The word for street in country is phố. For example, our apartment is on Phố Phùng Hưng. Phố, which is pronounced like “foe” in the phrase “foe sho,” as in, “most definitely,” has absolutely nothing to do with the word phở (pronounced “fuh” as in “fuhgeddaboudit”), which denotes the tasty noodle soup you eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner here sitting on tiny stools at tiny tables, hopefully with a fan blowing on you full force. If you have my sort of imagination, you might get the idea that the Vietnamese use the same word for street as noodle because streets are a little like noodles in that they’re long and narrow and sometimes squiggly. You would be totally wrong about this.
The streets in country are aswarm with motorbikes. Aswarm. Seriously, the photo really doesn’t do justice to the high degree of aswarmness I’m talking about. Sure, there are bicycles, buses, taxis, tuk tuks, SUVs, and even a few trucks, but it’s clear that motorbikes rule the road.
It’s also clear that many if not all of the basic sorts of rules of the road you might be accustomed to either don’t exist here or just don’t apply. For example, there are very, very few stoplights. And when there is a stoplight, it’s totally optional. This doesn’t mean that you can go on red so long as no one’s coming through the intersection. There is always someone coming through the intersection. Many someones, in fact. It means that you can stop on red, if that’s how you want to handle things, stop and then go whenever you want to, or not stop at all. Stopping at stoplights is totally optional. For another example, some of the streets go both ways, and some of them are one way. But which side of the street you drive on really, well, I guess you could say it depends. The rules of the road are really more like suggestions of the road or vague sort of intimations or intutitions about what to do in a situation. But it’s not chaos. Not even close. The streets in country are a dance. And there’s a sophisticated music of beeps and honks and choreography of hand signals along with basic common sense and consideration for others that keeps the dance moving and grooving 24/7.
None of this is to say that the streets in country are by any means unsafe. I’ve seen dogs—fluffy ones too, not the ones you eat—walking in the street, crossing the street, stopping for a snack in the middle of the street, and doing other stuff that dogs do on the regular in the street. And they’re fine. No problem. I’ve seen children, too, with parents who love them, playing in the street, riding bi- and tri-cycles in the street, crossing the street on their own to interrogate the two sweaty Americans enjoying cold bia hoi on the sidewalk—“Where are you from?” “USA. Where are you from?” “Vietnam.”—before recrossing the street on their own again to get into some other, no doubt more exciting, shenanigans.
The only thing that happens on the streets in country that is unsafe is when the FNGs try to cross the street safely. They wait, and wait, and hesitate, and start to walk, and hesitate, then—oh, shit—retreat back to the curb. Starting and stopping. Some of them run, God help us. And I ain’t talking just, like, potentially unsafe, either. You can see the injuries: Young Anglo-European or American tourists in tank tops with no bras—because they’re not going to let the fact that Hanoi, certainly by Southeast Asia standards, is actually a pretty conservative city and the whole tank-top-no-bras thing isn’t really a thing here get in the way of their Return-to-the-Blue-Lagoon style exotic vacation fantasy—and wispy fabric shorts with the draw strings that are all the rage right now with their calves bandaged up because they freaked out mid-crossing, hesitated, and got burned by a motorbike exhaust. Ouch. That looks like it smarts.
But it’s not their fault, really. They have to learn the way. I will teach them.
Most times you just walk. No hesitation. If you’re already walking down a street and come to an intersection and it’s a small street, you will be fine. Just keep calm and carry on. If you get to a wider, busier street, a multilane affair, you’re gonna wanna stop and wait for an opening. This opening will be much smaller than what you’re probably used to, and it is unlikely to span the entire street, the opening, that is. When you see an opening, you walk calmly, steadily across. Do not hesitate. Do not stop. Do not try to anticipate what the motorbikes are going to do and adjust. The streets are aswarm with them, remember? Aswarm. You’re outnumbered. You cannot possibly anticipate what all those drivers are gonna do and plot your course accordingly. Better to proceed in a calm and steady and predictable manner across the street and let them adapt to you.
This is the way. You must flow through the traffic like water flows through, well, other water. You will be fine.