“I was with my parents, and we were riding on a boat amongst a sea of lotus flowers. I felt like a fairy princess in my favourite childhood movie, Journey to the West,” Hoang Kieu To Uyen recalls, as if it had happened just yesterday. “And the funny thing is that I was actually in the West. Well, West Lake (Ho Tay) to be exact”.

Uyen, 32, is a realtor, and a born and bred Hanoian who has spent most of her life in Ha Noi. When she was an 8-year-old girl, her parents used to take her to the most beautiful places in the city to teach her about the capital.

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