Discomfort doesn’t have to be physical. It can mean going somewhere so different from your daily life, and from the way you usually travel, that it pulls you out of your habits. That kind of trip is available to anyone who can walk a few hours a day. Hanoi is one of the best places to find it.

Hanoi is not designed for you. That is the most useful thing to know before you go.

The Old Quarter is part traffic, part market, part improvisation. The sidewalks are full of motorbikes, plastic stools, and women cooking, so you walk in the road. The motorbikes don’t stop. They go around you. The first time it happens, you flinch. By the second day, you don’t. You walk at a steady pace, and the drivers adjust around you. That’s the first thing you learn.

Most eating happens at plastic stools on the sidewalk. There’s no menu in English. You point at what someone else is eating. A glass of bia hoi runs less than a dollar. A meal is a few dollars more. The food is excellent.

The city is old in a way most American travelers don’t have a frame for. Hanoi has been the capital city since 1010. The Temple of Literature was built in 1070, before construction began on Notre-Dame in Paris. French colonial buildings, communist monuments, and ancient pagodas sit side by side. None of it has been arranged for visitors. It’s just the city.

The war is here too, but not in the way American visitors usually expect. There’s the prison the pilots called the Hanoi Hilton, the wreckage of a B-52 in a residential pond, and a museum that tells the story from the Vietnamese side. None of it dominates. The war is one of several wars the city has been through over the centuries. The city has moved on. For an American traveler, that takes some adjusting to. It’s worth doing.

By day three or four, you start to know how the place works. You stop being lost. You recognize the women who run the same corners every day.

Most American travel can’t deliver that. A packaged tour can’t replicate it. Neither can a luxury hotel nor a smooth itinerary. You only get it by staying long enough.

Go for at least five days. Stay in the Old Quarter. Walk a lot. Eat where the lines are. Don’t try to make it easier than it is.