As I mentioned in my previous post, we're in Cambodia right now. We left Vietnam on Thursday, feeling much as we did when we left China: that we were saying goodbye to a newfound home away from home, one that we would like to visit again in the not-too-distant future. This was due in large part to the fact that we felt like we had made a real friend there: Max, with whom we had drinks the night before our morning flight to Cambodia. Maya and I had found a copy of the last issue of Revolver magazine I worked on before our trip (with Down on the cover) in a Hanoi bookshop that afternoon, and we showed it to Max, and we talked about how fucked up the music industry is, and he told us about the time he'd had a meal with Metallica's James Hetfield (who is apparently friends with Max's "mate" from Midnight Oil) and James wouldn't go anywhere without his bodyguard. After drinks, he dropped us off at our hotel on his motorbike (yeah, I know Maya and I vowed not get on one of the "damn things" again - but when Max is driving, it doesn't count) and bid him a fond farewell, promising to stay in touch. In homage to Max, here's a link to the Sir No Sir! anti-war flash trailer he showed us one day in his cafe - Punkass Crusade. It's pretty powerful stuff - check it out.
What else will we miss besides Max? The food. Delicious. All about fresh fruit, vegetables, and spices combined delicately with meat and fish. Over our two weeks in Vietnam, we had sizzling Cha Ca, a fish marinated in yogurt and spices grilled up at your table with veggies and served up with fish- and/or shrimp-sauce (and we ate it with an older Australian gentlemen we happened to befriend whose been eating Cha Ca at this one restaurant over the past 15 years and is writing a book on Vietnam); we had the most scrumptious Bun (pronounced "Boon") - a rice-noodle dish with sweet slices of beef, crispy deep-fried garlic pieces, sprouts, sprigs of cilantro, basil, and mint, and all sorts of other unnamed goodness - at a streetside family-style restaurant of questionable hygiene but unquestionable culinary talent; we had mouth-wateringly scrumptious fresh spring rolls, and fried spring rolls, and apple juices, lemon juices, strawberry shakes, slices of papaya, dragon fruit, and the list goes on... Did we pay for our culinary adventures? Occasionally. But we rarely regretted the days-after that we lost in our hotel bathroom.
On Halloween night, which was rainy and cold in Hanoi, we walked down to a movie theater that the propietress of our hotel recommended to us. (By the way, our hotel, Tung Trang, despite our somewhat frightening first night, ended up being awesome.) The theater was in a huge, western-style mall and had stadium seating and great sound and picture. We saw The Bourne Ultimatum, which we had missed when it was in theaters Stateside - and it rocked hard. The film, if you haven't seen it, ends in New York City, and seeing the familiar streets, buildings, bridges, and scenery of our hometown on the big screen, Maya and I felt a tinge of homesickness, which was made even stronger by the fact that sitting in the dark neverland of that mall movie theater felt just like sitting in a movie theater back in the U.S. When the film ended and we stepped back out into the dirty, barely lit, frenetic streets of Hanoi, we felt like we'd stepped right from America into Vietnam. The truth is that as much as Hanoi may have come to feel something like a home, we're still only visitors and our real home is half a world - and two more months - away.
Showing posts with label hanoi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hanoi. Show all posts
Monday, November 5, 2007
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
rock shopping
Last Wednesday Maya and I decided to try and find this metal/hard-rock store in Hanoi, called Coi Xuong Rock Shop, that I had found on that metaltravelguide.com website. The address I had was "So 3 ngo 154 Doi Can," translating to "number 3 alley 154 Doi Can Street); I found Doi Can Street on our map easily - it's a big street not far from the Ho Chi Minh Museum and Memorial; hopefully the alley would make itself apparent once we got to that main drag. So we headed down there, away from the hectic tourist-dominated commercialism of the Old Quarter and into what turned out to be a cool, almost whitey-free, and very authentic-feeling neighborhood. The Vietnamese were still selling shit on the streets, but to each other, instead of predominantly to foreign sightseers. And the street was still jampacked with motorbikes but somehow their drivers didn't seem quite as prepared to mow you down. The vibe was not only a lot chiller but also more friendly - the locals were clearly less concerned with separating us from our money and more intrigued by our mere presence.
As we strolled down Doi Can, we saw an awesome designer respiratory mask hanging in one store and stopped in to buy it. Two little girls - one, maybe 8; the other, maybe 4 - were the only people manning (or "little-girling") the establishment. The older girl handled the transaction shyly, while her younger sister (I presume) waved hello, stared at us, then waved goodbye. Outside, kids were just getting out of school and swarmed the sidewalks, shouting "Hello!," waving, and asking us where we were from and what our names were.
When we finally found 154 Doi Can, the number marked a dark, narrow alley which would have been slightly menacing if it hadn't been for the red-cheeked old woman cheerfully eating at a small table at its entrance. We passed her and wound down a blind corner in the alley. On the other side we found door number 3, which looked exactly like the door of a residence and nothing like the door of a business - until I noticed the small cardboard sign with "Rock Shop" written on it in blocky marker letters sticking out from the wall. Maya and I exchanged confused and amused glances, then I knocked on the door. No response. I knocked again. Same result. Then I heard a sound behind us and turning around, noticed an open doorway into a very dark room in which a man sat in the shadows, smoking a water pipe. He was gesturing for me to ring the doorbell (which I hadn't even noticed). Almost simultaneously, a woman passing behind us in the alley, gestured likewise. I hit the bell a few times, but still no answer.
