It’s a good thing I’m in charge of fun. Gina comes up with amazing ideas like, Let’s go on a two hour walk this morning, sweat so profusely we need to take salt supplements, then head on over to the Hoa Lo Prison (affectionately known as the Hanoi Hilton) to check out the truly horrific way the French colonizers tortured the Vietnamese for having the nerve to think for themselves. Diabolically is a favorite adverb of the folks who wrote the legends in English at the museum. But, you know, if baby wants to go to a prison museum to see actual photos of guillotined Vietnamese heads left out for the birds to pick clean and the one toilet in the prison that as punishment for staying true to their principles the French colonizers would not allow to be emptied and so it overflowed with some, one can only imagine, pretty disagreeable stuff . . . well, baby gets what she wants.
So we hop on the backs of motorbikes and head on downtown to the prison museum and as we pull up I see a very tall Dutch family—dad, not unmilfy mom, if I’m honest, and two teenage boys whose demeanors go progressively from disinterested to pretty much completely horrified as the tour progresses—get out of a tourist van with two young Vietnamese tour guides wearing conical hats and Hanoi Free Tours shirts. And I, because I really am a snob and would never sign up for a tour because I can show myself around myself, thank you very much—and especially not a street food tour, which is very popular here—thought, Suckers.
Except that it took about no time at all before I realized that the young girl who was clearly the most accomplished and good at English of the tour guides who was also pretty clearly the leader of the group not only knew her stuff but also spoke in the most mellifluous, yes, mellifluous, voice with an accent that sounded like she’d studied at Oxford and whatever the poshest university in New Zealand is at the same time, about the truly horrific horrors visited upon the Vietnamese by the French in the Hoa Lo Prison during the French Colonial Era, and that I was a fool, a fool, to spurn the tour group situation and go it alone. And so I joined the Dutch family group and learned a lot more and had a much more enjoyable stay at the Hanoi Hilton than I otherwise would have.
And so I start chatting up the tour guide with the mellifluous voice and really pretty enchanting accent and it turns out she doesn’t mind at all if I join the group because Vietnam Free Tours really are free because they’re run by high school and university students who volunteer because they want to promote Vietnamese culture. And they give street food tours.
“Ooh, I love street food tours! Can we book one with you?”
“Sure! How about tonight? I can teach you table manners.”
“Yes, please.”
The girl with the mellifluous and enchanting voice and accent’s name turns out to be Miracle—of course, it does—and she agrees to meet us on Hang Ga street at 5:30.
We texted her in advance to let her know that we were adventurous people and would eat anything. Because we didn’t want the lame, tailored for tourists who maybe don’t eat everything, especially not the dreaded bún dậu mắm tôm, type of tour. We wanted the real-deal Holyfield, eat everything especially if doing so elicits looks of awe and admiration from the locals at the tiny tables next to you on the sidewalk tour. I think Miracle thought better of this and kept it pretty tame for us anyways. As she explained over some really delicious seafood bánh xèo, which is a fried rice flour crepe stuffed with seafood that you add greens and herbs to before rolling up cigar style in rice paper that looks like plastic but isn’t plasticky at all and dipping in sweet and sour sauce before enjoying:
“We eat everything in Vietnam: We eat frogs, snails, snakes, roasted bunny heads. Rats. We eat rats. Did you know we also eat dogs? But don’t worry, we don’t eat the fluffy ones.”
No, of course not.
And so we learned that the first thing you do when you sit down to eat in Vietnam is to take a napkin and wipe down the spoon, chopsticks, bowls, and table to clean them. When I made a totally misguided joke about, you know, this practice not “really” cleaning anything, Miracle looked at me like I’d just grown a second head.
We learned a lot from Miracle over the course of the evening. We learned, for example, right off the bat because it was my first question that she did not have a motorbike nearby that we could all three of us ride at the same time because she lives in an outskirt of Hanoi called Thạch Thất and she travels two hours by bus to give these tours because she really is a very impressive and accomplished young women. We learned that if you want the really good snake whiskey you have to travel to the outskirts and make friends with some locals who are willing to share, which will probably be pretty easy to do. We learned how to cross the street Southeast Asian style (more on this later) without being stuck down by a bus or motorbike or taxi or tuk tuk or tour van or water buffalo out for his evening stroll. We learned that Vietnamese people think Americans who try to speak Vietnamese are cute, which I interpreted as, well, you know, cute, but which Miracle probably didn’t mean like that. We learned that Miracle’s enchanting accent didn’t come from Oxford or a posh university in New Zealand, but from her watching English-language TV to practice English and trying out different accents. We learned that not all of my jokes translate well. We also learned that the Vietnamese equivalent to cheers, prost, sante, salud, skoll, is to say, “một, hai, ba, dzô!” loudly and with much enthusiasm, college dorm room style, to show everyone how happy and enthusiastic you are to be drinking with friends, and that even the little ones participate in this ritual with their juice. We learned that the traditional conical hats worn by Vietnamese women have five uses: to protect the head from the weather, to use as a fan, to get a cold drink of water from a stream, to sit on because nobody wants dirty britches, and, most importantly, for Vietnamese moms to smack their kids with when they misbehave.
We learned that Miracles really do happen.