Travel Diaries #23 - Shoe Street
'Travel experiences', cultural fatigue and the universal irritant of raging heat and humidity. A short story about getting fed up with 'travel'.
Just around the corner from Shoe Street in Hanoi’s Old Quarter. There’s enough culture here to last you a whole summer. Photo by Tran Phu on Unsplash.
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“Wow, what an experience”
Oh we love a good experience, don’t we? That’s what it’s all about these days.
“I collect experiences, not things”, is what homeless young millenials claim, as if that’s any better.
But “’Experience’ always means ‘bad experience’, does it not?”, as Nietzsche pointed out.
Some people seem to travel for the misery, taking their exoticism to masochistic levels by paying good money to go to poverty-stricken corners of the world to see what it’s like to be exhausted from chronic sun exposure, scraping a living for months on end and riddled with disease as a result of poor sanitation, engorging themselves on the thrill of negative experience like they’re fat slices of chocolate cake.
The triumphant homecoming ceremony and year-long victory parade of the fella’s token lap of South East Asia or when herself ‘did’ half of South America in a month – a month which must mostly have been spent on an endless succession of 30 hour bus journeys and queues at passport control in immigration offices – is marked by fond reminisces in outer monologues and outdoor voices about how humbling and eye-opening and enriching it was to experience the deprivation of not having appropriate air-conditioning, achieving transcendental states after succumbing to gangrene from a motorbike exhaust burn, or the empathy cultivated from being held at gunpoint and chained to a radiator by immigration officers for a fifty euro bribe.
Oh how they loved the empty dirt roads devoid of scenery and the regular brushes with death on public transport and the lack of basic sanitary infrastructure the most!
Honest to God.
You could sit on your arse and not travel so much as a single step but as long as the toilet didn’t flush you could claim you had an amazing experience.
I was fed up with all this shit though. Not that these things all happened to me, just the idea of wearing the dysfunction of society as some kind of intellectual or moral pursuit. The vanity of war- and dirty-story telling that legendary author, anti-Semite and ‘absolute bastard’ Louis Ferdinand Céline described as a ‘vain instinct in most men’ might find its modern polite and civilised counterpart in the travel story. And like war stories, the minds of the vain soldiers who return from the South-East Asian front in Funky Monkey singlets with exhaust-burned calf muscles tends to hone in on the blood, the sweat, the tears, the gore. The suffering of it all!
I too had been enlightened by heatstroke and mosquito bites and intestinal parasites!
To be honest I felt rather ashamed to even complain about so much as the heat in my new home, 6,000km from my actual home, though it rarely prevented me from doing it. Instead I just accepted an air of generalised shame that hung over me as a kind of collateral damage for the supposed joy of the regular ‘travel experiences’ I got to experience on a daily basis by living in Vietnam, all the way over there.
They were exhausting, these travel experiences. Sizzling under the foreignness of strong sunshine (the eighth wonder of the world, would visit again!), being regularly riddled with stomach cramps, daily confrontations with death in traffic on my commute to work, and chronic exposure to toxic fumes and atmospheric pollutants, pumped out of seventh-hand Soviet motorcycles and village-sized factories producing more toxin-producing goods by hungry workers on a state-sponsored pittance.
Come to Hanoi and see all this on a half-day walking tour!
It's been a year since I received something I actually ordered in a restaurant though in the meantime I’ve feasted on intestines and cartilage. I’ve been laughed out of shops because my shirt is bigger than theirs and I’ve the skin complexion of a still birth. I’m understand nothing of the words of the heaving population who lives and breathes around me, but it’s just as well, because they’re probably all talking about what an asshole I am. Nobody can pronounce my name, and it’s mainly because nobody cares what it is. The language is more deafening than the endless construction, and I’m being robbed blind by the dozens of cents in every transaction I try to entreat with the owner of a shop. They see me coming and I’m wise to them, and although I find the idea of haggling for 2 euro with someone for whom it’s an entire day’s wages (“Oh but it’s part of the local culture, they want you to haggle”) positively rank, you still always walk away on the wrong end of a spiritual exchange in which you were fleeced. The fella will pull and drag you by your shirt for standing in the wrong place, and the culture and political system are so hierarchical that it takes ten people to welcome you into a café and none of them know how to do their own job.
All of this I can handle.
The worst thing of all though, is the heat, and the fucking mosquitoes.
And at this point I’m sick of it all.
