Buddhas and Other Muses

More from the Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum.

This guy, the ear-scratching guy, I think is my favorite of these pictures. Buddha statues come in all shapes and poses, but you can just see this one's expression saying, "Aaahhhhh." The following shot is part of a lacquer work. I like lacquer paintings, and the process to make them is just too painstaking to think about.

And something entirely different:

Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum

Style, a pig with pure style! These are a few pictures from the Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum. This next shot is a woodprint from the village of Dong Ho which is famous for ... woodprints. I like woodprints, the Dong Ho ones are cool even if rather formulaic. This one is of Hai Ba Trung, plus an elephant, so it's got to be high on my list!



Galleries with windows are nice, but they do make for surprising pictures sometimes! And this below, I have no recollection of exactly what that was but I'm pretty sure it didn't happen naturally.



Here we have the "Tall Four Seasons on Silks and Short Wooden People on Pedestal" Gallery:

Street View

The corn wagon, fully equipped with a charcoal fire, a steamer, a big pile of sweet corn and an umbrella is always a welcome sight. The corn here is a bit more mealy and not quite as sweet as where I come from, but fresh steamed or roasted right there on the street, it still makes a delicious snack.



When you need a place to throw your corncob...


These clouds of balloons, laden down with bicycles, float all over Hanoi. Randomly, it seems. Disney World must be just around the corner!

Ghosts of Tet Past ...

Bite-sized Sunshine

For everybody out there enjoying that snowy season – take a good look at these pictures. Hopefully you can glean some vitamin D from them... Ridiculously small, fairly cheap (if you are friendly to the ladies selling them), and jumping-up-and-down sweet, these things are addictive. I'll give you some, but you better get here fast!

Fruit-of-the (new) Day

Hồng xiêm, the local version of sapodilla. Happily I can buy those at the market 50 meters from my house. If they are not quite ripe, they are firm and have the very strange property of, in spite of being juicy, making your mouth dry up. Well ripened they are soft, consistency like a ripe pear maybe, with a sweet caramel-ly taste. MMMMM. :)

Hà Nội Thủ Đô

River Route

Hanoi - Back on the Street

Back in Hanoi, the rhythm of the streets rolls on without a pause. I think it is one of the most appealing, even addicting, aspects of the city for me, this endless stream of unadulterated, undecorated, raw life ebbing and flowing on every street. Most notable is the buying and selling, but at core, it is mostly about simple population density. Nearly everything that people do gets done on the street. For myself, however, what gets done on the street is largely just observation. Study and work are most successfully pursued in a place with fewer distractions. I suppose it speaks to the quietness of my life before Vietnam, my inability to block out the blindingly vibrant activity to focus on my own task. In any case, it is a manageable and pleasant addiction to cultivate!

Bricks in the Wall

Iran Awakening
Shirin Ebadi
The gripping story of a determined, intellectual Iranian woman’s experiences, from her childhood under the Shah, as a university student during the Iranian revolution, and her work as a legal professional and eventually a leading human rights advocate within Iran.

Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace… One School at a Time
Greg Mortenson, David Oliver Relin
Mountaineer-turned-development worker Greg Mortenson dives into life in northern Pakistan with an unconventional approach that gets things done. And he drinks tea too, I can dig that!

Red Tape and White Knuckles
Lois Pryce
This woman rides her motorcycle from London to Cape Town. And has a sense of humor writing about it. I liked this book because it is ‘just’ a story about the journey, it’s not a history lesson or political analysis of the places she goes through and it doesn’t try to be. A frank account of what travel in Africa is like, or at least what it was like for her.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
William Kamkwamba, Brian Mealer
William Kamkwamba grew up in a small village in Malawi. Through a combination of curiosity, access to an old science textbook, and frustration at being unable to continue school, he built a windmill next to his house to power electric lights in the evening. With this as evidence of both determination and ability, he is able to return to school, eventually to university, and of course, write a book about it all.