It's A Northern Thing

Looking down at Bát Dàn Street for the first time in daylight, it was a busy road with plenty of shopfront activity.  Scooters buzzed past each other and pedestrians walked squeezed up against the sides of the street, the pavements taken up by street vendors, parked scooters and the ubiquitous plastic stool and table arrangements of food joints.

Around the corner we found a small street with a few cafes and sat down at one for a vietnamese iced coffee.  These are small, strong coffees which filter through a metal strainer into a glass which has condensed milk at the bottom.  Once the coffee has passed into the glass you add ice and water to taste, stirring everything into a strong and sweet caffeinated concoction.

It was the perfect spot for people watching.  Those in the cafes opposite languidly sipping drinks shaded from the heat, people zipping by on their scooters and street vendors peddling anything from fruit and fish to domestic products and you guessed it, DVDs!  Many wore traditional conical hats and used bamboo poles to transport their wares carried in baskets; the heavy loads flexing the poles as these hardy ladies went about their business.

The waitress at our cafe was surprised that we actually spoke Vietnamese, as was the case with everybody we'd spoken to in Hanoi so far.  People spoke about us in Vietnamese thinking we were ignorant and their main guesses as to our origin ranged from 'Trung Quốc' (Chinese) to 'Hán Quốc' (Korean)!  Telling people that we lived in England just made them assume that we would not be able to speak our mother tongue.

My British analogy of a northern Vietnamese accent is that it is like speaking to somebody from Scotland (the words are strongly accented but generally quite clear - I don't mean a Glasgow accent obviously!) and so we had to concentrate to catch some of the words of the fastest speakers.  Another matter was the different regional words used.

For example, for a 'thousand', they say 'nghìn' in the north (just as it is printed on all the banknotes here) but in the south we say 'ngàn' which took some getting used to when paying for things.  Other differences include the word for bowl ('bát' in the north, 'chén' in the south) and even the phrase for saying how much something costs ('bao tiền' in the north, 'bao nhiêu' in the south).