I woke up at 7:30 this morning and went to brush my teeth. As I was brushing I felt something crawl across my foot. I looked down. Nothing like a large roach to REALLY wake you up in the morning. Who needs coffee?
We ate breakfast at the motel – fried rice, coffee, noodles in a beef broth, beans, pastries and jelly. Quite eclectic menu, but delicious.
We walked outside into the chaos of the Old District in Hanoi. The scene outside was chaotic, vibrant, alive, pulsing. To get across the street you simply start walking. There are NO traffic lights, stop signs or traffic circles in Hanoi (which I have never seen before)… You have to indicate when you’re walking and then walk directly across the traffic (or those of you that have played frogger, its just like that, but with higher stakes). The key is to walk at a steady pace – if you start walking, and then run, you run the risk of someone mistiming your crossing and hitting you. When crossing the street you communicate with infitismal, fleeting non-verbal cues that transcend language in the blink of an eye. A sort of negototiation between you trying to cross the street and them trying to avoid hitting you. There is almost a beauty or an art to it. It was nerve wracking at first, but it got easier as the day went along.
As we walked to the Hoak Kiem lake we soaked in the early morning environs…a lady making dumplings…people slurping breakfast soup all over the place…meal worms crawling around, alive in a bowl (don’t know what their eventual fate was). As we walked I was pleasantly surprised of the Vietnamese demeanor towards us – it was unlike any of the other places I’ve traveled…the people don’t notice you. They don’t look. They don’t try to sell you things (for the most part, there are a few exceptions, most of which Stephen seemed to findJ ).
We walked to the Hoan Kiem Lake (central lake in Hanoi)…and to the Vietnam monument and onto the Huc Bridge. A fire-truck-red ancient bridge that contrasted sharply with the Kelly-green, algae rich water of the Hoan Kiem Lake. On the bridge people kept asking Stephen to take a picture with them. He got three requests, we got one request to have both of us in the picture and I got no solo requests. My ego was bruised just a tad…but I’m not upset. I swear.
After crossing the Huc Bridge we walked into the Ngoc Son Temple. It wasn’t all that exciting. When I asked a local what the main draw for the temple was, he told me there was a massive stuffed turtle somewhere in the building. It apparently weighed 250 lbs when it was caught. When we finally saw the ‘turtle’ we realized it wasn’t a real turtle, but more like a seal that had been stuffed and then had a man-made shell affixed to its topside.
After seeing the temple we walked along the perimeter of the Hoan Kiem Lake to the Hoa Lo Prison (AKA the Hanoi Hilton) where American POWs were housed during the Vietnam War. The exterior was forlorn and depreciated and didn’t look much like a maximum-security prison that instilled fear in the hearts of American GIs for a decade. The interior of the prison had ominous music playing to add to the already creepy / scary interior. Oddly enough the vast majority of the museum was dedicated to the cruelty of the French colonialists (who kept Vietnamese insurrectionists locked up in there)…not the American POWs. It almost seemed like the French colonialism had as much, or more, of an impact on society than the Vietnam war. Apparently the French weren’t very nice colonialists.
We eventually saw where the American POWs were kept…also saw the jumpsuit, parachute, etcetera that John McCain was wearing when he was captured. By the way, its common knowledge that John McCain was a Vietnam POW…But I never knew how bad he had it, and I have a lot more respect for the man. McCain was on a mission to bomb a Viet Cong power plant outside Hanoi when his plane was shot down. He ejected out of the plane, but there was a malfunction whereby his body was slammed into the glass over the cockpit. Instantly both his arms and his leg were broken…badly. He landed in Ho Tay Lake, where he was nearly suffocated by his parachute (with two broken arms and a broken leg, mind you) and then wrestled out of the water by the North Vietnamese Army (see attached picture). When he was pulled out of the lake they broke his collarbone and stabbed him in the groin with a bayonet. He was then brought to Hoa Lo Prison where his battle wounds were left untreated for three months (the lack of treatment is the reason McCain can’t raise his arms above his shoulders today). When the VC realized his father was an admiral in the Navy they offered to release him hoping to signal their kind and benevolent nature to the rest of the world. John McCain refused, saying he wouldn’t leave until all the prisoners that had been captured before him were released. The VC balked at this request and John McCain spent the rest of his five and half years suffering in the prison. Republican. Democrat. Liberterian. Whatever you are you have to respect that about the man.
