Hanoi (again)
Trip Start
May 12, 2005
1
14
33
Trip End
Sep 11, 2005
Hanoi,
Vietnam
Monday, June 13, 2005
Again failed to visit the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, as it is shut on Mondays. Oh well... Instead went to the Museum of Revolution, which charted the national movements against the French and Americans - and towards communism.
The museum was all the more interesting for being able to read the French translations of the exhibit titles, as well as the English ones. Pictures which might quite innocently read in English "Vietnamese woman makes food for soldiers" were rendered in French as "Vietnam mother delighted to provide essential supplies to sustain heroic Vietnamese nationalists, fighting the maurauding French colonialists"! The later paragraphs about the "imperialist American invaders" continued in a similar vein...
Being fed up of tours in Vietnam, I opted not to take any of the possible organised day trips from Hanoi - my original plan - and instead set off on a two-fold expedition of my own devising: firstly (and most importantly) to find a new book to read; and secondly to see whether the Red River was actually red.
This expedition took me through some of the areas of the city that I probably would not otherwise have visited: parts of the business district; housing areas of various levels of desirability; and through a very grubby market just near the river bank. I actually managed to spend the whole afternoon without seeing a single other tourist!
Results:
- book found: a second-hand copy of Thomas Hardy's "The Woodlanders" (nothing like a good dose of misery to make you appreciate your own surroundings!)
- colour of the Red River: weeeellll, given a certain amount of artistic licence and the right lighting conditions, yes, a muddy kind of red!
In the evenings I went for cheap and delicious 'street food', including soup, noodles, rice, vegetables and occasionally the odd bit of meat/unidentifiable object(!) which I ate round.
Also spent a fair few hours at "bia hoi" corner - a crossroads in Hanoi's old quarter with bia hoi being sold on each corner - with Aaron and Nabil (one of the French guys from the Halong Bay trip). We all sat on tiny plastic stools in the gutter, getting very merry for less than a dollar each and watching the world go by. Fantastic!
On my final evening in Hanoi, I went to a traditional 'water puppet' show in a theatre by Hoan Kiem lake. Although not really my sort of thing, it was interesting to see how it was done, as I'd heard so much about it. The puppeteers (who all train for years) stand in a 4x4m tank of water, the backdrop hiding them from their audience. The puppets - people, dragons, phoenixes, ducks, etc - are operated by levers underneath the water and appear from the wings or from underneath the rather murky waters with much panache! The show consisted of a series of pastiches, accompanied by 'interesting' music on traditional instruments. I was glad I'd gone to see it, but was also glad it didn't last for more than an hour!
Cathy
