We didn’t come to Hanoi, Vietnam, expecting anything. We left with our hearts stitched into its alleyways, its heat, its loudness, and the way strangers spoke to us without a single shared language.

We’d never seen anything like this before.

It felt like stepping onto the set of a 90s movie. We spent the entire month with that feeling, constantly amazed. Yes, Hanoi will never be silent.

Hanoian fashion

Locals wear vintage skirts, button-down blouses, and delicate heels that make our eyes well up with emotion.

Girl at the café

A Vietnamese girl is sitting near us at the No.10 Cafe and reading Haruki Murakami. Her next pose looks as if it was imagined out of boredom. She’s reading slowly, romantically, resting her head in her left palm. People look at us here a lot.

The first Vietnamese person who smiled to us

There’s a café, 8 Café on Phan Huy Chú Street, filled with books and run by a Vietnamese man whose family lives on the third floor. He was the first person to smile to us after three days in Hanoi. We go there in the evenings to order hot chocolate and drink it on the second floor. When it’s empty, we dance there. And then we set out to explore the city.


The smell of mulberries

We stepped into a courtyard in Hanoi, and the smell instantly transported us to a summer in an Armenian village—mulberries and dust, stirred by fresh rain. It was a long time ago. We were kids. One of us stepped on a mulberry again, in a memory of Yerevan, just to return to Hanoi. We’re still far away from the countries we call familiar.

Ice cream

We queued for fifteen minutes at a Mixue bubble tea shop, a chain that’s been in Vietnam since 1997. It’s packed with schoolchildren after class, so we only go at night. We always notice their backpacks, their impatience, their joy. We stand with them, knowing we should write about it so we’ll never forget. So you’ll know it too.

Hanoi apartment

In a curved courtyard, cars can’t fit—only a single motorbike. To reach our door, we pass a tiny battery shop run by a grandmother and a barber where Vietnamese men of all ages cut hair side by side, without weekends. Next to our current home is a cake and doughnut shop. The home is hidden, but still, we wake up every day to the sounds of the outside world. None of us minds it at all.

Every day

On the way home, the younger barber greets one of us with a cigarette—Thăng Long, the local favorite. He offers one from a case, without words, as we don’t share a language. The older barber smiles too. We stand in that narrow passageway, less than a meter wide, smiling at each other. In silence, we somehow understand each other. It feels as if we could tell each other our life stories.

Motorbike driver

One night, one of us wandered for too long. It was late; she called a bike, only to realize there were only large bills. She asked a driver to stop at Circle K to break the change. When they arrived, she gave the driver a bar of milk chocolate. He smiled like a child. She smiled like a child. Then she slipped back into the alley of Lò Đúc Street.


Temples

It felt like a fairy tale. The beauty was so mesmerizing, we could’ve spent hours wandering through pagodas and temple grounds.


Bat Trang Pottery Village

Filled with history and traditions. Everything that the members of the village created long ago is not forgotten, it’s alive and blooming. All the pottery, whether on the streets or placed in homes, feels like it’s breathing. We felt like ghosts, privileged to witness those places filled with sunshine.


Always miss it all

At Hồ Hoàn Kiếm, locals and tourists dance by the lake. Everyone watches them and smiles. We are smiling even now, remembering it. Heat wave. The air is heavy. Mothers holding her baby, driving tiny bikes. The water puppet theater, the temples, the girl named like one of us—in the Vietnamese way: Kết—riding through traffic on a motorbike (she doesn’t have a driver's license but it’s fine here), and all the older people coming to be delighted by the whole Water Puppet Show, from beginning to end.

The sun is missing between the clouds. Heart-warming designs of bike helmets. The streets are hungry and alive. More than ever. Always miss it all.