As Maya and I retreated, somewhat disappointedly, out of the alley, the old woman at the corner accosted us in Vietnamese, either having seen the doorway we were knocking on or guessing where we wanted to go from our look. Seeing that we weren't comprehending a word of what she was telling us, she held up all 10 fingers, and then 5 fingers. "Back in 15 minutes?" Maya asked. The woman didn't understand, but she then held up 6 fingers. "Back by 6?" I asked. The two gestures didn't jibe, since it was about 4:50 at this point, but we thanked the woman for her efforts in communication and decided to continue our stroll down Doi Can and then swing by again on our way back to our hotel.
A little farther down the strip, we noticed on the other side of the street this rather amazing-looking shrine, which was all the more striking because of the way it emerged from the otherwise urban landscape while still looking like it belonged there. I asked Maya to cross the street so I could take a photo of her in front of the structure. As she went to do so, I pulled the camera from the bag and checked its settings; next thing I know, I look up for Maya and she's crossing the street with an old, bent woman in some sort of ethnic, turban-like headwrap holding her arm, walking with her through the whizzing traffic. Maya will later tell me that the old lady's teeth were black. Once they reached the other side of the street, I fully expected the woman to disengage, but she kept walking with Maya arm-in-arm, chatting to her (as Maya would tell me) about god-knows-what in Vietnamese the whole time. It was only after Maya effectively communicated that I was standing on the other side, waiting to take a picture of her, that the old woman went off on her way.
Here's Maya and her friend in front of the temple:
As we strolled down Doi Can, we saw an awesome designer respiratory mask hanging in one store and stopped in to buy it. Two little girls - one, maybe 8; the other, maybe 4 - were the only people manning (or "little-girling") the establishment. The older girl handled the transaction shyly, while her younger sister (I presume) waved hello, stared at us, then waved goodbye. Outside, kids were just getting out of school and swarmed the sidewalks, shouting "Hello!," waving, and asking us where we were from and what our names were.
When we finally found 154 Doi Can, the number marked a dark, narrow alley which would have been slightly menacing if it hadn't been for the red-cheeked old woman cheerfully eating at a small table at its entrance. We passed her and wound down a blind corner in the alley. On the other side we found door number 3, which looked exactly like the door of a residence and nothing like the door of a business - until I noticed the small cardboard sign with "Rock Shop" written on it in blocky marker letters sticking out from the wall. Maya and I exchanged confused and amused glances, then I knocked on the door. No response. I knocked again. Same result. Then I heard a sound behind us and turning around, noticed an open doorway into a very dark room in which a man sat in the shadows, smoking a water pipe. He was gesturing for me to ring the doorbell (which I hadn't even noticed). Almost simultaneously, a woman passing behind us in the alley, gestured likewise. I hit the bell a few times, but still no answer.
As Maya and I retreated, somewhat disappointedly, out of the alley, the old woman at the corner accosted us in Vietnamese, either having seen the doorway we were knocking on or guessing where we wanted to go from our look. Seeing that we weren't comprehending a word of what she was telling us, she held up all 10 fingers, and then 5 fingers. "Back in 15 minutes?" Maya asked. The woman didn't understand, but she then held up 6 fingers. "Back by 6?" I asked. The two gestures didn't jibe, since it was about 4:50 at this point, but we thanked the woman for her efforts in communication and decided to continue our stroll down Doi Can and then swing by again on our way back to our hotel.
A little farther down the strip, we noticed on the other side of the street this rather amazing-looking shrine, which was all the more striking because of the way it emerged from the otherwise urban landscape while still looking like it belonged there. I asked Maya to cross the street so I could take a photo of her in front of the structure. As she went to do so, I pulled the camera from the bag and checked its settings; next thing I know, I look up for Maya and she's crossing the street with an old, bent woman in some sort of ethnic, turban-like headwrap holding her arm, walking with her through the whizzing traffic. Maya will later tell me that the old lady's teeth were black. Once they reached the other side of the street, I fully expected the woman to disengage, but she kept walking with Maya arm-in-arm, chatting to her (as Maya would tell me) about god-knows-what in Vietnamese the whole time. It was only after Maya effectively communicated that I was standing on the other side, waiting to take a picture of her, that the old woman went off on her way.
Here's Maya and her friend in front of the temple:
A closer view:
We had walked maybe 5 minutes, when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was a middle-aged dude in a crisp white shirt on a motorbike, which he had apparently ridden onto the sidewalk. I immediately tried to brush him away, assuming that he was one of the "motobai" drivers trying to get me to pay for a ride. (I think I forgot to mention earlier that Hanoi is absolutely full of motobike taxi-drivers who are constantly harassing you for a ride by calling out "Motobai?!" or waving at you or grunting at you, etc.) But he was persistent and when I finally turned to look at him, he pointed back in the direction that we had come from and said, "Rock Shop," in halting English. "The Rock Shop owner is back?" I asked. He nodded, and with us following on foot, he sped off back toward the store.
When we finally got back down into the alley, door number 3 was wide open, revealing the living room and kitchen of a humble abode. The motorbike dude was standing in there waiting for us (he, it turned out, was the proprietor), and on either side of him were two racks of black T-shirts, which we soon discovered were metal and hard-rock tees from bands ranging from Nirvana to Death. The owner dude didn't speak English at all really, but this didn't stop him from flipping through T-shirts with Maya, phonetically reading out the names of the various bands: "Me-tal-lica. Se-pul-tur-a. Cra-dle of Filth. Link-un..." "Linkin Park," Maya would help him out occasionally. It was pee-your-pants hilarious. After a little while a whole group of teenage boys in their school uniforms rumbled into the shop, clearly shocked - and excited - to find two whities in the store. They talked to the owner in Vietnamese and he opened up this glass case for them so they could inspect a variety of spiked, black leather gauntlets. Maya asked the kids, though a combination of carefully enunciated English and hand gestures, if there was anywhere to see rock shows in Hanoi, but they all shook their heads and laughed. I ended up buying a Pantera T-shirt and a CD by a Vietnamese rock band called Flashback, who, we are positive, are gonna suck big time, but it was the only CD the shop had and I wanted to "support the scene, man." Plus it cost all of 10,000 dong, or about 70 cents. Here's a little video tour of the shop, which I shot after making my purchases - you'll see the mural that was on one wall of a band rocking out and the slogan "Heaven from Hell," written out in band names.
