I'M AT: Viet Anh Hotel, Hanoi, a posh place with a computer in the room, one of the best beds I've ever slept in, and a strangely bland breakfast. Gelled minions open the doors as your jandals slap down the marble staircase. Class.
It's just like being in a pub back home - except there's no bar; no roof; no toilets; no TV; no pool table; and only one beer on tap. You perch on a seemingly made-for-infants plastic chair, screamingly coloured, and in turn perch your damp glass on a plastic table. Lights from motorbike headlights rush past whilst friendly cob salesmen grin manically whilst they rip you off.
There are no pumps and no cellar, either. Get a barrel of beer and serve it on the street, and you've got yourself a bia hoi joint. Bia hoi - "fresh beer" - is made in small local breweries, without chemicals, so it doesn't keep.
It costs 2000 dong for a glass - maybe 250ml, a bit less than half a pint. And there are 32,000 dong to the pound. It's much cheaper than water.
Ha Noi is a low-rise, chaotic place where life is lived on the narrow streets. Women carry a yoke on their shoulders with two evenly-filled baskets swinging below. Some of them dole out mangoes, bananas, rambutans; some collect rubbish, glass and plastic, to sell for scrap; and some of them carry their kitchen. They bend the knee, drop the yoke, whip out a burner, heat the broth, cut the herbs, cook the meat, and serve delicious - really great - food, in china bowls. Bun cha is a bowl of soup with cucumber and carrots diced into it into which you curve a chopstick full of mint, grilled pork, half a spring roll, rice noodles, garlic and chilli. Swish it around, it's glorious.
The other defining feature of Ha Noi are the bikes - a real river of metal. The Vietnamese are sharp, very clued up, and you wonder how much of this is due to the mental effort involved in constantly judging the fine distances needed to move past their cityfolk without peril.
Perhaps, though, at these prices, they're all just too drunk to care.
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