Afterwards we sat and drank coffee silently just soaking in the city. The sounds – raspy motorbikes with their 50cc engines spewing exhaust and their high pitched horns blending into the audible aura of the city, a fan blowing air underneath large cauldrons boiling rice and other foods, a rooster cuckooing in the distance. The smells (both good and bad) wafting past our noses in an endless procession.
Next to the coffee shop old, crouched women peeled fruit, sliced produce and washed pots in the street – their adroit hands moving in the rote motion they’d undoubdetly practiced thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of times, in their lives.
Afterwards we walked to St Joseph’s cathedral, underneath a verdant canopy of tree leaves and suffocating telephone wires strung above us. After the church we decided to stroll around – not walking to any particular attraction, just walking. After being underwhelmed with most of the places we visited I realized that Hanoi is not a place with ‘theme park’ attractions (the attractions are all austere and not particularly well thought out). The beautiful thing, I realized, about Hanoi is that its not a city where you check must-sees off your list, it’s a place where, more than anywhere else I have ever traveled, captures the aphorism that the journey is more important then the destination. It’s a city to be absorbed, not toured.
We stopped at a café and drank the famous, freshly-brewed beer. Afterwards we headed back to our hotel to take a break before our night time plans. As we walked down the street I saw a hairless, roast animal sitting on a silver platter. The carcass was too big to be a duck or a chicken…but the tail too long to be a pig. The head had been chopped off at the base of the neck. I walked closer towards the mysterious roast and directed Stephen’s attention to it.
“It’s a pig.” He said.
We got closer.
“That’s no pig.” I said. I pointed at the head of the creature, sitting behind the body.
As sure as anything it was a roasted dog. The head of the creature was sitting on the tray, as a cooked pig might, with a small fruit in its mouth, and its teeth reared back in a rictus of aggression.
Stephen turned pale. “I thought you were joking when you told me they ate dog here.”
I nodded my head. “Sadly, I was not joking.”
Vietnam is definitely not a good place to be an animal, or an animal lover for that matter – I saw street vendors decapitate frogs and then watched in morbid curiosity as their beheaded bodies tried to jump out of the buckets. I saw a woman slice a three foot fish in half and then watched as the fish lay, severed in half, gasping for air. We eat (most) of the same stuff in the US, but we see it packaged neatly in the meat sections of supermarkets, disengaged from the reality of slaughtering the animal. There is no such barrier in Hanoi.
We walked home and passed out for two hours (jet lag!).
At 9:15 we went to see the famous cultural ‘Vietnamese water puppet show’ in the Old Quarter of the city. During the show I heard an instrument - which consisted of a board, a single string and a pole a woman manipulated with her hand – that created a timbre, pitch and tone I’ve never heard from a string instrument before. It was very beautiful. The announcer told us that in olden times the instrument could only be played by a male to all male audiences because the men were scared that if any woman heard the beauty of the instrument they would fall in love with the musician.
The show was midly entertaining, but for Stephen and I it was enjoyable because it was so culturally significant in Vietnam. The water puppet plays were created in the Mekong Delta in southern Vietnam where villagers used the underwater puppet shows to entertain themselves when their rice paddies flooded.
After the show we walked around Hanoi at night – there were groups of adolescents sitting on the ground around the Hoan Kiem lake drinking beer, lemon juice and cane sugar and eating ice cream and dried, flattened fish cooked over an open flame.
One thing that struck us both was how many more white people there were at night time than there were in the day. My only natural conclusion was that these people must all be vampires and my theory received a shock of veracity shortly afterwards when I saw a Vietnamese girl wearing a shirt that said, ‘I only date vampires.’ (Mental note – purchase clove of garlic before tomorrow morning).
We went to one last café, had desert and a beer and then headed back to prepare for our trip to Halong Bay tomorrow morning.
It was a long day and the confluence of jet lag and walking for ten hours has left me exhausted and unable to focus as much on writing as I would like. Such is life.
Tomorrow we travel three hours east for our cruise in Halong Bay. Apparently typhoon Nalgae has lost some power and we’ve decided to give it a shot. We’ll spend tomorrow night on a boat and then take our first overnight train to Hue the Wednesday night. Not sure when I’ll be able to add my next blog submission. Probably sometime on Wednesday.
Till then…
