Happy Tet

Today is the first day of the Vietnamese new year -- Tet. The streets of Hanoi are eerily quiet. Most Vietnamese are home with their families, the way Westerners would be on Christmas day. All the shops are closed for the holiday.

There was a week-long build-up to Tet. Motorbikes with precariously perched kumquat trees clogged the roads. The air was heavy with burnt offerings made to the Kitchen God. Midnight flower markets sprung up, and everybody everywhere rushed to pack their fridges and purchase last-minute Tet gifts, knowing full well that after the stroke of midnight, Feb 2, nothing would be left.

Today's emptiness is a stark contrast to last night, the new year's eve celebration. Around every pagoda, whole cottage industries sprung up selling every kind of burnable and edible offering. Young people congregated around Hoan Kiem lake in the Old Quarter to be entertained by jugglers and snake handlers and live music, and at the stroke of midnight, fireworks.

For most of this, I ambled and observed. It was just about the first warm sunny day since I got here, and I took pictures. These were taken before the sun set, and reflect the calm before the storm:







The next one was taken downtown a few hours before midnight. I found a quiet, little spot above the fray for a beer and a bite where I could observe the madness from a safe distance.



I'm now sitting in one of the very few coffee shops left open in the city. The place is slowly filling up with Westerners, just the way a Chinese restaurant might fill with Jewish people on Christmas Eve. No family to go to, no tradition to fall back on, no gods to worship but the usual ones of coffee and work.