Ask anyone who arrived in here for the first time what their first shock was, and I bet you’ll probably hear about the traffic. Yep, it really is something. By all means I’m not saying that it’s worse than Paris (God knows I’m scared of even thinking about driving on the Place de l’Etoile); no, I’m just saying that it is an ‘organized mess’. No matter where you go, the traffic never seems to stop, and the traffic lights that happen to be on certain junctions seem to have a purely ornamental function.

Hanoi is probably the French-est asian capital there is; you can’t go around town for more than an hour before hearing the sulky-ish babbling that is so typical of my native language. You keep bumping into a lot of French tourists, students, short or long-haul expats – take your pick. As a direct consequence (!) the wine import industry seems to be doing wonderfully well; I saw this nice wine shop in the Métropole (the classiest, Belle-Époque style hotel in Hanoi) and couldn’t help but snapping this shot.