Hanoi Streetlife

We took a few days to explore Hanoi, eating our way through the various local dishes and meeting local people.  Sitting down to eat noodles at a street hawker stall and speaking to the lady seller was very interesting.  She had once held an administrative job with high authority but the powers that be decided to close the department and ended her career of almost thirty years.  With nothing to show for her loyalty and service, she turned to street selling to subsist and provide for her family.  She was now just one of the many street hawkers offering yet something else to eat.

My brother's blog is in my links list and is about our food adventures here.  However, I have to describe one thing that we've eaten and that is foetal duck eggs.  This dish is at the lower priced end of the hawker scale and sold by ladies who roam the streets carrying baskets slung on bamboo poles.  They carry the eggs plus herbs and condiments, stools, coal burner and boiling pot.  You hail them down and they stop in a convenient spot, sit you down on a tiny plastic stool and crack open however many eggs you want.  The eggs only sell for between VND6000-8000 (less than 30p) each and so the sellers are amongst the lowest earners on the street.

They are basically fertilised duck eggs left for the foetus to mature for around twenty five days.  Once available in the UK, EU food laws made them illegal and now you can only get them there at farms willing to deal in them like some kind of contraband.  I won't post any more detailed pictures here of the duck foetuses but you can view them on the other blog.

An interesting thing here is people's usage of available space.  One night we were out searching for a late night noodle soup and found a place still serving beyond midnight when most had long since closed (generally people are early to bed and early to rise in Vietnam).  We ate in a shopfront full of fellow diners but noticed there was a workbench, vice and tool rack.  The next day we passed the noodle shop and found that it lived a double life as a garage, with mechanics and broken down scooters replacing the stools, tables and cooking pots.

We also witnessed the incongruity of luxury cars driving down the same streets as people hawking goods and working, the unemployed whiling away time playing chinese chess and the odd homeless person on the street.  As in any developing country the gulf between rich and poor is a marked one, but I was surprised by the numbers of luxury cars (several Bentleys and plenty of German marques) to be seen on the roads.  We even saw a couple of Ferraris.  Some people here are doing very well indeed.

At work

At play

At a loss

At ease