Vespa World Heritage...

The road to Mỹ Sơn was made more interesting as there was a tourism festival going on, which involved a bicycle race. Naturally I was completely unaware of this, and totally by chance (like most of life) I ran into the back of the bike race just as it was beginning. So the last 30 km to Mỹ Sơn were slow driving, with crowds of motorbikes following just for the spectacle, and crowds of locals lining the road yelling hello and, I suppose, scratching their heads at why people would want to ride bicycle that far that fast... Anyway, I didn't have to worry about getting lost - following the crowd is the safest way to drive here, and in this case it was also the right road, an added bonus!

In addition to the bicycle race was a Vespa Convention. I don't know that much about Vespas, but living in Vietnam I have developed a certain liking for motorbikes, and my weakness for vehicles with 'character' goes back to when I was like 13, hanging desperately on to the back seat of my brothers' VW Beatle waiting for it to disintegrate around me... So, the Vespa Convention:

It's the retro version of retro woodgrain.

Che travels

To make up for all the motorbikes in Vietnam that don't have

mirrors or lights or horns.

Open Season on Social Evils

When I was teaching English I would sometimes find reference to the Social Evils in student essays. Upon inquiring about exactly what sort of things are Social Evils, some of the responses were predictable - gambling, prostitution and drug use, while some were less predictable - littering, disrespecting your parents... Still, for me at least, when I read about somebody cracking down on Social Evils, I have to keep on reading before I have any real idea of what might be going on!

The Social Evils are having a hard time here recently. A couple months ago the New Century, Hanoi’s biggest night club, was raided and over 1000 “revellers” were taken into custody, at least for a night. The club is, for now anyway, closed down and the owners are facing drug charges.

More recently some Vietnamese were arrested for gambling. In a rather puzzling bit of logic, foreigners are allowed to gamble, but Vietnamese are not. These are the same Vietnamese who sit on street corners everywhere exchanging cash over a game of checkers, or mah-jong, or a football match, or most anything it seems.

All that is stuff I read about in the news. Not being much of a club-goer or a gambler, I’m not particularly offended or gratified by dance halls and casinos being shut down. However, Friday night I went out for some music, and discovered one new Social Evil – live music. Live music was, at least this week, verboten at the R&R Tavern, which is the place for laidback live music. The R&R is also the place for pork BBQ with coleslaw and, considering it is in Hanoi, authentic burritos with pineapple hot sauce by the guy who is supposed to be singing. Fortunately, strange foods that foreigners like have not yet been nominated to the Social Evils list. Although if I were nominating, I’d award that hot sauce a higher potential for evil than any music I’ve heard there!

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

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!

- 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.

Liberation Day

This weekend is one long holiday here - Friday was the Hung Kings Day (fathers of the Vietnamese nation in, lets say, 269 bc), today Monday is Liberation Day, and tomorrow is May Day. April 30, 1975, Vietnam was officially re-united. I was rather small then, I don't exactly remember the occasion. However today, there was a sort of circus in the middle of the street. The funny thing is they often have concerts and performances there, and they never close the street. So everyone just keeps coming until there is about a half mile of mayhem, and everybody in the front can see the event and everybody else just sits there and breathes motorbike exhaust until the show is over. This time I got there early enough to get seat with a view.

Before it got crowded

After that…

Twirling hoops

Twirling flaming hoops

Bouncing on a stick

Bouncing and twirling a drum on foot, upside-down

Twirling burning bamboo

Trapeze

Euro Bovines

Europe Days 2007 in Vietnam are opening with a decidedly non-conformist herd of cows, currently grazing contentedly in Lenin Park. Cow graffiti must be effective, I think I remember some appearing in Harrisburg once, and I remember some as well in Bennington VT where I used to slip through with a rig early in the morning.. Anyway, cows:

Spring is here

Forever and a day

Yes it has been forever and a day since I posted anything. I am still here, and, like, getting up every morning, eating pho, motorbiking with my fingers crossed and all that, so what does the lack of news mean? I guess I haven’t learned anything in the last month? That can’t be it!

I have seen two noteworthy films recently, the first of which is called (with great originality), Congo River, and it is about the Congo River. It appeals to me on several levels. While it was billed as a documentary, it is less of a ‘facts and figures’ kind of documentary, and more of a ‘here is what happened to me’ kind of documentary. Most of the film involves a sort of river barge version of a matatu, how could that fail to be fascinating?

Apart from that the film is narrated in French, obviously with a lot of local languages as well and I heard all of two words that I remember from Swahili (of the four that I remember), and I was provided with Vietnamese commentary. It was a film, not a lecture, so I thoroughly enjoyed it in spite of not understanding much of the narrative. Languages are addictive, and naturally, ever after the first one they just give you a headache.

An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s film on climate change did actually make it to Hanoi. Of course, most films make it here before they get anywhere else, through the $1 sidewalk DVD sector, but I mean in a cinema. I don’t think there was much about the film that surprised me, outside, perhaps, of that fact that Al Gore’s delivery has been de-woodenized. Maybe it is easier to be engaging when you are facing the establishment, instead of sort of staggering along underneath it.

On climate change, there are a couple ethanol plants underway here in Vietnam, at least one of which will use cassavas. Which is a great idea, I can’t think of a better way to use a cassava! That in spite of reservations about ethanol as a sort of bandaid on a bullet wound, again pushing off that nasty little issue of the actual problem – the bigger is better complex.

Well, I guess the last month wasn't a complete wash. zaijian