I’ve had enough!
Oh these travel experiences really are just bad experiences, aren’t they?
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One of these typical experiences was the ordeal of trying to buy footwear, which would always prove difficult in a country with the fourth-shortest population in the world, the average man proudly standing at about 5 foot 3.
One day I went to buy a pair of flip-flops. I thought I might just get away with it as they contain less material than regular shoes, and maybe I could get away with my toes sticking out the end. I’d also been in Hanoi about a year, just long enough to feel like I kind of knew what I was doing.
It was the end of April, the first real day of summer gauging by the tarring effect of weather on skin, and the city was starting to burn.
Hanoi has a strange climate. The southern city of Ho Chi Minh gets the sort of weather you’re picturing when I mention Vietnam – it’s always 30 Celsius, give or take two degrees, and it’s got a dry season and a monsoon season, and the monsoon season is muggy as hell. In the northern Hanoi however, the winter is moist, clammy, damp, grey, miserable, cold, bleak, plus mould beings to grow on everything in the month known as Mouldy March (not good for the lungs). In the summer comes monsoon also, with all the sweat that entails, though the temperature often goes up past 40.
Welcome to hell.
It was the first time I’d seen the sun in two months. The mozzies were back, I’d never see the fuckers but was starting to get great big infected allergenic welts reappearing on my wrists and ankles (I don’t understand why they seem to have foot fetishes) for the first time in six months. I certainly didn’t mourn and may have celebrated their seasonal genocide in the winter, but now my nemeses were back and they were hungry.
My search for summer footwear began with me venturing ‘into town’ to the Old Quarter, a unique historical district which has existed since the city’s inception over a thousand years ago, and famous for the classification of its 36 streets according to the type of merchant who traditionally sold their stuff there.
Having spent much of the previous few months shivering every time I rode around the city, things had quickly transformed in a way I still wasn’t acclimatised to.
It was rush hour, and it was hot.
The sun exploded through the trees that form gorgeous guards of honour along the streets wide and cramped. Layers of skin peeled off and streamed down my face, my face lathered in layers of sweat and smog from the mélange of motorbike exhausts that surrounded me. Traffic bombarded at every point, as it does, though today it was just getting a bit too close for comfort.
It always would be, but some days it’d just bother you more than others.
Oul’ ones knocking off your shoulder, bouncing off your back bumper and your foot wearing out from hitting the brake pedal a bit too much. The oul’ ones would be kitted out head to toe in the local version of sunblock: heavy clothing. One of those ‘cultural differences’ that can’t really be categorised, it shouldn’t annoy you and nor does it quite achieve that, but the bafflement cannot be explained away with “they’re just protecting themselves from the sun” or “sun tans are seen as low status” or “just live and let live” – the bewildering sight of these thick coated ninjas in this weather sends you into a kind of low-threat state of annoyance. You’re not sure why, you know you shouldn’t care, but it just… puzzles you.
“How are they wearing so many clothes in this weather…”
A thick mask, large sunglasses, a full-body jumpsuit or mackintosh with toddler-friendly patterns of Hello Kitty cats or anthropomorphic sunflowers, thick gardening gloves. ‘Shy Guys’ I dubbed them, their heavy-duty clothing resembling the cloaked ghostly baddie in Super Mario who’d swoop down and harass you before flying off again before you’d a chance to deal with them. The Shy Guys were the worst, they’d glide by on enormous automatic scooters and cut you off without a second glance, before disappearing back into thick traffic, faces – and entire bodies – hidden from any hope of identification, the absolute bitches.
Driving around through smoke, sun, scooters, beeping, shouting. Stop, go, stop, go, start, bump, stop.
Looking for shops that sell shoes.
Ghostface Killah: scooter riding ninjas in Hanoi. Photo Credit: Vietnam Express
I’ll go to Shoe Street. There’s a street for everything in the Old Quarter. A street for shoes, a street for hardware, a street for things made of metal. Some historical thing, blah, blah, blah, can’t remember it now as my head is frying. Copper Street, Tin Street, Silver Street. Bamboo Goods Street, Bucket Street, Sugar Street, there’s even the fairly niche-sounding Quicklime Street. Nowadays Gold Street is home to a row of jewellery shops serving as money changers, who give such too-good-to-be-true rates and have such fast hands in their counting that it’s dubbed Money-Laundering Street. There’s one I used to know as Cooler Box Street, there’s a Lamp Street, there’s Hàng Giầy (Shoe Street), but there’s also another Shoe Street, Hàng Dầu (Oil Street, prounced ‘Hang Zoh’), not to be confused with Hàng Đậu (Bean Street, pronounced ‘Hang Doh’), on which there’s mostly places to buy petrol and oil, and Mã Mây, which would be known to ex-pats as Backpackers in Chang Wifebeaters Going on the Piss Street.
