2/13–Hanoi morning–Dong Xuan Market and Traditional House

Its our last day in Hanoi, and we’ve got a full one planned. After breakfast – again an omelet and again a lovely saying on the plate (yeah, I forgot to take a picture before I actually ATE the omelet)..

..we make our way up through the Old Quarter to the Dong Xuan Market, the largest indoor market in Hanoi.  It’s housed in a four story building containing everything from a wet market, to vegetables, flowers, electronics, clothing and some tourist trinkets. It’s mostly a local market, plus a lot of bulk sales and distribution for local retail operations across the city.  It is surprising that we haven’t been here on our other visits, seeing as we love markets, so we plan to rectify that situation. 

Its about a 20 minute walk from the hotel, and we choose to take the route most outside the Old Quarter, hoping to avoid most of the small congested lanes.  That strategy works fairly well, although it’s a little bit of a grubby walk for the first kilometer or so, as we follow along beside the big main highway road out of town.  We finally dive off into the Old Quarter and quickly find ourselves immersed in morning market life!  The scooters! The produce!  The transactions!  Sometimes you can’t even walk because of the congestion.  Good morning Hanoi!

We sort of circumnavigate the market and end up entering at the back of the building, where all the clothing stalls are located.  You want jeans? This is the place to buy them – stalls and stalls of them lining the aisles.  We head toward the wet market for a bit, but then decide it is really just a waste of time, as we sure can’t buy anything – food of course, but really not anything else either due to the weight restrictions on our upcoming flights. So we make our way back out onto the crowded streets and walk back into the heart of the Old Quarter, passing, implausibly so, the K-Mart (no worries about copyright infringement here apparently) before ending up at our destination – The Traditional House.

We visited here on our first trip in 2008, but we thought it would be good to go back again as I was looking for more little notepads like we bought there previously, and the admission is totally cheap.  (I won’t bore you with all the details of the house, but if you want to read more, you can click here.)  We paid our pittance and wandered around the collection of rooms and courtyards.  It is a wonderful look into the culture and lifestyle of the old shopkeepers here in Hanoi, with the wonderful old furniture, the outdoor kitchen and the open air balconies and courtyards that connect the different rooms together.

Unfortunately, the gift selection is not the same. Decidedly upscale and much pricier than we remember, there isn’t really anything the catches our eye.  But we are offered fruit and tea – which the girls at the front desk said are gifts for their visitors.  That’s so nice!  I take them up on the offer and snag one of those great, sweet little bananas for a quick mid-morning snack.  Finishing with the Traditional House, we notice a map on the back of the brochure listing other Heritage destinations in the Old Quarter. Since we’ve nothing planned until the afternoon, we decide to take a stroll.

The first place is listed as the Jewelry communal house. But after walking past the address a couple of times, we deduce that this is just a Jewelry store and not anything quite as interesting as the House. We move on, stumbling upon this cool little temple that has a courtyard filled with bonsai trees and interesting hanging decorations.  Inside, the temple is fairly traditional and looks a lot like the interior of the Temple of Literature. The huge stork birds are there “guarding” the altar, but there are also huge chicken statues (which Sunny decides he likes), and of course the offerings, this time though they consist of a lot of sweets – like the choco-pies and tins of cookies – as well as beer.  

Following our map, we walk around the block to find the Silk communal house.  This house is at least a renovated shopkeepers house, or so it seems. It is basically a sales shop, with displays of silk, jewelry and other items all for sale.  It’s a neat house, but we're not interested in buying anything, so we leave pretty quickly and wander our way back toward the lake, passing a guy burning his Tet offering on the sidewalk.  Happy Tet!  And stopping at a street corner to just watch the mayhem passing us by.

We’re getting a little chilled by now, so we decide to duck into a cafe for some coffee.  I want to go to Muse Cafe, where we can sit upstairs and watch the traffic, but it’s not open yet. I swore I read where it was open during the day, but obviously that was wrong, because what we think is the entrance is shuttered up tight.  We don’t want to go to the Egg Coffee cafe, because it just didn’t ring our bell, but we manage to find an “Illy” cafe for traditional Italian cappuccino and plop down for a while with our brews. 

Caffeined up, we head back to the hotel for a bit before grabbing a quick bite to eat (at a forgettable Banh Mi chain) and heading over to the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology.