Hanoi’s Old Quarter is a complicated web of 36 winding streets, linked together to form a thriving marketplace. Unlike the wide boulevards in the newer part of the city — near the monuments and large hotels — the Old Quarter is crowded, hazardous to pedestrians, and filled with the sights and scents of local life.

On Thursday we took a walking tour to get a better feeling for the more traditional part of the city. We never found a map as great as our Thai ones, but the one advantage Vietnamese street signs have over their regional counterparts is their use of Roman script. Though we still found ourselves lost a few times, we could at least sound out the names of the streets where we were. The use of the familiar looking letters stems from Vietnam’s longtime colonization by the French, but they managed to throw in some of the strangest looking accent marks I have ever seen.

Our walk wove through tiny side streets, each specializing in the sale of a different product. One street sold tires, another sold toxic-smelling paint. We perused a row of stalls that all sold paper money for burning in religious ceremonies. Some streets were entirely dedicated to fruits, others to crabs and still-flopping fish. Many of the saleswomen were wearing my new favorite outfit, complete with a rice hat. And while making our way through the many shops, we narrowly avoided several encounters with rogue motorcycles.

On one block, we saw three iPhone vendors and a small child being bathed in a basin on the street. It was contrasting moments like this that really reminded us we were in a developing nation. The exhaust streaming out from the motorcycles, the open air meat markets and uncovered fish, and the women carrying baskets of pineapple across their shoulders were also signs of the economy of yesteryear.

In Bangkok, we had been offered rides on a tuk-tuk at every turn. In Hanoi, locals were equally eager to get us onto their motorbikes. We declined, but everyone else in the city seemed eager to hop on board. Entire families on one bike, with small children sitting on the handlebars and babies crammed between two seated adults, were pretty typical. Though we saw an impressive number of adults wearing helmets, very few children were outfitted for safety. I read in one of our many online guides that ambulances in Hanoi can take at least 45 minutes to get to roadside emergencies because of the insane alleyways and motorbike traffic. Yikes. But despite the sheer insanity of the motorbike driving and their people-weaving skills, the whole system seemed to move pretty smoothly.

In addition to our streetwalking, we also perused a large market. The first floor was filled with all sorts of interesting foods: entire stalls devoted to different mushroom varieties, barrels and barrels of dried shrimp, more raw meat, and beautiful, bright-colored fruits. The upstairs was packed with wholesale clothing and make-up, reminiscent of many of the other markets we’ve seen on our Asian journey.

After spending the whole morning in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, we paid a visit to the Hanoi Hilton in the afternoon. The Hoa Lo Prison was given its nickname during America’s war with Vietnam, but it was originally built by French colonists to imprison the local political opposition in the late 1800s. The French used the prison through the mid-1900s, keeping large numbers of Vietnamese men and women in — according to the Vietnamese — subhuman conditions.

Much of the prison was recently demolished for new development projects, but the wing that remains has been turned into a museum. The exhibits show the small cells that the Vietnamese were forced into, as well as evidence that they were abused by their French captors. The museum honors the many local political heroes who spent time in Hoa Lo.

During the Vietnam War, the North Vietnamese army repurposed the prison to jail, torture and interrogate American pilots who had been shot down. From the museum exhibits, you would think the Americans — John McCain among them — were in summer camp. They made Christmas cards, wrote poems, played cards, joked with their captors and received excellent medical attention.

From the Vietnamese perspective, it seems that life in the Hanoi Hilton was rather bucolic for the American soldiers. Memoirs written by the American pilots in the decades since would probably disagree.

It was also interesting that the Vietnamese took a prison that had jailed so many of their own people, and repurposed it for their own uses (and abuses). It definitely gives the whole establishment a bit more of an eery feeling.