Time to breathe

We've been in Hanoi for a week and it's been great. Hanoi is really the poets' city where everyone wears darker clothing and the skies are grey. The cafes and pubs are cozier than the garish ones of Saigon, and the lakes and trees dull down the constant hum of motorbikes and mayhem. We've been truly chilling. Playing scrabble by the lake and in comfortable cafes. Spending hours lying on couches in restaurants that exist solely for the purpose of comfort. Sleeping till noon every day and then rolling over and sleeping some more because there's nothing urgent to take care of. We swept through Halong Bay and admired the enormous limestone structures that peered at us through the mist. Uncle Ho's embalmed body was locked away during Tet and we were unable to visit his corpse due to the holy nature of the past week. The entire city has shut down and we're in a Vietnam that I never knew existed. The only shops that peek through are the tourist galleries and jewellery stores where they charge more for an item than most Vietnamese make in a week. But it's been a fantastic getaway from the powerful energy of Saigon. While I count myself lucky to have a moment of pause and relaxation in HCMC, there has been little else to do here besides think. I'm writing this hours before I return to the noise and smog to meet my mother who is touching down in Asia for the first time in her life. Seeing her will remind me of my first encounter with the tangled traffic and buzz of life in the city that took me a minute to love but I still do not understand.