VN 14: Maison Centrale, Part 1

Maison Centrale is known in the US as the Hanoi Hilton and is what the Vietnamese used to call Hoa Lo, "fiery oven". Much of it has been demolished, but just enough has been kept as a tourist attraction--as an important historical relic.

Hoa Lo has an established place on the tourist train in Hanoi, and it tends to be the place most Americans ask about when they hear I have been to Vietnam, the way Vietnamese are asked if they saw the Statue of Liberty after they visit the US.

Hoa Lo was built by the French to jail Vietnamese, something which many Americans do not realize. 

In addition to the experience of touring the prison  in the sweltering heat--a truly humbling experience--I can also recommend a view from the eighth-floor-or-so air conditioned Australian sports bar in the glass and chrome skyscraper across the street.

VN 12: Work Hard, Play Hard

This almost-divey bar is no more; the last time I was in Hanoi, I made a point of walking down "coffee street' in the Old Quarter, Hang Hanh, and it had been replaced by a hotel.

More specifically, according to Google, it has been replaced by one Lakeside Palace Hotel, a boutique hotel with "warm cherrywood furniture...silks and natural linen...Italian marble bathroom". The hotel  has seven storeys and a restaurant at the top. By Hanoi standards, at least on the website it doesn't look really, seriously, competitively  upscale--yet--but it is certainly not a earthy as the Funky Monkey was.

Funky Monkey was a dark and cool and well-located place to get a Tiger Beer. Whether or not karaoke ever happened there, I don't know, but my guess is yes, it certainly did.

VN 11: Copyright Violation: Everything Else

Let me put it this way: when I asked, a friend gave me directions to a neighborhood (an intersection, actually) where I could buy software to bring home to friends. When I found a shop and asked for not just one copy but for two, I got a quizzical look. But the woman did sell the two copies to me. Later I learned why: once you slide the software disk into the laptop, the first thing you needed to do was click "Crack". And then you could not only use what you bought but also make as many copies of it as you wanted.

These days DVDs of Slumdog Millionaire or Platoon or Mamma Mia! or pretty much any current movie are for sale in Ho Chi Minh City for a dollar each. The DVD may play well, may play for five minutes, or may not play at all. 

A book I was given for my Vietnamese class was a faint copy of a copy of a copy, nearly 300 pages  all stapled together. Some pages were crooked, some pages had darker print than others, and some pages were missing. Nobody seemed to worry.

With Vietnam's entry into the World Trade Organization, examples of copyright violation are lessening, but, tellingly, when Vietnamese visitors came to the US, they often chose to buy vitamins and upscale cosmetics to take home, in part to be sure of the quality and the brand.

VN 10: Copyright Violation: Art

On the bright side, one way of learning how to paint is to copy The Masters. And so, in select locations, at least in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, you see art shops open to the street where a painter paints, say, a copy of the Mona Lisa. Or copies a painting from a book.

Open-air, open-city painting.

I have heard that, as in the US, art majors are not always immediately successful or employable. And so I am told this is one place where art majors may end up after university.

I once had a professor in a graduate writing class who observed that the two ways of learning anything are imitation and practice. 

Maybe so.

VN 9: Water Puppets Walking on Water

Among the most charming of the routine tourist sights in Hanoi is the Thang Long Water Puppets.

Basically the Thang Long Water Puppets have taken a Red River (northern Vietnam) cultural activity--people living on the rivers entertaining each other with puppets controlled by dowels under the water rather than with strings--and made it a colorful and splashy indoor event. The puppets act out folktales and other stories: farmers harvesting crops, a student returning home, and a dragon dance, among others. It's a colorful and splashy event. Very plinky-plunky. The puppeteers are not visible until the end when they come out from behind the curtain that hides them, but the musicians are visible throughout. 

Whenever I have been to a performance in Hanoi, the audience seemed to be made up of mostly Western tourists, and when I asked (especially early in my visits), I was told the cost (maybe $%?) was too expensive for most Vietnamese. BUT in Ho Chi Minh City, the audience in the newer water puppets venue in District 1 (basically HCMC's Manhattan, give or take) seemed to be a mix of locals and tourists, possible evidence of the rising Vietnamese middle class.

