Hà Nôi - Day 1
Hà Nôi - that’s not really how you spell the place name - the “o” is supposed to have a dot underneath it in addition to the circumflex accent. Lots of accents on lots of letters here, on generally very short words, usually of a single syllable - like “Hanoi” really being two words, or Viet Nam.
It’s hot and humid here vs the cold and dry I had in DC, but what do you know, I really am on the other side of the planet. Seoul was a short stopover in a faceless business lounge, looking out on the windswept tarmac - it looked grey, and judging by the bundled-up people working there, was cold.
I’m picked up from the airport as agreed, and driven to the hotel. There’s not too much to see as we head down a long elevated, needlestraight road, overtaking occasional motorcycles. It’s close to midnight when I get to the hotel, still trying to figure out the driver’s motivation for honking when he did. It seemed like morse code for a while, only there was never an answer.
The hotel room is fine, as usual I won’t see much of it. I am very, very tired and go straight to bed after hanging up my suits and shirts.
I wake up after a few hours and find it difficult to go back to sleep. Jet lag, me? I take one of the melatonin pills it’s been suggested might help and go back to bed. The sun comes up an hour later or two, and I give it up as a lost cause. I’m downstairs for breakfast relatively early, and dose up on caffeine instead. The breakfast buffet is okay, the muesli they serve is quite nice, and there’s pretty good fruit salad made fresh which I mix in, and have a croissant with jam and two rolls with butter and salmon. The coffee’s passable at best, and the juices are crap - clearly badly made from concentrate, which seems weird, given that all the fruits grow here fresh in abundance. Except the apples, I guess. Incidentally, the apple juice-from-concentrate Is the most palatable of the lot - not made locally, figures. Guess they could use some technical assistance on making fruit juice concentrate…
The piped-in background music features a woman sighing a soft-pop version of “Sympathy for the Devil” - there are so many things wrong with that it doesn’t actually abrade my nerves as much as I’d expect, instead settling into the slightly surreal background hum which tells me I’m somewhere I haven’t been before.
This is clearly evident from the streets. They are packed with an incessant flow of motorbikes and scooters, peppered with the occasional car or minibus.
traffic
I consider crossing the street with some trepidation, before observing how the locals do it - with a measured step, calmly wading through the stream of angrily honking engines streaming by. I don’t quite manage to copy their style, I find myself jogging the last few steps when I see an opening and jumping back to the safety of the sidewalk. But it gets me where I’m going.
Which is a picturesque little lake, North of which extends the Old Quarter.
I come to the lake at its Northern edge, and walk around it before heading into the Old Quarter. It’s picturesque. There are fresh food markets sprawled over side streets, with women chopping up fresh meat while the neighbouring stall’s fish in water-filled buckets advertise their freshness by waving their fins. I could buy all manner of fruit here, but loaded up on breakfast and carry a bottle of water with me. The vendors are surprisingly (to me) laid back in their attitude, contrasting nicely with the single men on motorcycles that keep offering me rides (“very good, very cheap. One dollar!”). The old East Gate of the city is impressive, quaintly contrasting with the heavily laden scooters buzzing through it.
Old East Gate
There are shoe shops everywhere. The local populations generally appears well shod, I’m not in Malawi here. In fact, probably half the shoes of the stores in DC are made here, so it stands to reason that this, at least, is a product they have easy access to. There’s a quarter with blacksmiths in it. It’s pretty cool, I think - mostly they seem to be welding constructions designed to let motorcycles load up even more things. Every thing here is a custom job. I wonder for a moment what sort of a cool miniatures Naginata such a blacksmith could make from a dark cedar chopstick and a scalpel blade, inspired by the warrior miniatures sold in many of the stalls. But as with the very simple, elegant statuettes of a woman with a conical hat I’ve seen, continued observation shows me that there are literally hundreds of identical ones. They look like wood, but clearly are made from some sort of resin poured into molds and mass-produced. I find that off-putting, and will admit to a bit of snobbism there.
I wonder back past the areas inhabited by leather and silk dealers (they are generally marketing to grown-ups the size of my daughters, meaning that I can’t find dresses for either my wife *or* daughters) and get back to the hotel in time to meet our local correspondent, who takes me to a very nearby open-air restaurant filled with noise, smells and locals for some quite decent local stir-fried noodle dish to fill me in on background, particularly regarding the people we’re supposed to meet. One problem appears to be that things are very hierarchically structured here and all lines of power run back to the (communist) party, as Viet Nam is a one-party state. So while we may be meeting with relatively senior people, their actual decision-making power is likely quite limited, and therefore so is their ability to commit to something or to speculate on matters of future policy. In combination with a number of other events having recently happened as regards our agenda, it appears possible that I might be through with my preparations for the workshop next week on Thursday, for which possibility my host suggests a three-day tour of Ha Long bay for the weekend, which would include the possibility of hiking to the top of Cat Ba island. Sounds perfect, if possible.
