Festivale!

I have to interrupt this photo-stream for a little to talk about Hai Bà Trưng, the Trung sisters. The Trung sisters lived around the beginning of the 1st millennium, just outside present-day Hanoi, and were, like, seriously good at kung fu. One Trưng sister fell in love with a local dandy named Thi Sách. Mr. Thi Sách had a lot going for him; he had a shiny Japanese motorbike, one of those burnt-yellow Korean boy band hairstyles, and a mobile with 4893 ring tones. However, much to his dismay, the Chinese (who wore the big hats here, back then) caught up with him one day and he wasn’t wearing his helmet so they took him away to someplace for people who don’t wear helmets. Now, that left one Bà Trưng up the creek with no paddle, as it were. So she rounded up her sister, and all the intrepid women in the neighborhood, they made themselves an army and chased away the Chinese. The army included elephants – those are the elephants in the Hai Ba Trung Temple (picture, I’m talking about the picture of an elephant in the dark) who the Trưng sisters rode into battle, since Thi Sách’s motorbike had been impounded. That elephant told me that Bà Trưng was not particularly thrilled to be on one Vietnamese pachyderm express instead of one Japanese motorbike, but that is how the cookie crumbles. So, there are the roots of Vietnamese matriarchal society, or Vietnamese society’s matriarchal roots, or at very least a nice story which can be interpreted with a matriarchal cast. The rest of the story, well, Hai Bà Trưng were queens for something like 3 years, then the Chinese came back with a bigger madder army, and the elephants got rumbly tummies (the Chinese had left an ox-cart full of peanuts at the café down the road). The legend (this bit is actually the legend, not me, honest) says that the Chinese went into battle in 1st Century birthday suits, and the Hai Bà Trưng being honorable women, turned around and ran away, and so the battle was lost. In any case, along with a Hai Bà Trưng Street in every city, town, village, and berg in Vietnam, there is also the Hai Bà Trưng Temple here in Hanoi, with elephants and occasional festivals.

This picture reminded me of some photos from when I was in Tibet, inspiring me to post some of those photos in an archival sort of way (these are from January 2003), by clicking here you can find my essay on the bus journey out of Lhasa, and photos of the place.

Anyway, back to Hanoi, night on the lake.