Nicoleadventuringandthingsandstuff

I don’t know whether anyone has been into a smoking lounge of an airport and been triggered into a nostalgic day dream like I have. Memories for me are always set off by a scent. I don’t smoke anymore, but when I travel back to New Zealand or go on holiday, I always pop into that grey-scaled sauna of a room and stand for a bit surrounded mainly by old men chain smoking before they connect to their next flight. I probably look like a crazy woman, just slowly dying of second hand smoke, inhaling the fumes of lung cancer with an unexplained smile on my face. That misty, somewhat sweaty experience in the lounge brings me back to Vietnam every time.
South East Asia has a scent to it. It’s neither disgusting nor delightful, just different. The smell of smoke is definitely present and the smell of un-dried laundry is somehow in there, too. It’s like a humid, smokey mist that surrounds you. It’s not overbearing, but it is memorable.
It was 10am on a Wednesday morning. I’d stumbled off a connecting flight from Melbourne and the heat hit me as hard as the smell did. After dropping my bags off at the hotel I decided the best option was to embark on a micro-adventure into Hanoi’s hectic old quarter. The first shock that I hadn’t readied myself for was the normally simple task of crossing a road. Mopeds where buzzing around corners and across zebra crossings like bees chasing their queen. Finally, after many close calls I arrived, somewhat shaken to the centre of the hive. Certainly out of character, a KFC was the first thing I recall seeing. The further I walked into the labyrinth of streets, the more I realised the Colonel and I were very much out of place. As I wondered around taking in the sounds and smells of Hanoi, the visual aspect started to really hit me. At that point it was about 38 degrees celsius. Whole chickens and select cuts of pork were sat on the foot path as if they were being aired like salmonella didn’t actually exist there. I found myself being ushered over to a shopfront by a small Vietnamese man, ‘You Australia, you like beer’. He was correct in some ways, I’m not Australian, but I do like the odd beer. So there I was, sat on a green seat that in Australia would be sold only in the children's section of IKEA, drinking a Tiger beer from the bottle which set me back about 50 cents. After buying a horrifically ugly beaded bracelet from a woman in a conical hat, I sat back and wondered, ‘how did end up here?’