I take another long walk in the afternoon, which takes me to the old quarter again to make reservations with the tour operator he suggested, and from there clear across town to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum quarter. HCM, counter to his wishes for a simple cremation, lies embalmed there - making the pilgrimage to Ha Noi and paying him his respect is supposedly a very big thing here. But not entirely my cup of tea, particularly as it involves checking all belongings and standing in line for a long time. I go to visit the One Pillar Pagoda, which is a much smaller, more relaxed affair nearby.
The One Pillar Pagoda I can see is a faithful (I am told) replica of the original, which was built in this place by an Emperor in the year 1079 - and survived here until the French were forced to leave Ha Noi in 1954 and burned the structure out of spite as one of their last actions. Talk about sore losers.
The pagoda isn’t a particularly grand affair, it’s more in the nature of a large tree house than a small temple. But standing upon once central stone pillar which rises out of a pond gives it a certain something, and I find the shape quite appealing as well.
It’s getting dark now, and my feet hurt. But I don’t feel like taking any of the (many) offered motorcycle rides, out of a combination of pride in being a long walker and concern for my safety, both possibly misplaced. The local newspaper said that 76 % of fatal accidents in Viet Nam involve motorcycles. I’d consider that actually a credit to the motorcycle drivers, given that they constitute an even higher percentage of the total traffic even here in the capital - in rural areas I’m sure motorcycles constitute well over 90% of total traffic. Yet they’ve also had about 10,000 traffic fatalities last year (compared to 4,000 in Germany, with comparable population and a much higher motorization rate).
Anyway, I stop for a rest near a little lake across from the Temple of Literature (itself already closed) and watch two young guys in wide white pants and naked chests work out. Their jump kicks aren’t bad, but somehow I don’t feel like asking them when and where they have their (presumably indoor) more formal training sessions. They’re not doing anything I couldn’t do myself, I think, or maybe it’s just that my feet hurt…
I have dinner at KoTo, which is a non-profit outfit which trains poor kids in cooking and general gastronomy. Compared with my food expenditures so far, I splurge on a very good dinner and a beer, and pay my nearly 10 USD with a good conscience. It was a colourful first day.
It’s hot and humid here vs the cold and dry I had in DC, but what do you know, I really am on the other side of the planet. Seoul was a short stopover in a faceless business lounge, looking out on the windswept tarmac - it looked grey, and judging by the bundled-up people working there, was cold.
I’m picked up from the airport as agreed, and driven to the hotel. There’s not too much to see as we head down a long elevated, needlestraight road, overtaking occasional motorcycles. It’s close to midnight when I get to the hotel, still trying to figure out the driver’s motivation for honking when he did. It seemed like morse code for a while, only there was never an answer.
The hotel room is fine, as usual I won’t see much of it. I am very, very tired and go straight to bed after hanging up my suits and shirts.
I wake up after a few hours and find it difficult to go back to sleep. Jet lag, me? I take one of the melatonin pills it’s been suggested might help and go back to bed. The sun comes up an hour later or two, and I give it up as a lost cause. I’m downstairs for breakfast relatively early, and dose up on caffeine instead. The breakfast buffet is okay, the muesli they serve is quite nice, and there’s pretty good fruit salad made fresh which I mix in, and have a croissant with jam and two rolls with butter and salmon. The coffee’s passable at best, and the juices are crap - clearly badly made from concentrate, which seems weird, given that all the fruits grow here fresh in abundance. Except the apples, I guess. Incidentally, the apple juice-from-concentrate Is the most palatable of the lot - not made locally, figures. Guess they could use some technical assistance on making fruit juice concentrate…
The piped-in background music features a woman sighing a soft-pop version of “Sympathy for the Devil” - there are so many things wrong with that it doesn’t actually abrade my nerves as much as I’d expect, instead settling into the slightly surreal background hum which tells me I’m somewhere I haven’t been before.
This is clearly evident from the streets. They are packed with an incessant flow of motorbikes and scooters, peppered with the occasional car or minibus.
traffic
I consider crossing the street with some trepidation, before observing how the locals do it - with a measured step, calmly wading through the stream of angrily honking engines streaming by. I don’t quite manage to copy their style, I find myself jogging the last few steps when I see an opening and jumping back to the safety of the sidewalk. But it gets me where I’m going.
