Greetings from Hanoi! Today’s newsletter will be in two parts: (1) what I ate and drank in northern Vietnam; and (2) a startling realization about who I’ve become, thanks to a travel mishap at the very outset of my journey.
This newsletter started off with me writing about #2, but it was too much of a bummer. Travel can certainly evoke nostalgia and melancholy and messy emotions, but travel is also fun! I want to celebrate how wonderful Vietnam is, and going straight into airplane feelings does a disservice to the country and the magic of traveling generally. So let’s start with a list of the best things I ate and drank:
Regional Lay’s Flavors. I love checking out regional flavors of products like chips and candy (looking at you, sakura matcha Kit Kats!). At a convenience store, I picked up chips in four flavors: Nori Seaweed; Brazil BBQ Pork Rib; Hanoi Beef Pho; and Korean Spicy Chicken with Cheese. The Nori Seaweed was surprisingly flavorful, and Hanoi Beef Pho was a standout—it captured the flavor profile of pho, replete with a hint of lime at the end, really well. I haven’t been able to find the Hanoi Beef Pho flavor anywhere else since, though, and it’s been tearing me up inside. (I wanted to bring it back to the U.S. to give to friends.)
[Insert Flavor] Coffee. If you walk around the streets of Hanoi, you’ll find numerous cafés advertising different coffees: egg coffee; coconut coffee; salt coffee; brown coffee; white coffee. It’s fun trying all of them, even if some (like salt coffee, which had a cheese foam-like topping) ultimately aren’t for me. I appreciated how unpretentious coffee culture is in Vietnam, as well, even as the coffees themselves are beautiful and intricate.
Rice in Sapa. Sapa is filled with rows and rows of race paddies, terraformed into the hills and mountainsides by the Hmong. It’s absolutely breathtaking to trek through them and gain a newfound appreciation for every grain of rice. We did a two-day trek with Sung, who was our really wonderful and knowledgeable guide. (She doesn’t shy away from the more horrific aspects of Hmong history (e.g., persecution by the Chinese) and culture (e.g., kidnapping women to be taken as wives), which makes for a sobering but enriching education.)
Tea with Water Chestnut and Lotus Seeds. Highlands Coffee is a Vietnamese chain that serves coffee, of course, but also really interesting teas that are unlike anything I’ve encountered before. Topped with a salty foam (I suspect the same one used in salt coffee?), it’s delicious when mixed together and finished with a spoon.
Snails and Clams. I love seeing what locals are eating—bowls upon bowls of snails seemed to be extremely popular, so I had to try it! The menu is small—big snails, small snails, steamed clams—but steamed to perfection with lemongrass accompanied by vinegar dipping sauce. Everyone around us seemed to also be eating something fried which wasn’t on the menu and turned out to be the best pork skewers I’ve ever had, with a spicy condiment. Order a kumquat juice to cool off in between bites, and this meal was the platonic ideal of street food. Anthony Bourdain would still be proud.
My trip, however, did not start out smoothly. Caught up in the day-to-day of my life in New York—decluttering my apartment, listening to recordings of interviews for my book, planning my revision (i.e., a complete rewrite) of my manuscript—I neglected to look up visa requirements for Vietnam. It wasn’t until the night before my flight that I realized this oversight. I turned to Google.
I was, unfortunately, out of luck. Vietnam e-visas take a few days to process, so I wouldn’t be able to obtain one before my flight the next day. I submitted an application anyway and arrived at the airport as planned, hoping that my visa application would be sufficient—only to be informed by the airline that they could not let me on the plane. (As they should have. It was my fault.)
I should have applied earlier. I should have researched visa requirements earlier. To make matters even worse, I had even traveled to Southeast Asia eight years prior and had remembered then to obtain all my visas in a timely manner. Eight years ago, I hadn’t been so neglectful, so careless, so dumb.
There are moments in life that make you question your core assumptions about yourself. As I stood off to the side of the Cathay Pacific check-in counters, one earbud tuned into a reservations agent on the other side of wires and waves, the other ear listening to the airport crew members asking me if I needed anything, frantically messaging my partner (whom I was supposed to meet in Vietnam)—I realized this was one of them.