Vietnam has the fourth-shortest people in the world, and they average shopkeeper in the Hanoi is also probably the fourth most-belligerent person in the world, and my attempts to find flip-flops that fit my western boat-feet were met with a mixture of indifference, derision and pointing and laughing.
Every shop the same.
“No shoes for you” the Shoe Nazis cried, though it’d be easier if they were all like this, as often they’ll just say ‘Yes’ and show you things that clearly aren’t what you asked for.
“It’s a cultural thing”, not to say ‘no’, though some of them have the cheek to try to convince you it is what you’re looking for.
Some of them might spit, though to be fair, I think they were probably going to anyway, it was no display of contempt for me or my sad requests for flip-flops.
Throw the leg over the back of the bike again and once more into the pit. The advantage of driving a bike around Hanoi is that you can go whatever direction you want, regardless of which direction traffic is officially supposed to be flowing. The disadvantage is that everyone else can do the same, and so I was battering myself against a barrage of humans on machines as well as the brick wall of shimmering heat, humidity and exhaust fumes.
I was getting worn out.
After looking into my phone to escape the haze of the heat around me I found a shop which had a page advertising ‘western sizes’ which led me to being beckoned into a narrow, packed store piled with footwear to the roof, through which I’d to crawl up a wooden ladder and into the attic, where the man claimed to be hiding the larger sizes for freaks like me. Again though, there was nothing, the man’s claims of being able to cater for me had been exaggerated at best, the latest example in this culture of bare-faced manipulation of facts in order to save face that I’d never get my head around, though in some way you had to admire the neck of it. I’d to politely leave without bumping my head off the 5 foot 4 roof, which at this stage of the day I was also unable to get my head around, inevitably and fittingly bumping into it.
I google shops, I ask strangers, I prowl up and down looking for shops with flip-flops dangling in the doorway. Anything, anything at all!
But I fail.
I clamber back onto my bike. It’s approaching rush hour (aren’t they all!) and it’s hotter than ever, by which I mean than it’s ever been in my life. I’m absolutely done at this point. I just want to go home. I’ve to join the queue of bikes heading in some direction, almost certainly not the one that’ll take me home. I’ve been driving around for 2 hours looking for a simple pair of flip flops and still haven’t found them, in a city which, by the way, contains a population of 8 million people who almost exclusively wear flip flops or some variation of them.
I’ve been laughed at, pushed, shoved, hissed at, mocked and berated. This is all par for the course here, and of course, as a mildly conscious 6’2” westerner trying to respectfully fit into a place that I really shouldn’t even be in, I accept it in my stride, that my lot is a small one in the grand scheme of things and that I’m beyond privileged in the same outsider-ness which means that, although I can’t buy a pair of flip flops, I’m not harassed daily by police and don’t live in fear of starving or the latest government clampdown on my personal freedoms.
But still – none of this changes the fact that it’s so bloody hot.
It’s hard to care about how hard anybody else has it when your underwear is melting and is welding you to the seat of your bike.
Today is just the latest in the last year’s worth of daily ‘travel experiences’ that come living in a place where I’m so out of place.
Hanoi will forever be known by those who went to live there as Opposite Land, a world where the frustration and confusion of attempting to carry out routine chores and tasks was always tempered by the latent sense of shame of the jarringly obvious privilege we enjoyed as people coming from where we came from, compared to locals who came from where they came from. We had nothing to complain about and yet we must, for the cognitive dissonance of not allowing yourself to accept these frustrations in carrying out activities of daily living is, however, a recipe for insanity.
To try to pretend that this doesn’t all drive you mad, will drive you mad.
It lessened as I went on, it being possible to make yourself at home anywhere by simple acts of acceptance, but in that first year I really couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that, as might have been entirely obvious to many outside or local observers,
“I really shouldn’t be here”.
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You’re a wonderful writer and you’re willing to say all the things about the experience of being away from home, the good, bad and ugly. Just thought I’d say so.