good weather

Today might have been Hanoi’s best weather of the year. One could argue that Hanoi’s perfect weather day is one of those cold cloudy December days because then you can pull out all your stylish cozy clothes that are now moldy like your curtains and towels because they’ve been sitting untouched in closets with 90% humidity for months but one can dream, right? Grab toothbrushes and vinegar with the best intentions and turn small stains into huge faded blotches so now you gotta go buy new clothes, and no better reason to go out in cold weather, especially when hot soup and cold beers are waiting for you and your new outfit down every alley. Sure, the smog quadruples right around then but if you don’t live here you’ll soon be home where you can talk everyone’s ear off about AQI and if you do live here you surely have bigger health problems to consider like tofu fried in oil from 2024 or the infamous ‘thay đổi thời tiết’ which is supposedly any one of a hundred health problems locals attribute to the change in temperature but is again, the fault of the smog, not to be confused with the fog. Nobody would argue that the perfect Hanoi weather is any hotter than today, where you can’t walk to work so much as swim, not that locals would walk 2km anyway, that’s just for mad dogs and thirsty photographers, as the saying goes. I like to say I love hot weather because it makes everyone wanna take their clothes off, but that’s the kind of thing I normally say in air-conditioned offices and not sat somewhere on a plastic children’s stool melting into a pool of moldy clothes and energy drink. So let’s just give the crown to today, when the drool on dogs’ tongues bounces in time with their steps and the sun explodes through the mass of branches always over your head which means hung over photographers can turn their camera’s ISO all the way down and walk for hours taking pictures of streets which are even more full than usual, because people want to be out, not have to be.