The one thing I wished I had captured in this vid - but didn't notice until after filming - was the portrait of Ho Chi Minh hanging on the living room wall right over one of the racks of rock tees. In a similarly absurd and amazing juxposition, we saw, as we walked back to our hotel from the Rock Shop, a small square dominated by a towering statue of Lenin; a group of Vietnamese teenage boys were practicing their breakdancing right in front of the monument, and honestly, they fucking ruled. So, as the sun went down, Maya and I sat on the curb and watched them B-boying, thinking what an awesome afternoon it had been - and how Lenin's jaw would be on the ground right now, if it were actually him and not just a statue, looking on with us.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
ha long? not long enough
I just added a pic of Maya in her kitty respiratory mask to my last entry, so check that out. I've also added a brief post on blogging difficulties in China; you can read that here. Now a quick rundown of our two-day trip to and through Ha Long Bay...
Seen along the road on our 2 and a half hour ride to the Bay on Monday:
- Water buffalos grazing in swampy rice paddies. Two of them, with tall, white crane-like birds placidly sitting on their backs.
- A motorbike speeding down the highway carrying what looks like a whole chicken coop on the back, right behind the driver, a trail of feather flutters in the bike's wake.
- Tiny colorful cemetaries full of beautiful mini-pagoda shrines appear amidst palm trees and farm fields.
- Ghost-town housing complexes full of those tall, narrow French Colonial-style buildings, all shining new and empty, standing next to crumbling stone shacks, which are all very clearly occupied. When we ask our guide about it later, he explains that these are the weekend homes of rich Vietnamese. As for the tall, narrow construction style, that is due, he says, to the fact that even the rich Vietnamese can only afford small plots of land, so they expand vertically, building multi-floor homes to contain their traditional multi-generational families, with the elders living on the ground floor and the youngest on the top.
- Farmers in those iconic conical straw hats, toiling in vast fields, harvesting their crops by hands and with bent backs. We pass a long line of tourist buses stopped by the side of the road and crowds of pale, khaki-clad sightseers snapping photos of the farmers and their fields. Maya and I talk about how pissed off we would be if hordes of fat whities on vacation were taking pictures of us, grinning at how "quaint" we were, while we did backbreaking work in the hot sun just so we could feed our families and keep our stone shacks from falling completely apart. We agreed that we'd probably grab a clump from the nearest pile of water buffalo dung and throw it at the tourists.
Arriving at the Bay, we boarded a beautiful, ornate wooden boat where we would have our own cozy cabin. The ever-changing view from the deck as we moved out into the ocean was stunning. The Bay has over 1,000 islands of craggy limestone karst peaks and we wound between more than a few of them. Later we would stop and swim in the clear, cool, salty water (I jumped a good 15 feet from the roof of the boat into the waves); we passed floating villages where whole communities live on the water, among the cliffs, fishing and farming pearls; then we stopped at one particularly large island and explored a cathedral-like cavern, its name translating from Vietnamese to mean "Amazing Cave"; and that evening we had a delicious dinner onboard (cucumber and tomato salad with garlic and chili dressing, shrimp cocktail, fried spring rolls, a nicely spiced grilled fish...) Maya and I thought, eyeing the dramatic land/waterscape around us, that if the Great Wall of China had been like something out of The Lord of the Rings, this reminded us of Skull Island from King Kong.
Seen along the road on our 2 and a half hour ride to the Bay on Monday:
- Water buffalos grazing in swampy rice paddies. Two of them, with tall, white crane-like birds placidly sitting on their backs.
- A motorbike speeding down the highway carrying what looks like a whole chicken coop on the back, right behind the driver, a trail of feather flutters in the bike's wake.
- Tiny colorful cemetaries full of beautiful mini-pagoda shrines appear amidst palm trees and farm fields.
- Ghost-town housing complexes full of those tall, narrow French Colonial-style buildings, all shining new and empty, standing next to crumbling stone shacks, which are all very clearly occupied. When we ask our guide about it later, he explains that these are the weekend homes of rich Vietnamese. As for the tall, narrow construction style, that is due, he says, to the fact that even the rich Vietnamese can only afford small plots of land, so they expand vertically, building multi-floor homes to contain their traditional multi-generational families, with the elders living on the ground floor and the youngest on the top.
- Farmers in those iconic conical straw hats, toiling in vast fields, harvesting their crops by hands and with bent backs. We pass a long line of tourist buses stopped by the side of the road and crowds of pale, khaki-clad sightseers snapping photos of the farmers and their fields. Maya and I talk about how pissed off we would be if hordes of fat whities on vacation were taking pictures of us, grinning at how "quaint" we were, while we did backbreaking work in the hot sun just so we could feed our families and keep our stone shacks from falling completely apart. We agreed that we'd probably grab a clump from the nearest pile of water buffalo dung and throw it at the tourists.
Arriving at the Bay, we boarded a beautiful, ornate wooden boat where we would have our own cozy cabin. The ever-changing view from the deck as we moved out into the ocean was stunning. The Bay has over 1,000 islands of craggy limestone karst peaks and we wound between more than a few of them. Later we would stop and swim in the clear, cool, salty water (I jumped a good 15 feet from the roof of the boat into the waves); we passed floating villages where whole communities live on the water, among the cliffs, fishing and farming pearls; then we stopped at one particularly large island and explored a cathedral-like cavern, its name translating from Vietnamese to mean "Amazing Cave"; and that evening we had a delicious dinner onboard (cucumber and tomato salad with garlic and chili dressing, shrimp cocktail, fried spring rolls, a nicely spiced grilled fish...) Maya and I thought, eyeing the dramatic land/waterscape around us, that if the Great Wall of China had been like something out of The Lord of the Rings, this reminded us of Skull Island from King Kong.
