Even though I don't have a watch, it's easy to tell what time it is in Hanoi from the sounds bouncing from the streets up to my 5th floor room.  The first sound of the day is the 6:30am public address system.  There are speakers mounted on phone poles at just about every intersection and they broadcast news and propaganda right into your bedroom, like it or not.  The traffic starts early, about 5:30, but the blaring horns don't get going until 7.  They come to a crescendo around 7:45, when the whole city is gridlocked because everyone simply goes first.


Food for the soul and for the stomach compete for attention on a Vietnamese street.

6am is also the time to go out onto the street and hear people cheerfully trash talking while playing badminton on empty sidewalk spaces.  They are soon surrounded by street vendors, who shout "eat here!", "sticky rice!", "egg sandwich!" to any and all passers by.  By the end of the morning rush hour, it's much quieter, but by then it's getting hot.  Stay-at-home moms hide in their cool houses while bicycle vendors ply down each and every alley singing phrases like, "Fresh bread!" "Sweet corn!" "Shine shoes!" "Fix locks and make keys!" "Fix washing machines, air conditioners!"  Their poorer counterparts, the trash dealers, who are invariably stick thin from walking day after day, have a sad tune something like, "Throwing anything away? Sell it to me instead!"  All the residents have to do is shout back through their locked doors, welded grills and barb wired walls to get just about any service they need.

Lunch time is another crazy traffic moment.  They are on the French schedule here, so they take 1.5 or 2 hour lunches, and a lot of salarymen drive home to their families, eat a wife-cooked lunch, and then take a nap before going back to the office.  The horns aren't as bad now, maybe because everyone is more worried about the heat.  Motorbike riders take cover under umbrellas, oversized white shirts, cliché conical hats or in any spot of tree-shade.  For students, it's usually lunch at the rice stalls, lovingly called "street-dirt food."  There are 8 of these places on my street, and they each hire 2-3 teenage boys to risk their lives by jumping in front of oncoming traffic while shouting, "Have you had lunch yet?!!?," creating a mini traffic/horn-honking danger zone.

After everyone goes back to work for the afternoon, it gets quiet again.  Not even the bicycle vendors or trash dealers go out because of the heat.  But the afternoon rush hour makes up for it with a new batch of raucousness, probably because like anywhere in the world, people would rather be at home than at the office.   It's compounded by the day's worth of dust and pollution, fully suspended in still, humid air, so sounds of coughing add to the usual honking.  After most people are home and it cools off, the night vendors set up.  They are usually people with day jobs who happily chat the evening away at their sweet and snack stands while earning a few extra cents, so they aren't as loud or pushy as the breakfast and lunch folks.

Even they eventually go home, at around 11pm, and all the streetside shops close up.  It's eerie.  There's not a bike on the street and not a TV blaring.  Hanoi in the wee hours is as quiet as a mountain village.  Except for the animals, who don't seem to obey everyone else's schedule.  You can still hear caterwauling, and dueling caterwauling, from blocks away.  The village feeling is preserved through 6am, when in the middle of a city of 7+million people, you can hear roosters crow just before the daily announcements on how to be a model citizen start blaring, one more time.