Knowing that Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, was actually smaller than Vietnam, made me think that it would somehow be a little less crazy. I foolishly believed life would move at a slower pace, people wouldn’t incessantly blow their horns, and the old quarter would be be full of relaxing cafes and charming French architecture.

Instead, Hanoi sports a fairly similar level of craziness and chaos to Saigon. The streets are just narrower and shadier, yet the scooter traffic zips by with the same orderly chaos and noise. The old quarter, where we based ourselves, has nearly impossible noise levels. We changed hotels here more than anywhere else, constantly searching for a place where we could sleep uninterrupted until a reasonable hour. If it wasn’t the scooters and the traffic, it was construction on a nearby building. Or it was the Voice of Vietnam, the national radio network, being blared at ear-splitting levels at 7:30am from a speaker across the street.

Irrational expectations and sleepless nights aside, Hanoi is pretty cool. The old quarter is always bustling, and is packed with shops. The further from the main tourist center you get, the fewer tour offices there are and the more interesting things get. The nearby lake is also really pretty, and is a relative oasis of calm. It’s a great place to sit, or walk, just about any time of day.

Hanoi is where you can visit Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum, complete with his embalmed body lying in state. We never made it, due to an increasingly strong feeling of tourism fatigue. Rather than hitting the sights all day, we prefered to find a good place to watch life go by, and sat around enjoying Vietnamese coffee or some “bia hoy.”

“Bia Hoy” means “fresh beer,” and is just slightly chilled beer that comes out of kegs. It doesn’t have preservatives, so it really is (and must be) fresh. There are places all over the city to sit and drink it, for as little as 2,000 dong (about 12.5 cents) a glass. Most spots consist of an elderly person and a few kegs, some glasses, and lots of red plastic chairs. Several street corners in the old quarter are packed with people in the evenings, chatting and drinking lots of bia hoy. I’d have to say it’s easily my favorite feature of the city.