After dinner we talked deep into the night with this really cool chick named Michaela from Switzerland, who was travelling alone. We shared our travel experiences thus far, discussed why we travel, and most of all, talked about the challenge of staying open to and connecting with the people of whatever country you are visiting when they are obviously so much poorer than you and so many are constantly asking you for money or sometimes, even worse, trying to scam you. Around midnight Maya and I went to bed, and after a somewhat restless sleep in our cabin, we woke early to catch the sunrise.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
good morning, vietnam (part 2)
Sorry for the delay (and the cliffhanger ending of the last post) - just got back from Ha Long Bay, which was amazing, but more on that in a bit. First, back to your originally scheduled programming already in progress... The next morning we woke up and found ourselves not only alive but completely mosquito bite-free. To be honest, as we've learned since, there's really no reason to get (too) hysterical about the little winged blood-suckers in Hanoi - 90% of the Dengue cases in Vietnam this year have been in the South of the country (Hanoi is in the North), and the city is not considered to be malarial. In fact, there hardly seem to be any mosquitoes around at all...certainly less than we encountered while in Kyoto.
After retrieving our Permethrin-"impegnated" clothing from the balcony rail (and checking out the amazing view of the city from said balcony), putting it all on, and covering ourselves in sunblock and bug replellant, we stepped into the now sunlit Hanoi. Our no-longer-dark alley had been become a bright, busy gauntlet of tiny food stalls, whose face-stuffing patrons spilled out into the narrow street, seated at what looked like little children's plastic picnic furniture, only smaller. We tiptoed through this strange smorgasmord and hit the main strip, intriguingly named Hang Bong; this seemed, at first, to be like any trendy tourist-centric shopping strip - then we noticed the traffic. Think of it this way: Hanoi is basically like one big motorcycle rally, but instead of burly, bearded Hell's Angels-types in black leather and denim, it's all little Asian people and their families (kids, grandparents) in their street clothes (flip-flops, high-heels, mini-skirts, etc.) roaring around like daredevils with a death wish on their bikes and scooters. Almost no one wears a helmet - a few people wear hard-shell safari hats - but more than a few wear these awesome designer respiratory masks - in colorful prints and/or with cute animal shapes stitched on them - over their noses and mouths. (Maya and I agreed immediately that we had to find out where we could buy such things.) If we thought crossing the street in China was a life-risking adventure, crossing the street in Hanoi literally involves overcoming the most basic animal instinct of self-preservation and stepping into a nearly continuous wave of honking and rumbling motorbikes, then stopping in the middle of the street, hoping that the vehicles speeding straight at you will veer around you, then taking another step, and again throwing that same prayer to the heavens, repeating this process until you reach the other side of the road. One time as we stood paralyzed with fear at a particularly insane block, a random older Vietnamese woman stepped up, took Maya by the hand, and led her/us through the torrent of motorbikes without a word, depositing us at the other curb with a quick grin before continuing on her way.
But motorcycles and scooters aren't the only things to dodge in Hanoi; we would also get to dodge swarms of women in conical straw peasant hats, carrying two baskets hung from a pole over their shoulders, and aggressively hawking bananas, pineapples, and papaya. And then there are the dudes who pop up out of nowhere with a bag full of books that they are determined to add to your personal library - most of the books are travel guidebooks to various Southeast Asia destinations, the rest seems to be war-themed literature like Catch 22, and according to our guidebook, they are all photocopied-and-hand-stitched-together bootlegs (in fact, just today we found out that the reference copy of Lonely Planet: Vietnam sitting in the lobby of our hotel is just such a bootleg. It would be totally usable, except that it's missing pages and the photocopied maps are unreadable).
After breakfast at a lakeside cafe comfortably tucked away from all the madness of Hanoi, we scurried over to the Kangaroo Cafe, the only westerner-run tourist cafe in the city, which had been recommended to us by our friends Sarah and Alex. (Taking bootlegging to new heights/lows, there are two fake Kangaroo Cafes run by Vietnamese.) There we booked the trip to Ha Long Bay that we just returned from. Maya, still jittery from last night's misadventures and from today's street-crossings and vendor-harassment, was eager to talk to the cafe's Australian owner, Max, and get the straight dope from him on just how wary we should be of Hanoi's scam artists, outright thieves, and, of course, those damn "Mozzies," which is how Aussies apparently refer to the blood-sucking bugs. Max, it turns out, is quite the character. An orphan raised by a Jewish and Irish couple and turned ex-pat in Vietnam (where he has starred in more than a few movies and is referred to in some guidebooks as "Vietnam's Tom Selleck" - probably because of his 'stache more than anything else), Max is maybe even chattier than Maya and full of opinions - mostly good-humoredly negative - of other ex-pats, of tourists, and most of all, of his homeland. He alleviated the majority of our fears, and, much to Maya's and my surprise, he invited us out to drinks after he closed the cafe that night: "Just meet me outside the shop around 9:30," he said, "we'll hop on my bike and go somewhere nice."
