Monthly Archives: October 2012

So much to tell, so little internet to tell it with! Brad has taken some amazing pictures of the people on the streets and the sights around Hanoi but the internet in our hotel is so painfully slow we had to wait until we left and reached the country of Laos.

A word about our hotel and our group before I go any further. We are staying at the Sofitel Metropole which is a French Colonial hotel built in 1901. It has been visited by many statesmen and famous celebrities throughout the century, most notably Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Kennedy. There are a series of tunnels and bunkers underneath the hotel that were used by the likes of Jane Fonda and Joan Baez during the Vietnam War. And, yes, Bob there is a cool Buddha Store in the lobby. We are with a group of seven other couples and a guide leader who are on the same ten-day tour with us. They are from all over the United States and Canada. We have enjoyed getting to know them and it seems to be the right size to move around S.E. Asia.

And now, on to the $2.50 haircut! Yesterday was our day with a private guide to take us back out to see the sights of Hanoi. At breakfast, we were reading some articles about the sights in Hanoi when I came across an article about the street barbers. These barbers literally hang a mirror on a wall with a wood shelf and a chair and cut hair with their scissors all day. We had seen them the first day and were quite curious. Brad had to cancel his monthly haircut before we came and was getting pretty bushy hair with all of this humidity. (Sometimes even Brad’s hair gets out of place….I won’t even tell you about the nightmare my hair is with this heat and humidity!) I suggested to Brad that maybe he should try a street barber. Brad was game and so the quest was on with our guide, Du, to find an appropriate barber. After much searching (and some confusion where he thought I was the one who wanted to go to the barber!), we found our man on a street corner. The pictures below should tell the story quite well but needless to say Brad is sporting a new Vietnamese haircut and the cost of the whole experience was $2.50 and a lot of laughs and a little nervousness on both of our parts! Personally, I think Brad looks really good in it; a little Tom Cruise-ish from Top Gun. (We found out today that the street barbers are actually illegal so we might have had an entirely different story to tell if the police had stopped by!)

We have had the best guide for the last three days. His name is Du and he has an amazing knowledge of Hanoi, the Vietnamese culture, and has perfect English. He told us that he started his career as a teacher but teachers only got paid $20 a month and he couldn’t feed his family on that amount of money. So, he went into guide work which seems to be paying him much better. He has been a wealth of knowledge to us about the culture.

We haven’t written about the food yet but we would be remiss in going any further in this blog without sharing our favorite dishes. Everything here is absolutely delicious and it is very easy to eat on the lighter side because most things are stir-fried and contain a lot of vegetables. We ate at a magnificent restaurant last night and had spring rolls, mushroom soup, roasted duck with mandarin sauce, stir fried vegetables, seafood, and creme caramel for dessert. Mostly, we eat whatever is ordered for us and put in front of us and have enjoyed it all! A note to Mary Stevens, so far I am handling this food much better than when we were in Spain!

One last cultural note, I am starting to feel like a giant around here. Most of the women can’t be more than 5’2″ and weigh about 90 lbs. Many of them like to pose with me and I am heads taller than them. I did get a Vietnamese massage yesterday and the tiny Vietnamese woman just jumped on my back and started massaging me. Nothing quite as provocative happened as it did with Brenda in Thailand but she did do a lot of sitting on me and there was much cracking of my back and neck muscles!

The President on Holiday, the Cyclo Tour, Water Puppets, Vietnamese Cooking Class and Taxes

We had to leave the hotel at 7:30 this morning so we could beat the crowds at the Ho Chi Min mausoleum. It is customary to leave the heads of state for Communist governments lying in state indefinitely. Ho Chi Min was the founder of the Communist Party in Vietnam who ousted France in 1954 and lead the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War (or the American War as they call it). He died in 1969 and has been lying in state in Hanoi ever since.

Well, as we were heading over to the mausoleum to view this former president, our guide informed us that Ho Chi Min had left the country. He was in Russia. Apparently he likes to spend Fall there to get, um, cosmetic surgery done. He left a little earlier than usual this year. Eager to get that face lift done, I suppose. It wasn’t announced ahead of time as they don’t want someone absconding with the old guy.

Yesterday our tour leader announced that we would all take a cyclo tour around the Old Quarter of Hanoi. The Old Quarter is a bustling section of the city with outdoor markets, street vendors, restaurants and stores. It is rumored to be the most densely populated area in Asia at .8 square meters per person. Try to imagine living in a space about the size of your couch and you get the idea.

A cyclo is basically a rickshaw attached to a bicycle. Since you are only allowed one person per cyclo, we started off in 15 separate vehicles. Now, if you think crossing the street in the wild city traffic is scary, try pulling into traffic in one of these contraptions. Well, while we had low expectations for the tour, it turned out to be fascinating. We got a slow-motion perspective on the heart and energy of this city. Interesting people, stores and buildings; a close-up look at the tangled power line-laden infrastructure; what we dubbed Vietnamese minivans (single motorbikes with two parents and two kids riding on them); Communist “news” being broadcast over loudspeakers. If you are ever in Hanoi, make your first activity the now-popular cyclo tour.

