If I could express in just one concept the biggest challenge that I had to face over my first six months in Vietnam, I would say “sensory overload”. Maybe it hit me that hard since Hanoi was my first time in South East Asia, a place where all Westerners certainties about how to behave and how a public space should look like are just wiped out, every moment, at every corner. All my senses got overwhelmed by an avalanche of unfamiliar inputs that I was not able to recognize or to frame in any experienced situation.
My first accommodation was located in the old quarter, where my first sight was a lively and dense maze of narrow streets and alleys packed with motorbikes going in every forbidden direction and carrying every possible item/ animal/ number of passengers, chicken and roosters on the loose, food stalls serving meals from 6 am till night, and people living the street as there is no line between private and public life. It was immediately clear that I had to re-think my personal space in the world.
The Hanoians out here are basically spending the day keeping each other company, eating, doing self-pedicure (yes, I would say it’s a public accepted practice, but “the accepted public practices that you wouldn’t expect” might deserve a dedicated post), taking naps in any available spot, eating again, cooking, watching people, or simply looking into the void or at their phone screens, and maybe sometimes selling a piece of the inventory. This last activity is quite hard to figure out when it comes to several “specialties” (each street of the Old Quarter is specialized in a profession or a category of products), for instance the “tape street”, where you can find 10 shops in a row with plenty of rolls of tape in any size on display, that you can assume are not such in high demand. But it looks like they wouldn’t care to enlarge their portfolio, maybe just because that stock is everything they own since ever, those products were passed down through the generations, and it’s part of their identity. But still, they are spending the day sitting by the side of the street, looking not really worried about selling any piece of it, nor bothered to take any action to increase the possibility.
And they look totally carefree and happy. Welcome to Vietnam.
Smell is definitely over stimulated down here. With 5 millions motorbikes hitting the road, the air in Hanoi is so stuffy that after a while hanging around you feel out of breath, like you had a balloon in your lungs, preventing the air to come in properly. Sometimes street barbecues just give a yummy note that would be quite enjoyable, but my sense of self-preservation set my breathe in the anti-pollution mood, and I feel like I am not able to inhale hard, even when the smell is good.
Besides the pollution and the food, this city boasts a wide array of stinks that my nose had never witnessed: sour, pungent, multi-faceted, maybe a combination of rotted and fresh food, and rubbish piled up under the sun for 10 hours, with a touch of standing water plus a hint of some secret ingredients….that put all together create the peculiar Hanoi smell, that words are just not enough to describe.
Coming to sounds, I must say I am from a very loud city, worldwide acknowledged for its noisy inhabitants, and having this benchmark…Hanoi sounds like Spanish quarters after Napoli wins a Champion’s League football match, but all the time, everyday. They have this honking addiction that I found unbearable and very frustrating, especially at the beginning, when I was still looking for a reasonable explanation for everything was happening around. You are on a taxi, you cannot communicate with the driver and the guy is just honking every now and then, even in the unlikely event that there are no cars or motorbikes ahead, or when you take the highway to the airport, just stating that he is passing by, and making you jump out from your seat every time you relax. And you cannot tell him to please stop it, since he wouldn’t even get the point, not to mention the language of course. But in my opinion, being a pedestrian is the most stressful role that you can play on the street: with no sidewalk or clear spot available, if you lose focus for a second you can trip over a basin where people are washing pans and dishes (running water is just for big and fancy restaurants), stumble on a rooster, or on a mound of rubbish. And you walk in the middle of the street, with this continuous honking which should be supposed to advise that a vehicle is approaching…but it’s just the level zero of noise.
On the bright side of this constant over-stimulation, I would definitely mention taste. With a variety of street food, soups, spring rolls, rice and noodles, tropical fruits and vegetables, and ways to prepare meat and fish, Vietnamese cuisine is an explosion of flavor at every bite. Sometimes disappointing, as too strong for an Italian pasta and tomato eater, but as per food, I have to admit that yes, you get used to it. Even if you used to eat max 3 ingredients on average in a dish and you have been taught that you should never mix up meat and fish proteins. Or that you have to cook in different pans to preserve the real flavor of the ingredients, and you were the “plain, please” customer…you end up eating everything together, minced garlic and onions like never before, chilli and spicy, and all those seasoning that you couldn’t even stand the smell. It doesn’t mean that I am not craving for my food, but sometimes (just sometimes) I am able to change the perspective somehow, and guess how tasteless could be an Italian meal for them, and why they need plenty of adds-on when a (almost) authentic Italian dish is served. I never thought I’d enjoy coriander, to me was a kind of parsley tasting more or less like a cleaner, a food ruiner, unfortunately as popular as basel in Italy…but after six months, I love it.
Hope the coriander is just a “starter” in a new stage of adaptation.
It’s all just about getting use to it, they say.
But then, after I proved myself that I can make it, and I took my sensory tolerance to the next level, could we just go back home?
Vietnam overload 