We passed the day rather (happily) eventlessly, walking through the city, taking out some money (3,000,000 Dong! the exchange rate is about 16,000 Dong to 1 dollar), and buying soft-sleeper train tickets to Sapa for later in the week. After dinner, we walk through a massive night market where we stumbled on a woman selling huge piles of those designer respiratory mask we'd seen on many of the Hanoian bikers; Maya bought a particularly cute one with a little cat's head cut-out sewed to its left side for $1 (the woman was insistent on receiving U.S. currency). Here's Maya posing later with her mask:
The traffic around the lake area was absolutely insane. It was Saturday night, which apparently meant that all the young people would go out biking and drive faster, louder, and more recklessly than ever. The headlights of their vehicles shining in the dark as they sped around the lake traced out what could easily have been a massive nighttime race track.
At 9:30 we meet up with Max, who is just closing up the cafe along with his all Vietnamese staff. They invite us in behind the closed doors, and we all talk and laugh. Then he takes us back out front, and we all get on his scooter - Maya sandwiched between Max, driving, and me, hanging on for dear life to the back - and launch into the frenetic Saturday traffic. We're just going a short way to Max's place to drop off the bike, then we're planning to walk to an unnamed drinking spot of Max's choosing, but even that short, maybe 5-minute ride, we almost get in an accident, as another bike tried to sneak at high speed around our right side, nearly clipping us. Then, as we ride down the tight alley running back behind the majestic St. Joseph's cathedral and down to Max's home, we discover that a food stall has set up one of those kindergarten tables full of customers right in front of his door. He slows down, berates the people there in Vietnamese, and then, when they don't move out of the way, he rides right through their table, knocking plastic seats and food all over the place. Maya and I hop off, fully expecting the situation to explode into a full-on brawl, but the older woman running the food stall runs over and moves the customers (who simply look stunned), apologizing the whole time. Max doesn't seem too perturbed by the whole thing; "They do this all the time," he says, resigned to having to drive through people's dinner to go home at night.
After dropping the scooter off at - or rather inside - Max's pad, which proves to be quite swanky, we walk a few blocks through barely lit Hanoi, past more busy food stalls, as well as stinking piles of garbage and over a open gutter full of god knows what. Next thing we know Max has led us through a doorway and into what seems like a completely different universe: It's the opening of a new nightclub/ restaurant in Hanoi - Max knows the owners - and the place is fancy as all hell, pumping with too-loud house music, and looks like it could honestly have been transplanted from Soho or Chelsea! It's packed with young and obviously swinging white ex-pats, including one couple dressed as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. Max clearly feels almost more out-of-place than Maya and I (he claims to be the most unpopular person in the Hanoi ex-pat community and says that he fully expected to get into an argument with someone as soon as he came in), but the three of us are more than willing to enjoy the free food and drink and shoot the shit in the corner - where, in a rather grimly humorous reminder of the real world outside and, perhaps, of the future of the club, Max and I spot a mouse scurrying down the wall.
When I tell Max that I had been working as an editor of a rock magazine in the States up until embarking on this trip, he gets rather excited: He's a big music fan, plays guitar and sings himself, and is good friends with the guys from the Aussie band Midnight Oil. He recommends that we skip this joint and check out a venue he knows that sometimes features live music. So we follow him out and down a few blocks to what proves to be a hopping dance club packed with drunken Vietnamese men and women. There's American pop music - Britney Spears and such - blasting from the speakers and everyone (besides the three of us, of course) is singing along. Max points out the stage, which honestly looks more like a stripclub catwalk than anywhere a band would play, but he says that the platform rotates and moves up and down and that there are mini-elevators on the side, which sounds like a performance there would be pretty cool to see. But, unfortunately, there's no live music tonight, and in fact, the club closes at midnight, as does pretty much the rest of the city. So we down our drinks, head out, and decide to call it a day. As we approach Max's corner, he points us in the direction of our street, and then, almost mid-sentence, bids us a quick farewell and vanishes like a ghost into the night. A fitting end to a surreal day.
After retrieving our Permethrin-"impegnated" clothing from the balcony rail (and checking out the amazing view of the city from said balcony), putting it all on, and covering ourselves in sunblock and bug replellant, we stepped into the now sunlit Hanoi. Our no-longer-dark alley had been become a bright, busy gauntlet of tiny food stalls, whose face-stuffing patrons spilled out into the narrow street, seated at what looked like little children's plastic picnic furniture, only smaller. We tiptoed through this strange smorgasmord and hit the main strip, intriguingly named Hang Bong; this seemed, at first, to be like any trendy tourist-centric shopping strip - then we noticed the traffic. Think of it this way: Hanoi is basically like one big motorcycle rally, but instead of burly, bearded Hell's Angels-types in black leather and denim, it's all little Asian people and their families (kids, grandparents) in their street clothes (flip-flops, high-heels, mini-skirts, etc.) roaring around like daredevils with a death wish on their bikes and scooters. Almost no one wears a helmet - a few people wear hard-shell safari hats - but more than a few wear these awesome designer respiratory masks - in colorful prints and/or with cute animal shapes stitched on them - over their noses and mouths. (Maya and I agreed immediately that we had to find out where we could buy such things.) If we thought crossing the street in China was a life-risking adventure, crossing the street in Hanoi literally involves overcoming the most basic animal instinct of self-preservation and stepping into a nearly continuous wave of honking and rumbling motorbikes, then stopping in the middle of the street, hoping that the vehicles speeding straight at you will veer around you, then taking another step, and again throwing that same prayer to the heavens, repeating this process until you reach the other side of the road. One time as we stood paralyzed with fear at a particularly insane block, a random older Vietnamese woman stepped up, took Maya by the hand, and led her/us through the torrent of motorbikes without a word, depositing us at the other curb with a quick grin before continuing on her way.