VN 8: Slow Daytime Traffic in Hanoi

Until Vietnam remodels totally and unfortunately removes all the vestiges of their colonial history, going to Vietnam has moments when it is like visiting Paris. The architecture remains. St least dome. For the time being.

The street crowds are not Parisian, nor is the November craichin, dust rain.

VN 7: More Life on the Street

There are sidewalks but you can't always see them, and walking in the street in some places is perfectly acceptable.

You just have to manage not to get hit.

For a far more vivid explanation of crossing a street in Vietnam than I can ever give you, go to YouTube and search for "crossing street in Vietnam". Yes, there are many more brand new red-green-yellow streetlights in Vietnam than there used to be, and in some places the traffic does not always consider the traffic light as just kind of a loosey-goosey suggestion that can be ignored. These days sometimes cars and trucks, motorbikes and bicycles and cyclos do stop, even for pedestrians.

Really.

That said, it still helps to think of navigating the streets of Vietnam this way: as you make your way around, you have to help them not hit you.

And you also need to be aware enough to notice not just the new red light on the corner, but also the motorbike racing towards you--aiming towards you, it seems--going the wrong way up the one way street you are walking along.

VN 6: Forms of Transport

Of course in cities there are cabs, often with meters if you are lucky, although these days more and more people are buying cars ostensibly "for hire". Yoke ladies tote their wares, and some bicycles seem to have been there since what the Vietnamese call the "American War." Increasingly trucks bring in produce and everything else from the countryside. But 100cc motorbikes still do some of the hauling of goods from vegetables to hogs and ducks to fifteen feet of rebar if necessary.

The pedicab (cyclo) in the front is a dying breed, so to speak. In the past as often as not they were driven by former allies of the US who most likely one way or another come across hard times. (But I did once have a cyclo driver in Hanoi who could not have been more than twenty but who had only one arm. But he could pedal.)

Given the increasing car and truck traffic in Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi (and the accompanying pollution), I was not surprised to read that licenses for cyclos are no longer being issued--except, I assume, for the bright, shiny new ones supplied to guests by some world class hotels,  silver and clean cyclos that have a red canopy over the seat, one advertising, for instance, the Hanoi-located Hilton Hotel.

VN 5: Life on the Street

At least (if not before) since 1986, the time of doi moi (the socialist-oriented market economy), life has been lived on the streets. Especially in the cities, the fronts of houses tend to be narrow since they are taxed according to that width. Or so I have been told.

In many cases, the front of the house is the family business, and that business  makes its way onto the street. Go past where the store meets the street--that is, go in--and you will find the home, however big or small: bedroom, kitchen, maybe a sitting room. Maybe just one room. 

It seems at first that everything is wide open since the front of every home is, well, wide open--until it is all locked up tight at night.

The sidewalk serves as sidewalk, yes, but equally as front porch and parking lot.

VN 4: Sitting, or The Crouch

Perhaps she recycles paper.

To rest, she sits on the sidewalk on a piece of the ubiquitous low red or blue plastic furniture--a stool or a low chair. Plastic makes sense in Vietnam given that the weather is always hot (at least by standards set by the northeast US) and that when it rains, it rains. Think a rain whiteout.

But all Vietnamese can squat--in effect, sitting without a piece of furniture. Which is to say they don't need furniture in order to rest.

Life is lived on the street.

VN 2: Yoke Lady

Especially when cars were fewer than they are now and Vietnam was more a developing nation than it is now, one of the more you-can't see-this-at-home sights were the yoke ladies.

They were (and still are) traveling sellers of fruit (usually only one kind at a time, depending on the season); sellers of bottles of water (by reputation the more reliable and safe is La Vie, bottled by Nestle)--or of postcards, trinkets and what have you. Whatever might sell.

Or she just carries whatever she has from here to there.

Or she may be carrying a small kitchen, basically, and for a price she will pour and cook some  batter and give you a small waffle to eat as you walk around.

