Vietnam, Hanoi - It's so french!

"Bonjour" sang the taxi driver as we sped through the streets of Paris, I mean Hanoi, at 5.30am. He ditched us on the pavement in the Old Quarter and sped off in his black beret. The pave-stones, the street signs, and even the small blue plaques numbering the buildings were just so French. I could wander these pavements without a map, and sniff out a boulangerie or a cafe, because I once lived in Paris, and I feel sure I could remember my way around.

But these pavements are used for anything, everything but wandering. The French town planners thought their pavements would westernise the East, but the Vietnamese customised the concept and use them for parking motorbikes and setting up impromptu stalls manned by miniature ladies crouching in conical rice hats, who scurry away when a policeman skulks through, poking and hacking at things to show his authority.

The ladies are like giant speed-walking balancing scales, their disc-like baskets dangling from the plank that strains across both sides of their shoulders. They scurry through the chaotic traffic in the street, because on the pavement they would get in the way of people enjoying their morning shot of coffee and dish of wet white noodles covered in beef stock and steaming of cinnamon, around whom last nights debris and scum is swept off the pavement into quickwater and carried into the gutter.

It's relatively peaceful in the old quarter at this time of day, but around the lake it's all going off. I joined in a club of open-air-obics yesterday in the square by the bronze statue of Ly Thai To, an ancient vietnamese ruler in pointy shoes. I jumped, high kicked and waved frantically with about 100 Vietnamese pyjama-clad women to a techno-karaoke soundtrack, which woke me up. The class was so popular (and loud) that people were even joining in from across 6 lanes of traffic on the other side of the street. There was a butch looking English chap learning a very gay dance involving lots of flag waving with a troupe of 10 elderly vietnamese, while an altogether more stately bunch were transfixing and tai-chi'ing into the depths of the lake, where apparently there is a giant turtle guarding a magical, ancient sword.