This afternoon we visited the Hoa Sua School for disadvantaged youth. This school provides free vocational training for orphaned, handicapped, and poor children in Hanoi. They teach the kids how to embroidery, cooking, housekeeping, hospitality services, etc, so that the kids can get jobs in the tourism industry. We went to get lessons in Vietnamese cooking. Our visit provided financial support for the school and a great experience for us. Expect a sampling of our new skills (?) when we return home.

Yesterday we showed you a photo of the typical skinny, tall buildings we see here. Today we learned why they’re designed this way. Apparently, real estate is taxed by the amount of frontage the building has. So, a 30-foot wide building is taxed much higher than a 10-foot wide building even if their square footages are the same. This is why many homes here are no wider than a single-car garage, but, are very deep and three to four stories tall. We even saw a building that was about 5-feet wide. Imagine living in that!

We’re had dinner tonight in a private home in the Old Quarter. We were treated to a surprise and were measured for traditional Vietnamese formal wear. Check out the pictures below. We made quite a scene walking through the Old Quarter.

Tomorrow, we board a plane for Laos and many new adventures. Until then . . .

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Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO Natural World Heritage Site, was our weekend destination. Ha long Bay is about three hours northeast of Hanoi. Legend holds that the 3,000 limestone pinnacles scattered throughout the Gulf of Tonkin were created by a dragon’s tail as it slipped into the sea. The dragon, as the legend goes, was in Vietnam to help the overmatched Vietnamese repel a hostile invader. Since the country has spent much of the past 1,000 years occupied by one force or another, this is a common theme. We will say that the dragon seems to have created one of the most beautiful places we have ever visited.

We drove through the countryside filled with small towns of tall skinny homes, countless fields of rice, and the occasional water buffalo by the side of the road.

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Once we got to the Bay, we boarded our Junk boat and settled in for a lovely cruise around the bay. We quickly found out we weren't the only boats on the bay! I guess part of of being one of the Seven New Wonders of the World means a huge boon to tourism. Needless to say we were surrounded by lots of boats and people. (We were actually pretty dismayed by the amount of pollution we saw and are hoping that the tourism board of Vietnam figures out a way to improve that soon!)

After cruising around the bay for a while, we were taken to Surprise Cave–an enormous cave that felt right out of Indiana Jones. Check out the pictures and see if you can see the Surprise! (Hint: It's an enormous, uh, phallic symbol…..)

During the rest of the short cruise, we stopped on another island and hiked up to the top, Brad took a short cooking class and learned how to make spring rolls (while Lisa was still doing her hair) and we took a flat boat trip to another cave. All in all, it was a nice way to catch up on some sleep and get in a little relaxation before our trip really started on Sunday. We also got to know a couple of great people that will be on our tour for the next ten days.

Here are a few more pictures from the weekend and the drive to and from Ha Long Bay. On the way home, we stopped at a pineapple/fruit stand and had delicious pineapple with chili powder on it. The women were fascinated by the height of Dr. Jack (one of our traveling companions) and had to take a picture with him. We also stopped by the side of the road and watched people processing and drying rice. Along the way, we saw more interesting “items” on motorbikes. We saw chairs, tables, loads of baguettes….all being transported. The “item” that caught our attention most was when our guide pointed out an actual “live” water buffalo being transported on the back of a motor bike. He was apparently being taken back from the field to his family home!

Enjoy the sights of Ha Long Bay and the drive to and fro……

Small Business is Big Business in Vietnam

Vietnam is an emerging economy. While it declared its independence from China in 1945, it has only truly been independent since the mid-1990s. The government remains Communist, but, the people of Vietnam are independent and resourceful. So, everywhere you look, whether in the city or the country, you see small businesses. People are selling merchandise, services, food, you name it. And, often, they sell it from the first floor of their home while living in the upper floors. Notice the photo of the tall, skinny three-story building. This is very typical. Sometimes it is connected to other similar buildings. Other times, for some reason, it is standing by itself like this one. I guess it is waiting for others to be built some day.

They will use whatever resources are available to them. Many times this means they carve out space on the sidewalk as their cafe seating area. And, curiously enough, they use those little molded plastic blue chairs and tables our kids used to sit on as their cafe furniture. So, you see lots of people sitting on little blue chairs on the sidewalk enjoying coffee, lunch, or a snack. It doesn’t look comfortable to me, but, people seem quite content doing so. In the country, these cafes were located under freeway overpasses, on the roadside, or under a tree — still using those same colored plastic chairs.

Many families in Vietnam have been granted a patch of rice field to farm. Each rice field yields two harvests per year providing needed sustenance. As you look out over the picture of the rice fields, you see, perhaps, a hundred such patches. We happened upon a harvest in which the entire family was out to help bring in the crop. They pay to have another man bring out a machine that separates the rice from the stalk. They will then allow the rice to dry on the side of the road. They’ll wash it, store it, and eat it.