But motorcycles and scooters aren't the only things to dodge in Hanoi; we would also get to dodge swarms of women in conical straw peasant hats, carrying two baskets hung from a pole over their shoulders, and aggressively hawking bananas, pineapples, and papaya. And then there are the dudes who pop up out of nowhere with a bag full of books that they are determined to add to your personal library - most of the books are travel guidebooks to various Southeast Asia destinations, the rest seems to be war-themed literature like Catch 22, and according to our guidebook, they are all photocopied-and-hand-stitched-together bootlegs (in fact, just today we found out that the reference copy of Lonely Planet: Vietnam sitting in the lobby of our hotel is just such a bootleg. It would be totally usable, except that it's missing pages and the photocopied maps are unreadable).
After breakfast at a lakeside cafe comfortably tucked away from all the madness of Hanoi, we scurried over to the Kangaroo Cafe, the only westerner-run tourist cafe in the city, which had been recommended to us by our friends Sarah and Alex. (Taking bootlegging to new heights/lows, there are two fake Kangaroo Cafes run by Vietnamese.) There we booked the trip to Ha Long Bay that we just returned from. Maya, still jittery from last night's misadventures and from today's street-crossings and vendor-harassment, was eager to talk to the cafe's Australian owner, Max, and get the straight dope from him on just how wary we should be of Hanoi's scam artists, outright thieves, and, of course, those damn "Mozzies," which is how Aussies apparently refer to the blood-sucking bugs. Max, it turns out, is quite the character. An orphan raised by a Jewish and Irish couple and turned ex-pat in Vietnam (where he has starred in more than a few movies and is referred to in some guidebooks as "Vietnam's Tom Selleck" - probably because of his 'stache more than anything else), Max is maybe even chattier than Maya and full of opinions - mostly good-humoredly negative - of other ex-pats, of tourists, and most of all, of his homeland. He alleviated the majority of our fears, and, much to Maya's and my surprise, he invited us out to drinks after he closed the cafe that night: "Just meet me outside the shop around 9:30," he said, "we'll hop on my bike and go somewhere nice."
We passed the day rather (happily) eventlessly, walking through the city, taking out some money (3,000,000 Dong! the exchange rate is about 16,000 Dong to 1 dollar), and buying soft-sleeper train tickets to Sapa for later in the week. After dinner, we walk through a massive night market where we stumbled on a woman selling huge piles of those designer respiratory mask we'd seen on many of the Hanoian bikers; Maya bought a particularly cute one with a little cat's head cut-out sewed to its left side for $1 (the woman was insistent on receiving U.S. currency). Here's Maya posing later with her mask:
The traffic around the lake area was absolutely insane. It was Saturday night, which apparently meant that all the young people would go out biking and drive faster, louder, and more recklessly than ever. The headlights of their vehicles shining in the dark as they sped around the lake traced out what could easily have been a massive nighttime race track.
At 9:30 we meet up with Max, who is just closing up the cafe along with his all Vietnamese staff. They invite us in behind the closed doors, and we all talk and laugh. Then he takes us back out front, and we all get on his scooter - Maya sandwiched between Max, driving, and me, hanging on for dear life to the back - and launch into the frenetic Saturday traffic. We're just going a short way to Max's place to drop off the bike, then we're planning to walk to an unnamed drinking spot of Max's choosing, but even that short, maybe 5-minute ride, we almost get in an accident, as another bike tried to sneak at high speed around our right side, nearly clipping us. Then, as we ride down the tight alley running back behind the majestic St. Joseph's cathedral and down to Max's home, we discover that a food stall has set up one of those kindergarten tables full of customers right in front of his door. He slows down, berates the people there in Vietnamese, and then, when they don't move out of the way, he rides right through their table, knocking plastic seats and food all over the place. Maya and I hop off, fully expecting the situation to explode into a full-on brawl, but the older woman running the food stall runs over and moves the customers (who simply look stunned), apologizing the whole time. Max doesn't seem too perturbed by the whole thing; "They do this all the time," he says, resigned to having to drive through people's dinner to go home at night.
After dropping the scooter off at - or rather inside - Max's pad, which proves to be quite swanky, we walk a few blocks through barely lit Hanoi, past more busy food stalls, as well as stinking piles of garbage and over a open gutter full of god knows what. Next thing we know Max has led us through a doorway and into what seems like a completely different universe: It's the opening of a new nightclub/ restaurant in Hanoi - Max knows the owners - and the place is fancy as all hell, pumping with too-loud house music, and looks like it could honestly have been transplanted from Soho or Chelsea! It's packed with young and obviously swinging white ex-pats, including one couple dressed as Elvis and Marilyn Monroe. Max clearly feels almost more out-of-place than Maya and I (he claims to be the most unpopular person in the Hanoi ex-pat community and says that he fully expected to get into an argument with someone as soon as he came in), but the three of us are more than willing to enjoy the free food and drink and shoot the shit in the corner - where, in a rather grimly humorous reminder of the real world outside and, perhaps, of the future of the club, Max and I spot a mouse scurrying down the wall.
When I tell Max that I had been working as an editor of a rock magazine in the States up until embarking on this trip, he gets rather excited: He's a big music fan, plays guitar and sings himself, and is good friends with the guys from the Aussie band Midnight Oil. He recommends that we skip this joint and check out a venue he knows that sometimes features live music. So we follow him out and down a few blocks to what proves to be a hopping dance club packed with drunken Vietnamese men and women. There's American pop music - Britney Spears and such - blasting from the speakers and everyone (besides the three of us, of course) is singing along. Max points out the stage, which honestly looks more like a stripclub catwalk than anywhere a band would play, but he says that the platform rotates and moves up and down and that there are mini-elevators on the side, which sounds like a performance there would be pretty cool to see. But, unfortunately, there's no live music tonight, and in fact, the club closes at midnight, as does pretty much the rest of the city. So we down our drinks, head out, and decide to call it a day. As we approach Max's corner, he points us in the direction of our street, and then, almost mid-sentence, bids us a quick farewell and vanishes like a ghost into the night. A fitting end to a surreal day.
good morning, vietnam (part 1)
Let me preface this story by saying that we are alive and well and Vietnam has turned out to be very cool. (Please keep this in mind as you read this entry). But like China, where our first day had us wishing we'd never had the mad idea of taking this trip and had just stayed home, living safe, if mundane lives, our first night in Vietnam made us "want our mommies."