Which is a picturesque little lake, North of which extends the Old Quarter.
I come to the lake at its Northern edge, and walk around it before heading into the Old Quarter. It’s picturesque. There are fresh food markets sprawled over side streets, with women chopping up fresh meat while the neighbouring stall’s fish in water-filled buckets advertise their freshness by waving their fins. I could buy all manner of fruit here, but loaded up on breakfast and carry a bottle of water with me. The vendors are surprisingly (to me) laid back in their attitude, contrasting nicely with the single men on motorcycles that keep offering me rides (“very good, very cheap. One dollar!”). The old East Gate of the city is impressive, quaintly contrasting with the heavily laden scooters buzzing through it.
Old East Gate
There are shoe shops everywhere. The local populations generally appears well shod, I’m not in Malawi here. In fact, probably half the shoes of the stores in DC are made here, so it stands to reason that this, at least, is a product they have easy access to. There’s a quarter with blacksmiths in it. It’s pretty cool, I think - mostly they seem to be welding constructions designed to let motorcycles load up even more things. Every thing here is a custom job. I wonder for a moment what sort of a cool miniatures Naginata such a blacksmith could make from a dark cedar chopstick and a scalpel blade, inspired by the warrior miniatures sold in many of the stalls. But as with the very simple, elegant statuettes of a woman with a conical hat I’ve seen, continued observation shows me that there are literally hundreds of identical ones. They look like wood, but clearly are made from some sort of resin poured into molds and mass-produced. I find that off-putting, and will admit to a bit of snobbism there.
I wonder back past the areas inhabited by leather and silk dealers (they are generally marketing to grown-ups the size of my daughters, meaning that I can’t find dresses for either my wife *or* daughters) and get back to the hotel in time to meet our local correspondent, who takes me to a very nearby open-air restaurant filled with noise, smells and locals for some quite decent local stir-fried noodle dish to fill me in on background, particularly regarding the people we’re supposed to meet. One problem appears to be that things are very hierarchically structured here and all lines of power run back to the (communist) party, as Viet Nam is a one-party state. So while we may be meeting with relatively senior people, their actual decision-making power is likely quite limited, and therefore so is their ability to commit to something or to speculate on matters of future policy. In combination with a number of other events having recently happened as regards our agenda, it appears possible that I might be through with my preparations for the workshop next week on Thursday, for which possibility my host suggests a three-day tour of Ha Long bay for the weekend, which would include the possibility of hiking to the top of Cat Ba island. Sounds perfect, if possible.
I take another long walk in the afternoon, which takes me to the old quarter again to make reservations with the tour operator he suggested, and from there clear across town to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum quarter. HCM, counter to his wishes for a simple cremation, lies embalmed there - making the pilgrimage to Ha Noi and paying him his respect is supposedly a very big thing here. But not entirely my cup of tea, particularly as it involves checking all belongings and standing in line for a long time. I go to visit the One Pillar Pagoda, which is a much smaller, more relaxed affair nearby.
The One Pillar Pagoda I can see is a faithful (I am told) replica of the original, which was built in this place by an Emperor in the year 1079 - and survived here until the French were forced to leave Ha Noi in 1954 and burned the structure out of spite as one of their last actions. Talk about sore losers.
The pagoda isn’t a particularly grand affair, it’s more in the nature of a large tree house than a small temple. But standing upon once central stone pillar which rises out of a pond gives it a certain something, and I find the shape quite appealing as well.
It’s getting dark now, and my feet hurt. But I don’t feel like taking any of the (many) offered motorcycle rides, out of a combination of pride in being a long walker and concern for my safety, both possibly misplaced. The local newspaper said that 76 % of fatal accidents in Viet Nam involve motorcycles. I’d consider that actually a credit to the motorcycle drivers, given that they constitute an even higher percentage of the total traffic even here in the capital - in rural areas I’m sure motorcycles constitute well over 90% of total traffic. Yet they’ve also had about 10,000 traffic fatalities last year (compared to 4,000 in Germany, with comparable population and a much higher motorization rate).
Anyway, I stop for a rest near a little lake across from the Temple of Literature (itself already closed) and watch two young guys in wide white pants and naked chests work out. Their jump kicks aren’t bad, but somehow I don’t feel like asking them when and where they have their (presumably indoor) more formal training sessions. They’re not doing anything I couldn’t do myself, I think, or maybe it’s just that my feet hurt…
I have dinner at KoTo, which is a non-profit outfit which trains poor kids in cooking and general gastronomy. Compared with my food expenditures so far, I splurge on a very good dinner and a beer, and pay my nearly 10 USD with a good conscience. It was a colourful first day.