The Red River isn't the only body to flow through Hanoi -- just as water flows through city, so do people and machines. East of the city center, the Red River cuts through the town, but the streets themselves are flooded with bicycles, mopeds, cars and motorcycles. Leaving the sidewalk is like stepping into a river. Everything flows, day and night -- a long, calm river that moves at 30 or 35 kilometers per hour (19-22 miles per hour), with few cars, hardly and trucks, and nothing frantic about it.

They drive in twos and fours, without safety helmets -- entire families travelling on two wheels, infants strapped between their parents. Lovers sway to the rhythm of the street's winding trajectory, and young women sit with impeccable posture. As they move through the street, the city's inhabitants resemble a school of colorful fish. That's no different on Han Thuyen Street, where older and newer forms of globalization meet in a cornershop.

A new supermarket here, "Au Délice," makes a strange impression -- especially with the tropical heat and humidity outside. Step through the door and you'll find a sumptuous cheese counter, stacked with Roquefort and Reblochon, Beaufort and Brie de Meaux, and then smoked fish from Norway and Holland, herring from Germany -- all in the heart of Asia.

You'll find Spanish chorizo sausage, Italian bresaola beef, ham from Bayonne and Parma. Half the names are misspelled -- but with the producers 8,000 or 9,000 kilometers away, no one is complaining. Truffle olive oil from Italy's Toscana region sits next to balsamic vinegar from Modena and mustard from Dijon. Then there's chocolate from Belgium and Switzerland, beer from the Czech Republic and Ireland, and long shelves lined with rare and expensive wine. At Au Délice in socialist Hanoi, you'll find things you'd look for in vain in many capitalist cities.

Ms. Nga, the owner, was married to a Belgian and now runs the shop by herself. She's helped by a handful of employees, like Mr. Thanh -- who knows just about everything there is to know about sausages. The retailers Nga receives her imports from companies that can even ship truffles from French oak forests to Hanoi homes within days.

Au Délice acts globally and in the present. But the store feels indebted to the past, as if it were the last heir of the French rulers who left Vietnam in 1954. An example of history's usual ambiguity, they brought injustice and suffering to the Vietnamese, but also bread, wine and culinary culture. In those days, globalization had a different name: colonialism.

A city unmarred by modern globalization

Contemporary forms of globalization are almost invisible in today's Hanoi -- they still haven't taken hold. If you want to experience a beautiful, lively city unmarred by McDonalds, Burger King, KFC and Starbucks, where people survive without supermarkets and shopping malls, without gas stations looming at highways like latter-day cathedrals -- then you should visit Hanoi, and you should do so quickly.

Hanoi is an Asian city that has elegantly accepted its European heritage. And yet it remains a place where foreign retail giants, fast food restaurants and land speculators have yet to reach. Still, that is likely to change soon, with Vietnam pressing for entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). The country wants to participate in the rat race of globalization. However, in its rush to find profits, the country may be running blind to the costs involved.

Hanoi is striving for a post-socialist "capitalism with a human face." But the heralds of the new age are faceless: functionalist architecture scattered randomly on the outskirts of the city, arterial roads already dominated by cars and not by bicycles and mopeds. Outside Hanoi's city center, you'll find the first supermarkets and a retail store the size of a train station, filled with international goods that compete unnecessarily with local products. Frozen chicken from Brazil, which has travelled halfway around the world to reach a country with 8 million small chicken farmers, lies stacked on a refrigerated shelf. But how many of those farmers will be left tomorrow?