We arrived in 'Nam around 10:30pm Friday night, an hour late, which was no real surprise considering what a bureaucratic nightmare the whole flight from China had been - a "special gate" where we couldn't check in until 45 minutes before take-off, a long transfer in Ghuangzou from and then back to the the same plane, etc. Maya and I had been pessimistically predicting all ride-long that our checked-in luggage would be lost and/or the car that our hotel was supposed to send to pick us up from the Hanoi airport would be M.I.A. , so we were very pleasantly surprised when we arrived at the luggage carousel and found our bags just making the circuit, and then lumbered exhautedly out of the terminal exit to find a dude with a sign that said "Maya Geist" waiting.
The guy seemed nice enough and his English was good though very heavily accented. We jumped into his extremely new minivan and headed off towards Hanoi. The driver made some small talk while we eyed the dark landscape passing outside the windows: a wide, shimmering river, some crazy-looking tall and gaunt French Colonial buildings, shanty-town shacks full of workers busy through the night, a massive flower market bustling with activity... At some point Maya asked the dude "Is your hotel far away?" and he responded that it was only about 40 minutes from the airport, but then he added something which we couldn't quite catch due to his accent, but which we both thought sounded like, "But I am not going to the hotel, I am taking you to my friends," followed by a laugh that in context sounded rather menacing. Maya and I exchanged perturbed glances, then I thought about his statement a bit and figured that what he must have said - better have said - was something to the effect of, "But it is not my hotel, it's my friends'." Either way, between the strange nighttime world we were passing outside and the mysterious conversation of our driver, Maya and I started to feel slightly on edge.
Then we wound through the tight, serpentine, and, though it was barely 11pm, almost completely abandoned streets of Old Quarter Hanoi (the tourist center), and pulled up to an almost pitch-black little alley. The driver made a call on his cellphone, then said that we should get out and that people from the hotel would meet us there. We did so rather hesitantly, and a few people did walk out from the dark alley, including two giggling young Vietnamese women strolling arm in arm, who we would never have guessed were from the hotel but they seemed to know the driver, and he, them, and they came over to us, began reaching down for our bags. "Uh, that's OK, I'll take them," I said, grabbing my heavy-as-fuck bag in one hand and tucking Maya's only slighty less heay-as-fuck bag under my arm. The girls didn't seem to speak much English, but they gestured for us to follow them down the dark alley, which we did, their incessant giggling and arm-in-arm strolling making them seem like a pair out of a horror movie. The alley only got darker the deeper into it we got, and then it hit a blind corner, around which Maya and I were both convinced we were gonna get mugged.
We didn't. Around the corner lay our hotel, which had a beautiful, cozy lobby. One of the girls checked us in and led us up four flights of spiral staircase (the building is one of those same tall, narrow French Colonial structures we'd noticed on the ride over) to our room - which looked perfectly comfortable, until Maya noticed that the door to the balcony was wide open. Now, as I've mentioned in a few of my very first posts, this year Southeast Asia has experienced its worst outbreak of the mosquito-spread Dengue Fever in 10 years. And that isn't the only mosquito-born terror to plague the region: there's malaria and Japanese enchephalitis, among other lesser-known but just as fucked-up diseases. Maya quickly closed the door, but we both could see the the seal was far from bug-proof, and when she pointed this out to the girl, the young woman only pulled a curtain, which was clearly even less bug-proof, over the doorway. "No problem, OK?" "No, not OK" Maya said and tried to communicate the issue to the girl, who only stared back with a blank smile and nodded, "Yes. Yes," clearly understanding nothing. After she left the room, Maya and I just looked at each other. It was too late to try and find another hotel, especially since, judging from the disquieting quiet outside, Hanoi was already well past its bedtime, so we decided to slather ourselves in bug-repellant cream and forge through the night.
We also decided that while we had a balcony, we should put it to use. You see, in preparation for the trip and the mosquito-spread infections that we knew we would be dodging throughout Southeast Asia, we had brought with us a few cans of this Permethrin shit, which is basically this bug-killing toxin that you're supposed to spray all over your clothes; thing is, the shit is so poisonous, you have to do the spraying outside, then you have to let your clothes dry for at least two hours before you wear them, and if you get any of the stuff into you eyes, mouth, or even onto your skin or the clothes you are wearing at the time, the warning label on the cans tell you to seek out immediate medical attention. Needless to say, we were almost more afraid of the Permethrin than of the mosquitos.
So Maya and I put on the medical respiratory masks and the rubber gloves (that we brought along for this exact purpose) and headed out onto the tiny balcony to spray our clothes. What followed was a comedy of errors, except that we - and especially Maya - were deathly afraid of the shit so it wasn't funny at all at the time. We could barely spread out our clothes without them dangling dangerously over the railing; it took me forever to figure out the damn spraying function of the Permethrin cans - turns out you have to pump the top of a can 5-to-10 times before the damn thing can spray, and the litany of progressively more terrifying health warnings; and there was a swirling breeze which would periodically hit us, turning any directed spray of the insecticide into a cloud of noxious fumes seemingly eager to consume Maya's and my heads. By the time we had finally finished "impregnating" our clothes (the rather disturbing term that the cans' labels use to describe the process), we were both dead tired and we flopped onto our bed, convinced that if the mosquito didn't kill us overnight, the poison we had just sprayed all over ourselves certainly would. (To be continued...though we're off to Halong Bay tomorrow so it might be a few days before the next installment. Remember, patience is a virtue.)
