walked up past the Bach Ma Temple – closed today – to the market at Dong Xuan, which is huge and stuffed to the gills with dried shrimp and spices stacked high along very narrow aisles, not to mention all manner of clocks, souvenirs and electrical goods – all the fresh produce spills out into the surrounding streets. We took our lives into our hands with a stroll out (part way) along the scary old Long Bien Bridge and then struck out for the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, stopping along the way for some very tasty Vietnamese coffee in a square full of cool socialist realist concrete statuary. Fully fortified, we even diverted onto the causeway through the West Lake to visit the Pagodas there first, arriving at the Mausoleum just in time to see the changing of the guards (a very impressive structure it is too – we might even pop back later in the week and have a look at old Uncle Ho himself if we can align our itinerary with his limited opening hours.) Then we made our way back to the hotel via Train Street – where the tracks are lined with perilously close-built cafes and bars – and the brand new Uniqlo store, very exciting! Later on we met a former colleague of Beck’s, Trung, at a nice restaurant called the Ngon Garden – it turns out his wife is now a full-time Tik Tok Hanoi food reviewer so we basically left the ordering to him; spring rolls with squid, huge prawns cooked in coconut, clams in a coconut sauce, rice paper noodle with squid cakes, beautiful soft tofu, some kind of vegetable dish with what looked like pumpkin flowers, prawn pancakes and fish stew… it was all really good! A very pleasant evening catching up and we even managed a coffee stop on the way home to the hotel…