Travel Diaries #22 - Café

There's no better place to sit around and write than in a cafe, and no better place for cafes than Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam

Gavin Brennan

Feb 12, 2022

Sometimes I sit and think and sometimes I just sit - cafes of Vietnam. Photo by buian_99 on Unsplash

“You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.”

- Ernest Hemingway

I started writing because I started visiting cafés, and I started visiting cafés because I started travelling.

I’d never been too bothered with places of daytime beverage consumption before I moved to Vietnam, probably because I’m from Ireland, the land where the pub is king, and the pub is life.

In my first few months feeling my way around the seductively erratic capital city of Hanoi I’d spend much of my off-time careening around on my newly acquired scooter. Hanoi’s endless offering of cafés served as perfect co-ordinates to begin mapping out the city and internalising its network of streets, roads, alleys and districts. The freedom of a scooter makes it easy to stop wherever catches your eye, and I’d busy myself by meandering through the city and stopping off in a café as a means of ‘sight-seeing’.

In Vietnam, the café is king.

The shouty, squinting fluorescence of north Vietnam’s bia hơi beer halls remind one of petrol station forecourts at 3am, efficiently pumping out armfuls and trays of beer, beer and more beer, as quickly as one can carry a tray of twenty chipped glasses. The café, on the other hand, is where people drift by to meet, to lounge, to chat, to idle and in that inimitably romantic Vietnamese way, to squat and watch the world go by.

The café scene in Hanoi, and in Vietnam in general is something of a marvel, an unexpected source of treasure that only continued to grow in scope the longer I lived there. Western-style latte shops are, of course, becoming more and more prolific, but Vietnam’s own tradition in cafés is a wonder in itself.

Potted plants and greenery are to be found everywhere, or creepers growing along tiled walls. Offerings include traditional Vietnamese coffees, with condensed milk or without, arrays of exotic fruit smoothies, coconuts, and trays of sunflower seeds and peanuts are offered for munching on in between sips, their remnants scattered on the floor. The hazardous Thuốc lào bamboo pipe might sit in a bucket in the corner, for patrons to come and fill their lungs with a bag of the ultra-strong Brazilian tobacco that’s smoked through it. Ashtrays overflow and cheap cigarette smoke floats out the front opening, flushed under a deluge of monsoon rain.

Amidst the chaos, there is calm.

Establishments tend to be open – a front wall would only take up space in a country where it’s at a premium. Beach-style fold-out slatted wooden seats are placed in twos or threes around table – never fours, as all of them face outwards towards the front wall of the building. The fourth wall, the one between the audience in the café and the real world – doesn’t exist. Doors only lead further indoors, the front of the café being protected for the few sleeping hours each night by a shutter or a steel cage, often rusted or faded if it had been painted.

And so when one faces the fourth wall it has the effect of a screen, and the infinite hum of daily life passes across one’s field of vision, entering stage left, or stage right:

A man in slacks and flip-flops trundling by on a scooter, an elderly lady shuffling by in her ao ba ba ‘pyjama’ style traditional garb, a wise-cracking middle-aged lady in a purple athletic hoody and knee-high pedal pushers waving a stacked tray of pineapples in a bundle in one arm.

People working, people digging, people selling, people chatting, people buying, people playing, people going to work, people drinking, people eating, people playing cards, or checkers or backgammon, people wandering, people wondering, people watching, people burning money and gifts at the side of the street as offerings for their ancestors, especially on auspicious days of the calendar, which tend to be frequent.

Many tourists end up trapped in such a café in Hanoi’s Old Quarter on a rainy day, peeling the foil labels off a stack of green bottles of Saigon beer, perhaps getting a bit antsy that they’re not ‘seeing the real Hanoi’ – which to them means not seeing the famous sights and the pins on the tourist map, the things they’d been lured to the country by already seeing on social media, not realising that this is it, this is the city and the country’s crowning glory, its most valuable asset, its entry for the ever-contested title of “Eighth Wonder of the World” – its people, its life, its energy; and that you need go no further only just do as the Vietnamese do and just sit, and watch, and think – or maybe just sit and think about nothing at all.

Instead of going out and desperately seeking life just sit and let life enter you as it wills, like people passing into your line of sight through the café’s fourth-wall projector, just trundling by into your mind, there’s a whole world there.

Eventually I thought it might be polite to start writing some of this down.

Suffering from the curse of productivity, I found myself writing endlessly, as if to justify just being there in the first place, sitting around in a café doing nothing, or living on the other side of the world in Vietnam. I found myself with some kind of writing addiction, or maybe it was a cigarette and coffee addiction, and I was just going to various cafés around the city ‘to do a bit of writing’, in reality just telling myself that as an excuse to always be going somewhere, to always be drinking something, though finding myself channelling the energetic hum of the city into something bigger than me, some artistic vision that emerged in the form of those first scribbled notes and in stacks of journals.

Addicted to travelling around the city from place to place by motorbike, the above, all just excuses to put life into motion and go from place to place; to be from place to place. But then what is life other than a series of addictions? Where would we be if we never let ourselves be consumed by our desires?

The only way I knew how to be was to be doing or to be going. This is one way to experience the world, by travelling from place to place. Just as travel is not about the sights you see or the things you do, but the spaces in between those things, so these moments of constant and regular escape to somewhere else add up to an overall state of being. It is one of longing, of yearning, of restlessness – of a search for something else beyond yourself: of transcendence.

But travel is not just about going, it is a state of being.

It took me a long while to realise and accept that maybe I just like sitting in cafés and watching the world go by – and maybe that was okay.

Though at this stage I’d done a fair bit of writing, as well as a fair bit of travelling, and so I find myself here today.

I’ve learned how to sit and watch the world go by, and to write down a little bit of what I see floating past the open fourth wall, the one that opens up from me onto the world.

Life is a café, and it’s cafés all the way down.

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