Working retail

Sure, there are stores, and stalls, and markets. But why not buy your goods off a basket lady? These women walk up and down the streets of downtown Hanoi carrying their goods -- often fruit, but also clothes and other merchandise. This one here is selling hair accessories in the left basket, and underwear in the right. Those pastel-colored things at the top of the right basket? Those are face masks.
Housing in Hanoi

There are a lot of these skinny houses -- some tall, some not -- in Hanoi, and in Vietnam in general. One of our hotels was of the tall skinny variety -- thankfully, it had an elevator so that we didn't have to drag our luggage up the equally skinny staircase.
My understanding is that it has something to do with taxes being assessed on the footprint of your lot, rather than total square footage (metreage?). I'm not entirely clear on why that means you would want to go narrow rather than square (perhaps the depth is standard?), but I think they're fun to look at.
Internet non-cafe

These are the kind of fancy digs teenagers can sit in for hours on end to play video games. Maybe the stereotype of the computer geek sitting in a room without windows is international.
Watch repair

This guy put a new battery in Valerie's watch, which made her very happy. He was in turn very happy to be paid in US dollars. For my part, I was amused to see him pull out the jeweler's loupe... made of aluminum. I guess there must have been glass inside, but on the surface it looked like leftover scrap metal.
What's Viet for "quarters"?

This is a depiction of a game played in the imperial city at Hue, but was apparently introduced from China; that vase at left was used as the collection vessel you see in the drawing. As far as I could tell from the description, it seems to be quarters with pick-up sticks. There was no mention of whether copious amounts of alcohol were involved.
Vietnamese beach

While we were in Hoi An we rented bicycles and headed to a beach a couple miles away. The Vietnamese tend to stay out of the sun as much as possible (unlike the westerners, who like to turn various shades of red and brown), so although we arrived pretty late in the afternoon (a little before 5?), there were more people camped out under the set-back trees than close to the water. As the sun got lower, though, families started to make their way onto the open sand, where they mostly hung out and picnicked -- fairly few actually went in the water. It's a great atmosphere, with food-cart and strolling vendors making their way up and down the shoreline, and other vendors setting up little plastic tables and stools on the sand.
Well, sure.
