Hanoi - Day 2 Part 2 - Russian Jeep Tour

Our entertainment for Tuesday evening was an open air driving tour of Hanoi in a vintage Russian Jeep. Our Hanoi guide, Phil, joined us and along with a driver and a jeep tour guide named Martin. We headed into the Hanoi rush hour traffic. Our objective was to get out of the heavily visited Old Quarter and see some more typical Hanoi street life.
Jeep passing by the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum

First stop was a street market in the southern part of town. We learned that most Hanoi residents shop every day for their food so that it is the freshest possible. Martin tried to find some fruits we had never tried before. Thanks to my last two breakfasts, he didn’t succeed on his first few attempts, but we eventually ended up with a funky looking thing they call some sort of apple, but it looked more like flora’s best attempt to imitate a shar pei. We bought several fruits to go and took them for our fourth stop of the tour. 
Fruit market


Stop number two was down a side alley in the market. Martin pointed out that the apartments above the shops were Soviet era block apartments built in the 1950’s for the veterans of the French-Indochina war. The apartments were both small and spartan. Over time, many people punched out an exterior wall and “added on” so that the formerly smooth exterior now had a patchwork of extensions of various depth. 

Hanoi back alley


 Our third stop was through a maze of narrow alleys to another generation of Soviet-era apartments that were some of the smallest living spaces I’ve seen. Units were 15 square meters (about 160 square feet). These units were so small that they had neither kitchen nor bathrooms (referred to as Happy Rooms). These were in a common area where they were shared with 4-6 other apartments. We met a woman named Mrs. Tinh. She was 84 years old and perhaps 4 feet 8 inches tall. She invited us in to here tiny apartment and let us see how she had made use of the room. We learned that Vietnamese families typically live in multi-generational homes. Mrs. Tinh had chosen to move out of the family home to make more room for her kids, grandkids and great grand children. The family in turn, had furnished her apartment with a small refrigerator, a TV and a web cam – so that they could check on her and make sure she hadn’t died overnight.
Visiting with Mrs. Tinh

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