Tết 2026

Get out of the house because it’s 3pm two days before Tết aka Lunar New Year’s Day and Hanoi will be a humid chilly landscape of families strolling past their shuttered shophouses in their Sunday best for almost a week so enjoy human life while you can. Step over your landlady’s family dismembering pigs in the lobby. Walk past old people in the classic Vietnamese squat you just figured out how to do after eight years here and is the best back stretch ever, ripping up paper and tossing it into a smoking copper urn as if the city with the world’s worst air pollution needs more. Walk past door after door, all open, so you can see inside dank salons about the size of jail cells with the lights too bright where pretty women check their phones with one slipper hanging off one foot because business is bad so the salon will be gone Tuesday morning just as sure as you’re looking at it on Thursday, behind sidewalks you can’t use because they’re covered with tables festooned with strawberries and pickled shallots and marbled pork and chili oil and all the stuff you wish you could find as you lie in bed every night around the corner. Take a pic of a family lined up just right in front of one of those storefronts that slaps a natural pictureframe around just about every photo you take in this city. Step through crowds of teens giving you their best “hello” and kids opening their mouths to show you what they’re eating when you’re not walking the tightrope between the sidewalk and even more bikes heaving with even more family members than usual because yes, it is two days before Tết and you’ll never understand how important Tết is here until you live here, and I’ve lived here 8 years and I still don’t really get it, but anything that can give this place even more life then it has on the average mess of a day is more than fine by me.