It's the most terrifying and beautiful place I've ever seen. The architecture is this bizarre mix of intricate french twirls and crumbling concrete - everything is falling apart in the most glamorous way possible. Everywhere you look there are stunning gold facades and spiraling red roofs clumsily spilled all over tall thin buildings that must only take up 15 square meters, but totter at five stories. The roads are insane, millions of motorbikes that career all over the road mixed with cars and bikes and men and women. When you cross you have to do it really slowly and constantly, and they just zoom around you, so close you get bashed by the wing mirrors. My family and I watched with amusement as the traffic lights, which cleverly display a countdown until the light changes, were deftly ignored by a thousand people. There are tiny girls in ballet-flat shoes and leopard-print leggings weaving around taxis and diving under buses. There are old ladies lugging yokes on their backs full of bizarre vegetables, and talking loudly at you while pushing twelve strange pumpkin-looking creations into your clueless hands. There are young guys on bikes that are so laden with boxes you can't see anything but their pedaling feet, and I should mention that everyone on a bike wears a patterned mask that ties over the mouth and nose, so the tiny, grimy, gorgeous streets are littered with faceless insects who flit from street to street as if chasing a great invisible flame.
Street hawkers are everywhere - one guy wrestled off my shoes because he saw the soles were peeling off. He then squatted like I thought only little children could do, and proceeded to glue, hammer, stitch and polish my shoes using only a tiny toolkit he had been harbouring. Then, as we have recently learnt is custom here, he smiled and demanded an obscene amount of money. We gave him half, and he seemed happy. The haggling here seems half-hearted, and the Vietnamese street vendors have kindly faces that crease in all the right places when you clumsily pull out a wad of crumpled notes and squint at them in confusion.
Everywhere you look there are crowds of people wrapped up in jumpers (ten degrees is pretty tough) and sitting on teeny, tiny stools eating bowls of soup and things wrapped in banana leaves. Every shop is that perfect mix of dilapidated and beautiful, with signs slouching off brick walls, giant multicoloured lanterns strung from crumbling concrete arches, mannequins with no hands or feet and wearing cheap blonde wigs modelling Donna Karan boots. After only a day, I have learnt to dim the constant sound of hooting to a dull roar in the back of my mind that duly reminds me when a deadpan eighty-something is hurtling towards me on a motorbike piled with boxes of oranges.
It's quite scary, the complete ignorance of me and my family in this big city. We get lost so easily, and yet stick out like sore thumbs. There are very few tourists wandering the streets, but even if they weren't recognisable by their whiteness, their dazed faces would be enough. I am the most dazed I have ever been. This is somewhere everyone should see.
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