Back to Beyond

So other than our time with Ho, and in the markets, Hanoi was a bit hard to get a feel for. It sprawls like crazy – an area close to the centre was apparently a rice paddy 25 years ago – and its population has quadrupled over that time, so it has grown like topsy and with a “flexible” disregard for urban planning. Our guide showed us the home he shares with his parents, which is a 3 or 4 storey vertical slice out of a building. The number of storeys is deliberately opaque, as the “roof” is actually a partly enclosed floor that is not actually permitted and therefore does not show up as a floor on any official documents.

But there are bits and pieces of impressions that can get stitched together into an overall feeling. There is the very grand opera house, built by the French and strongly reminiscent of Paris, that is fronted by a large sculpture celebrating 95 years since the founding of the Vietnamese Communist party. There is a luxury district, encapsulated by the large Prada store surrounded by lampposts dripping with Vietnamese and Communist party flags. And a different sort of temple, the Temple of Literature, where students centuries ago studied and sat exams in hopes of becoming a mandarin, and where there is a temple to Confucius, and where students get graduation pictures taken although, we were told, they have not yet graduated (and some will not graduate) but the weather is good so why not now.

And there is the street life, with street food everywhere and full of local people chowing down as clearly no one eats at home. For the tourismos there is “Train Street”, where a train runs every few hours down a track that leaves only a metre or so on either side between buildings that used to be the poorest dwellings but are now highly lucrative coffee bars essentially selling space to watch the trains go by, crazy close, for the price of a drink, and where the only things more numerous than the signs saying it is illegal to walk on the tracks are the visitors walking on the tracks. There is the small pond where a chunk of a B-52 fell when shot out of the sky as the US tried to break the North’s morale by carpet bombing Hanoi at the end of 1972. But on a brighter note was the insanity of the end of the school day, which we inadvertently walked through a few times, when hundreds of children stream out of the schoolyard to be met by hundreds of parents who have completely jammed the street outside with their scooters and motorbikes to take them home. So much buzz!

So a lot going on, a lot of moving parts that may or may not add up to a whole, and definitely hard to get your arms around in just 3 days. But so much fun to try.