Back to Beyond

Well, we love a good market as much as the next person. Maybe more. And we got our fill in Hanoi.

It started with a dawn visit to the overnight wholesale market, where produce, meat, fish and dry goods are sold to people who will resell at local neighbourhood markets. The wholesale market is organized and tidy – not. Instead it is a sprawling warren of lanes and sheds with merch piled haphazardly around and vendors looking dazed and tired after selling all night but still with an hour or two to go before packing up. The rain overnight meant that the outdoor walkways were wet and muddy and strewn with the debris that always seems to be generated by these places.

A neighbourhood market, where we went next, felt more relatable, with small scale vendors focussing on a narrower range of goods on street corners, sidewalks or the street itself. This is where individual people shop, usually just for the day ahead, but no further, so that everything is fresh when turned into a meal.

And, finally, a night market, set up in the middle of what would otherwise be a busy street, selling mostly clothes and household stuff, including, always it seems, large collections of athletic socks and women’s underwear in remarkable colours and sizes.

But I like to look at the people in all this. The woman selling nothing but bananas on the sidewalk; vendors in the wholesale market doggedly emptying large crates of yet more fruit; the buyers standing in the rain among the detritus, haggling for a better deal; the woman in her shrine to packaged decorations watching early morning TV; the woman on a scooter with huge bags of greens hanging off every conceivable carrying point; the cop chatting up a sidewalk vendor in the neighbourhood market, who is quite probably illegal but whose transgression is overlooked in an economy that our guide refers to as “flexible”; the woman cleaning shrimp that will sit out with her other seafood, in what could not be described as refrigeration, until it is all sold; the woman who saw me shooting and fixed me with her baleful glare. They are all here.