Notes from Hanoi

There is something indescribable about the first morning in a city you have never been to — the light feels foreign in the best possible way. Hanoi does this especially well.

I arrived before dawn on a Thursday. The old quarter was already awake: a woman ladling pho into bowls at a plastic table on the footpath, a man sleeping under the counter of his closed shop, motorbikes threading between deliveries, the whole city in a state of perpetual mid-motion.

I spent the morning doing nothing useful. Walking, stopping, walking again. That is the right kind of first morning — no plan, no destination, just the city doing what it does while you try to calibrate to it.