Hanoi

I've been here three times now. The first time I saw very little as I arrived at 6am, slept a little, sewed new lining into my bag, had some lunch and then went on the internet for about 5 hours. I decided to enquire about trips to Halong Bay and CatBa Island and ended up leaving the next morning at 7am!! When I came back from CatBa I stayed one night and then got a night train the next night up to SaPa in the north of Vietnam near the Chinese border. This time I have had 2 nights and days and have seen a little more.

Hanoi is a busy city, though staying in the Old Quarter is nice as you see a lot of life as it has been for a long time. The streets are named after the trade or craft that happened and was sold on that street and many of them still sell the same or the modern equivalent. Wandering today we found some new streets we hadn't been on before one of them particularly narrow and quaint. There are motorbikes/scooters galore and a constant cacophany of traffic and horns. Cyclo drivers hail you at every corner asking where you are going and letting yuo know they could take you there for very cheap; motorbike taxi riders compete for your attention. There are women balancing bamboo poles with a basket hanging from each end on their shoulders and selling fruit or bread or vegetables or other things that I don't recognise. There are streets where traffic seems to travel in more than two directions and pavements where there are so many motorbikes parked that pedestrians have to pass on the street, dodging the moving bikes, usually approaching leaning on the horn. All along the pavements are wee stalls selling food and drink. Each stall generally specialises in one dish - either Pho (noodle soup) with a choice of meats (or none!),or Com (rice) or Xom (a sticky rice kind of thing) or other tings that I haven't discovered yet. They have a small stall and then a stack of blue plastic stools about a foot high. Some have wee tables too but otherwise you perch around on the stools and use another one as a table in the middle of the group. These can be cheap but you never know - the Vietnamese as a rule charge tourists more and how much more varies and can be ridiculous. A consistent source of frustration for the budget traveller here. Vietnam wouldn't be so expensive to travel in if they charged normal prices as elsewhere. Oh well. There have been lovely people but at times you can meet just a few too many trying to do you in! And I have never been in a city where I have been asked more times if I wanted my shoes shined! "Very dirty shoes, very cheap, shoe shine,ok?! Ok?!!"

I went to see the famous Water Puppet show the second time I was here. It was interesting and I couldn't figure out how they moved a lot of the puppets! The sleep inducing heat in the theatre meant that the paper fans they gave were not just for a souvenir and an hour was a good length. Yesterday I went to Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. It was an interesting experience, though thought provoking how different it is from what his request was! He is laid in a glass case guarded by four guards (and loads more in the building), inside a large formal and rather imposing building. You are not allowed to talk, smile, or move your hands from your side, especially not to touch your head - all out of respect. HCM is taken every year to Russia to be done up and fixed. His request was that he be creamted and that his ashes be put in three places in the north, south and centre of Vietnam under a simple shelter in each place. Kind of the opposite really! The Ho Chi Minh museum was interesting too. It was well signed in Vietnames, French and English. There was some interesting history and quotes and then some good, though slightly abstract exhibitions upstairs that were a little hard to relate to the theme but I enjoyed in an artistic ideas sense. The doctrine and dogma of communismis very appealing and sounds great, but when you see the party officials driving around in flash new cars it is exposed in reality.

We visited the museum of fine art which was interesting too and there were some good pieces. I then went to the Temple of Literature where there is a statue of Confucius and some of his best pupils. The worship of him and learning seems to be the purpose of this place. On the way there I passed a guy doing long strips of Chinese calligraphy on the street. I was invited to sit down and given a small cup of green tea while I watched. I went to a couple of other small galleries on my way back towards the Old Quarter. There are lots of small galleries. Some of them have just paintings and a lovely smell of oil paint, but there is also a lot of laquer paintings. One lady explained to me how they were done and it is really interesting. A complex version of the kiddies colourful crayons and black paint pictures.

I have enjoyed getting to see a bit more of Hanoi and it is nice having a city where there is a lake at it's centre. Sitting by the Hoan Kiem lake, it appears to provide a stillness and calm amid the constant noise of traffic and horns flying around the edge of the lake. While you can't sit there without being approached by someone trying to sell you photocopied books and packets of postcards, or wanting to shine your shoes it is still nice. It is also used by amorous couples sitting and cuddling on the benches. West Lake is even bigger and is nice to look out at as long as you don't look at the water at the edge! It has boats and even swan boats for hire but we didn't see anyone out in them.