While small enterprise is thriving, the big projects are stagnant. We’ve seen unfinished hotel and resort complexes, large housing developments and factories. It seems that the recession of the past few years has taken its toll in a big way on the Vietnamese economy. The boom times they saw a few years ago came to a screeching halt. Sad to see. We’ll hope for improvement in the near future.

What is clear to us, however, is that despite the lack of what we might call basic comforts, the Vietnamese people are happy, friendly, intelligent and curious. They love Americans and desperately want us to love their country back.

Our first day in Hanoi was an overwhelming feast for our senses! The sights of the people, sounds of the traffic, smells of the markets made us realize that we weren’t in Danville, CA anymore. I have to explain the way the traffic works around here before I write a single other thing. Amanda had warned us that it was chaotic but we had no idea until we drove in it. Imagine six-ten lanes of traffic without any semblance of traffic rules or stop lights with most of the people on small motor bikes weaving in and out of traffic at will and you can get a feel for the craziness we encountered. Add in a few roundabouts and motorbikes who go the wrong way on streets in very densely populated areas with horns honking all around you and you get even more of sense of the “controlled” chaos. I say controlled because we never saw a fender bender or an accident the whole time we were traveling yesterday.

Driving is one thing because at least you have the comfort of being inside a car but walking on the streets is quite another. You can’t really walk on the sidewalks here because the people are all selling the wares and food on them so you have to walk amongst the traffic. And…then there are the times when one must actually cross the ten lanes of traffic. Our guide told us to just walk slowly and close our eyes and hope we made it to the other side! My heart is still beating a little fast from a few of those street crossings yesterday!

Yesterday, we spent the afternoon seeing the sights of Hanoi with a guide. We had a lovely lunch of Pho, spring rolls, and a crispy Vietnamese pancake filled with pork and shrimp and then we hit the streets. We saw a prison, a pagoda, and the Old Quarter where we met workers doing needlework and lacquer paintings. The Vietnamese people are extremely friendly and kind. They really want to know about your family and want to make sure that you are impressed with their country. They like the fact that we are from San Francisco because so many Vietnamese live their. They love to look at pictures of our family and guess what ethnicity Brad is. (They all have proclaimed that Stephanie looks just like her father!)

Today we are heading for a long ride in the country before embarking on a junk boat and cruising on Ha Long Bay. It will be an interesting change to see the countryside and villages after spending the day with millions of people and motor bikes in Hanoi.

(As a side note for my friend Chris….I do realize that blogging is more than one sentence (ha! ha!) but I wasn’t counting on the internet being such a problem in the hotel. I tried my best to publish a blog article last night complete with pictures to only get stuck in the internet black hole. I finally had to call it a night and try again this morning when the internet might be my friend).

A Rich and Sometimes Disturbing History (Brad’s section)

Downtown Hanoi is home to a large prison built in 1894. The French controlled Hoa Lo until 1954 and housed communist dissidents there. Torture, solitary confinement, and executions were the order of each day. While most of it’s history is owned by the French, you will recognize it for a short few years of it’s existence. It was known by American prisoners of war as the “Hanoi Hilton.” John McCain spent his years of confinement here as did many American fighter pilots who were shot down over North Vietnam.

It was a very disturbing and emotional walk through the prison. Seeing the large cell blocks that housed dozens of prisoners in stockades was tough. Men were held in place by stockade-like cuffs on their ankles and lined up side by side. Seeing the areas where women were confined with their children was tougher. And, the guillotine that executed hundreds was just plain macabre.

Seeing the Vietnam War from the other perspective was also disorienting. While we all know that war is bad, we all tend to pick sides and justify the righteousness of our efforts. The fact is, it is brutal for all — especially the innocent civilians that are caught in the crossfire. This was clear from the obviously one-sided, but, passionate view presented in displays at the prison. We all left feeling quite unsettled.

After leaving the prison and doing a little shopping, we visited a pagoda on a small island in the middle of a lake. Apparently, the Vietnamese were invaded often and were usually overmatched. But, fortunately, there were various gods, heroes, and other helpers available to save the day. At this particular sight we learned of a giant turtle who brought the king a sword to help defeat a superior enemy. The name of the lake translates to “return sword” because once the enemy was vanquished, the turtle returned to ask for the magical sword back.

This pagoda was fascinating as there were many Vietnamese people here in tears praying to displays of Buddah surrounded by fresh fruits, paper money, and candles. These were offerings to their ancestors in the hopes that they would bring prosperity and good fortune to their descendants.

OK, this was only the first day and there was far too much to write about. Suffice it to say, that we are fascinated and impressed by this very unique culture. Vietnam has 90 million people — and they all seem to be driving by on their scooters when we want to cross the street!

More to come. Oh, and, Steve Physioc — we really appreciate you right now. I have the Cardinals–Braves game on and they are not broadcasting the announcers sound track. I have no idea why that outfield fly was called for the infield fly rule.

For those interested, we are 14 hours ahead of Pacific Daylight time. It is 7:30 am on Saturday here. It’s 5:30 in the afternoon on Friday at home.

Sights from our first day in Hanoi.