A city with many faces

Street notes from Hanoi

Jan 26, 2026

For those who might not know, I took off last December for three and a half weeks in South-East Asia, alone, just to wander around and take photos. It’s my personal end-of-year ritual, and yes, the privilege of being my own boss and not having kids helps. Once a year, I gift myself time: traveling solo, focusing on photography, and inevitably a bit on myself too.

When I travel like this, I never plan a precise itinerary. I like deciding on the spot, depending on how a place feels. That’s why people were a bit confused when I told them I was heading to Hanoi. Why Hanoi? You never mentioned that city before.
Honestly, I didn’t really have a reason.

I think that today, in a world where everything is curated for us and algorithms quietly shape our decisions, we rarely go somewhere just to see what it’s like. We want reassurance. We want to know in advance that we won’t be disappointed. Before the internet, people arrived in places without really knowing what awaited them, and that uncertainty was part of the adventure.

I stayed there for a week, and it’s probably the city that left the strongest impression on me during this trip. Walking around the lake early in the morning, watching elderly people doing their exercises, I kept wondering what their lives looked like just a few decades ago, when war was still very present here.

What surprised me was how little of that past is visible today. Vietnam now feels like a confident, fast-moving place. Young women pose in elegant dresses while photographers carefully circle them. Phones and cameras are everywhere.

Apart from a few monuments and the omnipresent communist flag, nothing immediately reminds you of how heavy the history is.

Like many cities shaped by tourism, Hanoi has a historical center that sometimes feels like a stage set. A kind of Disneyland for foreigners, recreating a romanticized version of the past with bright, Instagram-friendly colors. It’s pleasant and even charming, but it can feel slightly artificial.

Take a side street, though, and the atmosphere shifts. Things get rougher, smokier, more alive.

Also: the occasional duck walking by.

And always: People sitting for hours, drinking tea, eating sunflower seeds, watching the world pass.

And then, just twenty minutes away, the French Quarter. Wide streets, polished façades, luxury stores lined up one after another. A completely different rhythm, existing right next to everything else.

Hanoi hasn’t smoothed out its contradictions… yet. But you can feel it coming. The omnipresent scooters, the uncles sitting on plastic stools, chilling on the sidewalks, all feel like scenes that might soon belong to the past.