2/12/14

Good Morning Vietnam (and afternoon! and evening! repeat 6 times)

I left for Hanoi around 6:30am to catch my flight and it was weird to be on the streets at that time in my hood (Zhujiang New Town) which is normally abuzz with people, cars, vendors, etc.  For some reason, the quiet/lack of people made it seem more “foreign” & made me flash back to when I arrived in Almaty for Peace Corps (although that was like 3 or 4 in the morning).

And check it out: going through security for my flight – leaving one “totalitarian” Communist state for another one – I did not have to take off my shoes.  Score another one for the over-zealous, sheep-like American reaction to “threats.”

Are there any U.S. airports where they will truck you out by bus to departing planes?  They do have the standard gates here, and ramps to planes, but there are also many where you go through the gate, get on a bus, and then get shuttled out to a plane.  This happened to me in Cairo (another flashback).  For some reason, it kinda trips me out, but also makes it feel a little “glam”/exotic to walk up a stair ramp in the open air to board a place.  I feel like the President!  J

As for Vietnam, it was a nice trip.  I usually prefer 1-2 week trips where I bounce around to several cities, doing forced march sightseeing to see as much as I can.  This was the first time in a long time….can’t even remember when…where I spent 6 days in one city.  But it was cool.  I did a couple of day trips, a city tour, and then explored Hanoi the rest of the time.  Observations:

No China smell!  This was surprising since Hanoi is a very old city (they celebrated their 1,000 year anniversary in 2010).  But I finally realized it doesn’t smell for the same reason Hong Kong doesn’t: Western sewer system – although Hanoi’s French system is obviously older than HK’s British system, so we’ll see what happens when it needs to be updated/replaced.

The Vietnamese are much friendlier than the Chinese.  Yes, I know this will come as a shock to anyone who’s been to China!  But I was still surprised they were friendly to an obvious American considering…. 

As I mentioned on FB, the currency was a challenge to deal with.  One U.S. dollar is worth over 21,000 Vietnamese Dong (huh huh huh, I said dong!).  It wasn’t until I’d been there a few days that I could get over the shock of hearing, for example, a t-shirt cost 100,000!  As a result, I didn’t end up with many souvenirs – in fact, only one.  I usually try to get one “semi-high end” local thing reflective of the culture (e.g., in Egypt I got a really nice rug), and I was going to get a nice embroidered piece of a local scene.  But the first one I found that I liked (of the One Pillar Pagoda) threw me off coz of the “high” price (over 1.5 million Dong!), and then afterwards every one I saw just wasn’t quite right.  Ditto for t-shirts.  At the end of the day, all I got was a propaganda poster from the Vietnam war – but I’m happy with that!  It shows a “monstrous” Nixon leering over Vietnam/children and says, “The Monster Nixon!”  Hmmm, I guess that’s more a statement of fact, rather than “propaganda.”  J

I happened to be in Vietnam when they were celebrating Tet, which was cool as I got to see the decorations AND experience the city both before half the people left and then after.  When I was walking around on New Year’s Day, I could actually cross the streets without worrying about getting taken out by a scooter.  The claim is that fully half of the city’s population (6.5 million) goes to their home village during Tet.  Not all of them took their scooters, but most did.  There are supposed to be 3.5 million scooters in Hanoi, which means more than one for every 2 people (which includes children!), but it sure as hell seems like I saw more than 3 million myself.  And apparently they are not bound by traffic laws.  The t-shirt I should have bought had a stylized drawing of “Hanoi traffic” with a mass of scooters.  It was a trip.

The food was good.  Believe it or not, I did NOT have any Pho while I was there, but I’ve never been much of a soup person, have had good Pho before, etc. But I ate somewhere different every day – from semi-high end places to the local fast food chain.  I was only mildly adventurous, though – at one place, I had some wood-cured shredded water buffalo (very good with the spicy Thai dipping sauce and local herbs); and on the boat trip around Ha Long Bay, I went ahead and had some fresh (non-fried) squid.  Otherwise, I had standard fare I knew I’d be okay with (fried rice, various vegetable and/or chicken and/or fish dishes, etc.).   
My hotel was nice enough – esp. for the price ($20 a night, which included breakfast – a decent buffet, too, not that “continental” crap that means some token bananas and hard muffins).  The Old Quarter in Hanoi, where I stayed, is full of boutique hotels that run the gamut from borderline scuzzy to high end.  Mine was a little “worn” in the stairway (no elevator), but my room was nice enough, clean, good-sized bed, cute décor, etc.  The downside: their water system went down and I had to switch to their “sister hotel” for my last two nights and the room there wasn’t as nice/cute – tho still clean AND did have a bathtub (mine had a “mini” tub I could not soak in), so I got to have a nice long soak in the tub for the first time since I left the states!

For anyone considering a trip to Hanoi, I would definitely recommend staying in the Old Quarter.  It’s very “authentic”/cool, there’s lots to do and see (the lake is cool, as is the temple on the little island in it), and it’s cool to wander the streets to check out the architecture, food, markets (different streets are named after the goods they sell), dodge the scooters, etc.  You WILL get the peddlers hitting you up.  For me, I had tons of guys who wanted to repair/fix my beat up shoes.  It was actually kind of fun to see the response from some of the guys with their little shoe repair kits – more than one literally gasped when they saw mine.  To be honest, I should have taken one of them up on it just to see what he could have accomplished – after all, it would have only cost me about 20,000 dong.  J

Beyond that, I got many, many guys asking, “Book?” (They all had small suitcase size boxes full of random books – usually including “Catch-22,” “Papillon,” and other random books, travel guides, etc.  I could fend most of them off by displaying a sullen Chinese look, shaking my head quickly, saying no.  But after I waved off the books, they immediately said, “Marijuana?  Woman?”  I almost always laughed at this, and then finally – out of curiosity – asked one guy, “How much for the marijuana?”  When he said 1.5 million, again, I did the double take and moved on (NOTE: for those interested in my more “risqué” adventures, e-mail me; I’m trying to keep this blog PG for my parents/other delicate souls).

Most everything else about the trip you can glean from the pics I posted on Facebook, but I think my most interesting/surreal experience was the Ho Chi Minh complex (with the Hoa Lo/”Hanoi Hilton” prison a close second).  As a history student, it was very interesting to see/hear about the French occupation and the Vietnam war from a different perspective.  Despite some of the things they did during the war, it’s hard not to feel sorry for these people who have been subjected to so much foreign interference (to put it mildly), and – as mentioned – it’s amazing to find them still so friendly after all that.


Seeing “Uncle Ho” – the actual Ho Chi Minh – in his preserved glass case in the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum was truly a trip.  The first time I’ve seen a dead body (the few funerals I’ve been to have been closed coffin).  The process, the security, etc. to get in there, the eerie silence as you loop around the case, thinking about this guy’s role in history and what he meant to his country, etc.  It was just all very surreal.  If I were Vietnamese, I probably would have been crying all over myself.  An equivalent for an American would be seeing George Washington or Abraham Lincoln’s preserved body.  Very, very intense.

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