Rain is good.

Rain is good. This may seem like an obvious point, but, as a person who has never really enjoyed humidity (blame growing up in New Mexico), I was not looking forward to the weather in Vietnam. Now, we haven't seen the worst of it by far, since temperatures have been low for this time of year. However, today was the first day where it rained most of the day. But instead of ruining things, I loved it. The rain, as long as it's not pouring down, is a blessing, especially in the city. It cuts the traffic; it keeps things cool; and, perhaps most importantly, it ameliorates the smell.

You see, Hanoi has a very special smell. One part is exhaust fumes. A horribly polluted city, walking the streets of Hanoi for a day feels like smoking a pack of cigarettes, but without the nicotine buzz. Another part is the various smells of food in open markets. Usually, this is good. There's ginger and garlic and ripe fruits...good stuff. However, there are also various pickled abominations and God knows what sorts of raw fish and meat. What's more, mix with part one (above) and part three (below), you get a weird sort of nasal whiplash--pleasant smells mixed with bad smells. This is not a positive plus negative cancellation. There's a weird math to smells, so that positive plus negative equals very negative.

The third part deserves a paragraph of its own. Part three is a mix of two related smells. The first is the sludge in the gutters. Even when it's not raining, there's a liquid flowing in the gutters. This liquid smells very much like the smell that comes out when you clean the trap from a sink drain or snake a drainout. If you've ever done either of those things, I'm sure you know exactly the smell I mean. It's a really wicked funk, and I'm sure it means there's a high percentage of raw sewage in the gutters. The other part is the trash in said gutters. The trash system here is novel, and it works like this. People (lots and lots of people) put their raw trash right in the gutters. This includes food trash, paper trash, you name it. Then, late at night, the folks who drew the short straws in the socialist work delegation pick up all this trash in bike-driven trash bins. What this means, of course, is that by late afternoon there is a steaming pile of trash every ten feet along pretty much every street.

Mix that smell with the raw sewage, the exhaust fumes, and the riot of food smells, and you get the smell of Hanoi...which is bad. And the rain cuts that smell at least in half. And that is why rain is good.