Shopping in Hanoi
The streets of Hanoi are teeming with shops
selling all kinds of things. Like most Asian cities, the shops tend
to be bunched together according to what they are selling - you'll
find streets entirely devoted to bookshops or ironmongers or tailors
or stamp-makers, or almost anything else you could imagine. It seems
very alien to us, because we're used to the idea of supermarkets,
where you get everything under one roof. It means that to buy things
you're popping all over the city, to get to the 'shoe lace' street
or whatever. 
The
other thing that makes shopping difficult is the pavements, something
I've described before. But here's an extra bonus feature - motorbikes
inside shops. Its because there are a few streets where people
aren't allowed to park their motorbikes on the pavement, so they
park them in shop doorways, or the shops themselves. This chap is
trying to get into a clothes shop, squeezing between two Honda Dreams
casually parked in the door - and out of sight there's another pair
to their left, even further inside the shop! It's so bad, that sometimes
you can't get into the shop at all, until somebody moves their bike.
And what makes it seem worse is that most of the bikes seem to belong
to staff - could you imagine this at Sainsburys? Its bad enough when
the staff get all the parking spots near the entrance, but at least
they don't park in the entrance.
The
other thing that makes shopping difficult is the pavements, something
I've described before. But here's an extra bonus feature - motorbikes
inside shops. Its because there are a few streets where people
aren't allowed to park their motorbikes on the pavement, so they
park them in shop doorways, or the shops themselves. This chap is
trying to get into a clothes shop, squeezing between two Honda Dreams
casually parked in the door - and out of sight there's another pair
to their left, even further inside the shop! It's so bad, that sometimes
you can't get into the shop at all, until somebody moves their bike.
And what makes it seem worse is that most of the bikes seem to belong
to staff - could you imagine this at Sainsburys? Its bad enough when
the staff get all the parking spots near the entrance, but at least
they don't park in the entrance.