We arrived in 'Nam around 10:30pm Friday night, an hour late, which was no real surprise considering what a bureaucratic nightmare the whole flight from China had been - a "special gate" where we couldn't check in until 45 minutes before take-off, a long transfer in Ghuangzou from and then back to the the same plane, etc. Maya and I had been pessimistically predicting all ride-long that our checked-in luggage would be lost and/or the car that our hotel was supposed to send to pick us up from the Hanoi airport would be M.I.A. , so we were very pleasantly surprised when we arrived at the luggage carousel and found our bags just making the circuit, and then lumbered exhautedly out of the terminal exit to find a dude with a sign that said "Maya Geist" waiting.
The guy seemed nice enough and his English was good though very heavily accented. We jumped into his extremely new minivan and headed off towards Hanoi. The driver made some small talk while we eyed the dark landscape passing outside the windows: a wide, shimmering river, some crazy-looking tall and gaunt French Colonial buildings, shanty-town shacks full of workers busy through the night, a massive flower market bustling with activity... At some point Maya asked the dude "Is your hotel far away?" and he responded that it was only about 40 minutes from the airport, but then he added something which we couldn't quite catch due to his accent, but which we both thought sounded like, "But I am not going to the hotel, I am taking you to my friends," followed by a laugh that in context sounded rather menacing. Maya and I exchanged perturbed glances, then I thought about his statement a bit and figured that what he must have said - better have said - was something to the effect of, "But it is not my hotel, it's my friends'." Either way, between the strange nighttime world we were passing outside and the mysterious conversation of our driver, Maya and I started to feel slightly on edge.
Then we wound through the tight, serpentine, and, though it was barely 11pm, almost completely abandoned streets of Old Quarter Hanoi (the tourist center), and pulled up to an almost pitch-black little alley. The driver made a call on his cellphone, then said that we should get out and that people from the hotel would meet us there. We did so rather hesitantly, and a few people did walk out from the dark alley, including two giggling young Vietnamese women strolling arm in arm, who we would never have guessed were from the hotel but they seemed to know the driver, and he, them, and they came over to us, began reaching down for our bags. "Uh, that's OK, I'll take them," I said, grabbing my heavy-as-fuck bag in one hand and tucking Maya's only slighty less heay-as-fuck bag under my arm. The girls didn't seem to speak much English, but they gestured for us to follow them down the dark alley, which we did, their incessant giggling and arm-in-arm strolling making them seem like a pair out of a horror movie. The alley only got darker the deeper into it we got, and then it hit a blind corner, around which Maya and I were both convinced we were gonna get mugged.
We didn't. Around the corner lay our hotel, which had a beautiful, cozy lobby. One of the girls checked us in and led us up four flights of spiral staircase (the building is one of those same tall, narrow French Colonial structures we'd noticed on the ride over) to our room - which looked perfectly comfortable, until Maya noticed that the door to the balcony was wide open. Now, as I've mentioned in a few of my very first posts, this year Southeast Asia has experienced its worst outbreak of the mosquito-spread Dengue Fever in 10 years. And that isn't the only mosquito-born terror to plague the region: there's malaria and Japanese enchephalitis, among other lesser-known but just as fucked-up diseases. Maya quickly closed the door, but we both could see the the seal was far from bug-proof, and when she pointed this out to the girl, the young woman only pulled a curtain, which was clearly even less bug-proof, over the doorway. "No problem, OK?" "No, not OK" Maya said and tried to communicate the issue to the girl, who only stared back with a blank smile and nodded, "Yes. Yes," clearly understanding nothing. After she left the room, Maya and I just looked at each other. It was too late to try and find another hotel, especially since, judging from the disquieting quiet outside, Hanoi was already well past its bedtime, so we decided to slather ourselves in bug-repellant cream and forge through the night.
We also decided that while we had a balcony, we should put it to use. You see, in preparation for the trip and the mosquito-spread infections that we knew we would be dodging throughout Southeast Asia, we had brought with us a few cans of this Permethrin shit, which is basically this bug-killing toxin that you're supposed to spray all over your clothes; thing is, the shit is so poisonous, you have to do the spraying outside, then you have to let your clothes dry for at least two hours before you wear them, and if you get any of the stuff into you eyes, mouth, or even onto your skin or the clothes you are wearing at the time, the warning label on the cans tell you to seek out immediate medical attention. Needless to say, we were almost more afraid of the Permethrin than of the mosquitos.
So Maya and I put on the medical respiratory masks and the rubber gloves (that we brought along for this exact purpose) and headed out onto the tiny balcony to spray our clothes. What followed was a comedy of errors, except that we - and especially Maya - were deathly afraid of the shit so it wasn't funny at all at the time. We could barely spread out our clothes without them dangling dangerously over the railing; it took me forever to figure out the damn spraying function of the Permethrin cans - turns out you have to pump the top of a can 5-to-10 times before the damn thing can spray, and the litany of progressively more terrifying health warnings; and there was a swirling breeze which would periodically hit us, turning any directed spray of the insecticide into a cloud of noxious fumes seemingly eager to consume Maya's and my heads. By the time we had finally finished "impregnating" our clothes (the rather disturbing term that the cans' labels use to describe the process), we were both dead tired and we flopped onto our bed, convinced that if the mosquito didn't kill us overnight, the poison we had just sprayed all over ourselves certainly would. (To be continued...though we're off to Halong Bay tomorrow so it might be a few days before the next installment. Remember, patience is a virtue.)
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