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Published: November 25th 2006
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Our Alley
It doesn't look like much, but it's a nice little place with lots of life. Hi all! I’ll bet you’ve been wondering what we’ve been up to here in Hanoi. It’s been quite some time since I last posted anything on the blog. My apologies. It seems I’ve gotten caught up in so many things and have had a hard time sitting down to write anything.
Hanoi is a city of 3 million people much like the greater St. Louis area. Also like St. Louis, it straddles a great river, the Red River (Song Hong). Settling in Hanoi at the end of July, we moved into the house that we had found in May on our house hunting trip. The house is located in a small alley just off of Doi Can Street in Ba Dinh District in central Hanoi. The place has taken some getting used to, but suits us quite well. When we first got here, we were unsure whether we’d stay in the house as it was fairly dirty and loaded with bugs. It seemed the landlady was in no way interested in cleaning the house after the last tenant moved out. We were a bit put off by that, but after a week or three of cleaning and scrubbing we started
My Honda
Our front gate and my bad motor scooter, all 115cc of it. to really come to like the place. It’s close to town (about 10- 15 minutes by motorbike) and not far from the university (about 10 minutes), so I don’t think we could have planned a better location
Our neighbors are all Vietnamese. Living here gives us a real sense of what life is like for the average Hanoian. The daily routines of life in the alley are now quite well known to us. At 5:15am, the lady at the end of the alley and her husband set up a tarp across the entranceway and open their soup stall, complete with little plastic stools and wooden tables. They stay open until about 9:30am, or a bit longer on weekends. At 6:30 am, the local news is broadcast over the PA system attached to the pole in the middle of the lane. It is loud!!! We can hear it very clearly through our windows even with them closed up tight. It took us a while but we can sleep through it now. People start heading off to work around 7am, pulling their motorbikes out from their front rooms and into the alley closing their gates behind them. At 7:30 the soymilk
Our house in Hanoi.
It's not the greatest, but it's home. 3 stories and a balcony... peddler comes cruising down the alley on his bicycle stopping here and there to handover or collect a few glass bottles of his homemade drink, corks on top. Following him is an all day parade of people selling or buying things, calling or singing out what they have as they cycle down to the end of the alley and again on their way back out. You can buy woven mats of all sizes, rubber sandals, fresh baguettes, fruit, veggies, plastic ware and brooms all from the back of bicycles orbiting the place all day long. Around about 8am, a few neighbor kids usually run up and down playing and shouting making noise without even so much a shout from their mothers.
At the end of the day, another important event happens around 6:30pm. At this time, the garbage lady wheels her cart into the alley and rings her bell a few times to tell everyone to bring out their garbage, amazingly everyone does. Aside from getting rid of the garbage it’s a great chance to get a look at the neighbors. Of course if you miss that, you can always walk out to the entranceway to drop off your
My barber!
Lots of Hanoi barbers operate from under a tree. He runs an electric cord from his house and works while it's light outside. The cost for a haircut....10,000 dong or about 60 cents US! trash and have a peak into the houses as you go. The Vietnamese tend to keep their front rooms open and visible from the alleyway. Television sets always face the alley, so it’s quite easy to get a sense of what everyone is watching as you walk by. Our house seems to be the only one with the TV facing into the house, giving us a bit of privacy as the cabinet it sets on blocks most of the front room from the alley. A number of visitors have commented on how strange this is.
The house itself is 3 stories tall, which is short to average for Hanoi, as many houses are 5 or more stories tall. Lest you think that they are all mansions at that height, you should know that they are only 4 meters wide! Houses here are taxed on the width of their roadside frontage, so things tend to be built deep and tall, making for lots of odd looking narrow buildings. We have a living room, fish pond, kitchen and bathroom on the first floor, two bedrooms and a bath on the second and a bedroom, a landing and a patio on the
Trash lady
Ok...sanitation worker...most of them in Hanoi are women and they come around every evening collecting and sweeping. Pretty tough job really. third floor. All the rooms have fans, but only two have air conditioners, though our room does have a balcony overlooking the alley.
Outside the relative quiet of the alleyway is the busy, newly paved Doi Can with its seemingly endless parade of bicycles and motorbikes punctuated every now and then by the odd taxi or bus. In our section of street there are a wide variety of shops selling cell phones, clothing, books, and more cells phones. There are also a fair number of hair salons, internet cafes, and juice/ karaoke bars lining this section of the road. The post office is nearby and there is a wet market about 300 meters away where you can buy fruit veggies, flowers and meat (from chicken, pork and beef, to dog, fish and shrimp). There are also gas stations at either end of the block which were quite useless for me until recently.
Rents for foreigners in the upscale neighborhoods of Hanoi tend to run well into the thousands of dollars as the housing market was really inflated until very recently. However, in our neighborhood we have nothing in that price range. I don’t doubt that we are paying a bit more than average for the house, but at $400/month it fairly reasonable. Electric runs about $55/month, especially if we run the air conditions a lot. The house telephone runs about $12, and water about $6 a month. We got DSL installed to allow Jo to work from the house and that too runs about $12/month.
Getting around town we initially had to take motorcycle taxis or taxis. Depending on how long the trip is, it might run about 10,000-20,000 Vietnamese Dong (VND) which is about $0.60- 1.25 (US) for a motorcycle or VND 30,000 -60,000 ( $2-4) for a taxi. As of a month ago, I started riding my own motorbike around town which is so much more convenient, but I’ll tell you about that another time.
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