Some loads bounce more than others as she walks along.

VN 3: Yoke Lady, Part 2

A closer view.

Always friendly, always willing to sell you whatever they have: lychees, rambutan, dragonfruit, mangos. The rule in Vietnam is that buyers are supposed to bargain over the price--politely and in a friendly fashion so that no one loses face--and although I did do some of that, when it came to the yoke ladies, I never really tried too hard. Covered to protect their skin from the sun, they walk and walk. 

If I am not in the market for what they are selling, they smile and nod and move on, as do I.

One yoke lady who found me on a beach near Danang told me, "You no buy, I no eat. Babies no eat." I was going to buy some of her lychees anyway, and when I did, she squatted down next to me and  ate them with me in a companionable silence, the two of us just smiling and looking out at what the Vietnamese call the East Sea (and what we know as the South China Sea).

VN 1: From Galaxy Hotel, Hanoi

Of course before I went to Vietnam for the first time in 1998 I read everything I could get my hands on. There weren't too many guidebooks for tourists, though, and as I recall there was one AOL interest group about Vietnam that had a total of three members, one of whom was me. (One of those members warned me that the weather was "sweltering" which proved to be an understatement. But still I remember reading it.)

So based on a recommendation in the Lonely Planet guidebook, I chose a three-star business hotel in Hanoi, Galaxy Hotel (now permanently closed) on Hang Cot, near the Old Quarter. My room was more than basic, had AC, hot water and a few Vietnamese TV channels, and except for one early afternoon, the electricity worked. The location was close enough to the tourist sights but it was also quiet--an amenity not all hotels in high-volume Vietnam (or maybe anywhere) can offer, truth be told.

The pretty much all-glass Galaxy Hotel  lobby looked out on a roundabout, and during the late afternoons when I sat to cool off and watch the traffic, I was usually offered a bottle of water or a Tiger Beer. Since at that time (more than these days), traffic moved like fish swim but with pedestrians, motorbikes, bikes and bigger vehicles just kind of making their way any way they wanted to, I had a lot to look at.

Third Anniversary and Another Change

The short version: whoohoo! Three years of retirement already.

Three years ago on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend I moved the last boxes out of my office, and the following Tuesday the first thing I did was to check online to make sure the retirement incentive had been deposited.

It had.

I was free.

I was buoyant in ways I had not expected. A fried was right: when you do what your parents expect; as an adult, you do what your workplace requires, and in retirement (if the Fates allow, anyway), you do whatever the hell you want.

Although I may be overstating things, most days I feel more centered than I ever have. I do on some occasions miss some of the people I used to work with, but, truth be told, although I am on the far end of campus and in the pool twice a week,  I don't visit any of the places I used to go. I go in the door to the gym that is the farthest from any place I ever worked. That said, though,  I do still enjoy, in a one-time-removed kind of way, a good rumor about the place every once in a while. And I still have the doll (if that is what she is called) a colleague made of me (and of all the members of her academic department) from a good ten to fifteen years ago, and she--a version of me--is at the top of  this page).

On the whole, though: not my circus, not my monkeys.

I no longer insist on staying in bed until at least eight  in the morning in part because for decades I got up around six. I can get up whenever I want to. I can read (and write) anything I want (no memos, very little work-related email).

Most importantly--and I know how lucky I am to be able to say all this--as far as I am concerned, the brain cells I thought were gone because of work stress and meetings, gone from spontaneous combustion or for whatever other reason, seem to have regenerated. Or at least that is how things have felt for a while in the New World of No Stress from Work. I like to think this is true.

What I choose to do with my time organizes my time. Yes, I still make lists as I always have, and some days I am more productive than others; there are things to be said for ignoring most of the items on the list and sitting and reading on the back deck. Celebration takes lots of forms.

To celebrate this anniversary, this blog is going to take a detour--for how long I do not know. But for at least the next few weeks (and perhaps much longer), this blog's much more frequent postings will consist of photos and prose, mostly about my almost-twenty years visiting and traveling in Vietnam.

Come along with me.

Copyright 2018
Sandra Engel