A Day in the Life of Hanoi's Old Quarter
12/08/2013 03:08
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Everywhere in Old Hanoi, life spills out from these tunnel houses onto the streets. On the streets, you'll find average Vietnamese people going about their day, tourists looking for some interesting shopping, and street vendors selling their wares. You'll have to walk around stools set onto the sidewalks, where cafe customers are eating their rice or drinking tea, and you'll need to watch out for the motorbikes racing by in the streets.
Things to See in the Old Quarter
Amongst other sites of interest, the Old Quarter is home to Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum, the most frequently visited historical site in Hanoi. Drab and imposing from the outside, the rough, grey granite slabs hide polished stones of red, black, and grey on the inside. Designed to look like Moscow's Lenin's Mausoleum, Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum rests in the centre of Ba Dinh Square, where President Ho read the Declaration of Independence in 1945, after the Japanese had been defeated. Be careful when you visit the mausoleum; the guards strictly enforce rules regarding dress (no shorts or miniskirts), talking (don't do it), walking (visitors must walk in two lines), and there is no smoking, photography, or video taping allowed anywhere inside the mausoleum.
Right next to the mausoleum is the Ho Chi Minh Museum, a living scrapbook of Vietnam's struggle to boot out foreign powers.
Nearby you'll find two contrasting buildings also related to Vietnam's twentieth century history: the Governor's Palace and the House on Stilts. The Governor's Palace is an ornate, yellow, colonial style building that was built in 1906 to house French government officials ruling over Vietnam. Large and imposing, the Governor's Palace isn't open to the public, but you can walk around the grounds and snap a few photos.
The House on Stilts, on the other hand, was Ho Chi Minh's home on and off from 1958 through 1969. Built of teak in the traditional Vietnamese village-style, the House on Stilts was a simple home that represented Ho's communist ideals.
Visit While You Have a Chance
If you want to see Hanoi's Old Quarter the way it's been for hundreds of years, you should visit soon. A government proposal suggests razing many of the tunnel houses and replacing them with fancy new condominiums and commercial buildings. If the construction is approved, as much as a third of the tunnel houses will disappear – along with the families that have called the long, narrow houses home for generations. In a process of gentrification all too familiar in the west, the face of the Old Quarter may be very different in just a few years. In other words, go see Hanoi's Old Quarter now, while it's still old.
(Vietnamtravel)
