Saturday, May 26, 2007

Power cuts on somebody’s birthday

Saturday, last weekend, was Ho Chi Minh’s birthday, inspiring various neon-bright celebratory displays with black and white pictures of ‘Uncle Ho’ leading the revolution, teaching children to read, or sitting in a bamboo chair next to his traditional Vietnamese stilt house reading a book and smoking. His stilt house is still there, right up the street from the somewhat less traditional imposing Russian granite house where he currently resides…


Sunday was election day in Vietnam, proclaimed by more neon (and flowery) signs, and polling stations well bedecked with flags and posters.



More standard Old Quarter shots.

Another view of Hoan Kiem Lake.

St. Joseph’s Cathedral.

Shrink-wrapped Buddhas (I guess they're Buddhas, I’m not an expert and really don’t know).

The rose-seller's bicycle.

“Moto moto! Very cheap! One hour! Go around! West Lake! Hashish? Museum Uncle Ho! Where you from? My friend, cheap for you!”
Pas de power in Paris

Sunday, May 20, 2007

Military History Museum

Saturday, on a sudden urge to be a tourist, I went to the Military History Museum. It is a couple blocks from the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, and across the street from a big statue of Lenin, with flowers and people playing badminton and people doing tai chi and ladies selling bananas and teenagers making out while perched on their motorbikes. Just like everywhere else in Hanoi.

The museum display started with the Battle of Bạch Đằng, which is where, in 938, the Vietnamese put sharpened iron-tipped stakes in the river bottom. At high tide they snuck out beside the Chinese navy and said “nanny nanny boo boo, bet you can’t catch us,” and took off up the river drawing ‘hot pursuit’ – which is allowed under international law, they checked that first. Then the tide went down, and the Chinese boats were stuck, looking uncannily like hydrofoils perched precariously in the wrong millennium, and feeling a ‘there’s a stone in my shoe’ kind of feeling, only slightly more ominous than that. In any case, in the short and sweet version of Vietnamese history, that is the beginning of independence from Chinese domination.



There was one display on a musician who, I suppose, wrote patriotic and revolutionary music. Nice sculpture, I can’t really speak for the music, I didn’t hear it.


I think it’s fair to say that the most popular part of the place was all the equipment they
had outside, old French stuff from before they were defeated in 1954 at Điện Biên Phủ (the museum is on Điện Biên Phủ Street, after all), and of course lots of stuff from the American War, as it’s known here. Scattered around the ‘flag tower,’ built in 1812 as part of Hanoi Citadel, are cannons and airplanes and bombs, a huge pile of wreckage from an American plane that was shot down, and tourists having their pictures taken next to big, old, deadly stuff.













The war, in a direct way at least, seems to have very little to do with my life here. I guess in some way my interest in Vietnam right from the beginning was motivated by kind of a reaction against my impression, of the war and the ‘Vietnam Era’ and it’s impact on the American psyche, of all of that completely overtaking the ability to see Vietnam the country, today, with beauty and pain just like everywhere else. I guess that is pretty direct – directly contradicting what I said before...

Of course the leftover bombs are not all sitting in the museum. Just last week somebody found a 500 kg bomb at the My Son World Heritage Site – that is in central Vietnam, some six or eight hundred year old remains from the Cham culture, which are fascinating. But less fascinating if there are 35 year old bombs lying about rusting away… I was at My Son twice on my first trip to Vietnam, don’t remember seeing that bomb. Unexploded ordnance are still found regularly in some areas here. Sometimes safely, sometimes not safely.

From the top of the flag tower, you have a nice view across central Hanoi, high-rises going up. At the bottom of the tower, next to the ATM and the row of motorbikes, generously providing recovery services from strenuous ‘posing next to deadly machinery’ exercises, is a Highlands Coffee Shop. Under a canopy of trees, with a funny musical mix of a traditional Vietnamese song, something else reminding me of the beach, and always one 4th generation version of something that used to be reggae, the java and hoa quả was all good and very peaceful.

Quote of the week:

From China Daily:

"China is like a giant elephant riding a bicycle it has to maintain a fast speed, otherwise it will crash."

Remember that!

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

- ON THIS DAY -

On May 8, 1973, militant American Indians who had held the South Dakota hamlet of Wounded Knee for 10 weeks surrendered.


Once, in another life (a teenage life) I spent some time in Wounded Knee. Hamlet is a good word for it. I remember a hill with a cemetery on it, a handful of trees mixed with a few old buildings, a couple Winnebagos, and a horse corral with a guy in a cowboy hat training horses. Mostly I remember a lot of space and the feeling you get, on the west side of the flat middle bit of the US, that the sky and the earth have not only gotten bigger, but also closer together, leaving less room for all the stuff that people do. More space and less room … It's a feeling I don’t find often in Hanoi!

There is one spot here which always looks very secluded to me, somehow. Every day on the way to work I go through a big intersection, usually sitting at the light amid the crowd of jostling motorbikes and sundry wheeled paraphernalia, and I see a tower on the corner of one building. It’s not really that high, but it is two or three stories higher than all the surrounding buildings. Just a square, concrete tower not any larger than it would have to be to put a stairway inside it. The top is a jumbled mess of green-ness, plants spilling down the sides and pushing up and out like bean sprouts bending toward the sun. Ten square meters of somebody’s private wilderness, spurting above the middle of Hanoi, it’s a personal version of more space created around less room.