Hanoi, Fri 8/27/99
Hue, Mon 8/30/99
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a vietnam diary | howard besser | |||||
| Hanoi, Thurs 8/26/99 Hanoi, Fri 8/27/99 |
N.Vietnam, Sun 8/29/99 Hue, Mon 8/30/99 |
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| Hanoi, Thursday 8/26/99 | |||||||
| Surprised at how small the Hanoi airport is. Kind of like Rigaís. Parking lot is far smaller than Charlottesville or Urbana. Airport is really out in countryside. Countryside really looks like photos of Vietnam War. People along roadside walking or riding bikes stacked with sticks, reeds, etc. | |||||||
| Cows wandering onto highway (which is really just one lane in each direction between airport and Hanoi. People along road and in fields are herding small groups of cows or pulling their own cow by a leash. Even see either oxen or water buffalo plowing fields. Hanoi looks much more Third World than I expected. Reminds me a little of Delhi. Was expecting more of an urban feel (maybe like Bangkok), but it really still looks like countryside. When we first get to town buildings are kind of ramshackle and almost invisible behind the tiny storefront shops that line the entire street. Looks much more like a country lane (or a a tiny village in rural France) than a city. | |
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| I am absolutely amazed by number of bicyclists and motorcyclists. They totally envelop the road. Hardly any cars compared to them. And an incredible amount of horn-honking. There are so many bicycles that foreigners donít know how to cross the street, which really takes some time to get used to. The pedestrian needs to just walk across traffic at a constant pace so that the bicycles can anticipate where you are going. Pedestrians need to rely on the bicycles to swerve rather than swerve themselves. | |
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| Everyone seems to be running a scam. I take the airport mini-van in to town, and both the bus driver and the ticket-taker continually try to press me to go to a different hotel. It appears that thereís at least 2 that give them kickbacks, and they finally convince a couple of people in the van to go for it. When they realize that they're not going to convince me and another couple, they demand an additional dollar from each of us to take us to our hotels. |
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| I end up staying in the "backpackers" district. The term "backpackers" is really a misnomer as it doesn't refer to people who hike and backpack; instead it refers to people who carry backpacks. So it's mostly young people (20-somethings) living on the cheap. The "backpackers district" is where there's a large congregation of cheap guesthouses and cheap hotels, lots of Internet cafés, and lots of vendors selling postcards, T-Shirts, and souvenirs. My hotel (the Win) first tries to get $25/night for a room (thatís more than I paid in Bangkok!), but they settle for $23. Monsoon rains start, incredibly hard. People on the street constantly follow me around and hassle me, trying to sell me something or get me to take a cyclo (peddle-cab) ride. | |
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| Hanoi, Friday 8/27/99 | |||||||
| People continue to hassle and follow me, trying to get me to buy postcards or maps or to take cyclo rides. Really nice cheap T-Shirts (about $1 each) and 50 cent ice cream cones (exotic flavors, small scoop, big sweet cone). | |||||||
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Apparently, Vietnamese government workers only make about $40/month, and that is a very respectable salary by Vietnamese standards. That means that just $1 is a huge amount of money to a Vietnamese person. And that explains why I am often followed for 15 minutes by a 3-wheeled bicycle ("cyclo") driver trying to convince me to let him haul me around for an hour for only $1. Even heavy pedaling in this hot heat is worth it to him because $1 is worth so much. | ||||||
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But the number of people hassling
gringos for money is absolutely incredible. "Reforms" in the
so-called "socialist state" of Vietnam have pretty much done away
with social welfare. Iím approached by a large number of begging little
kids and elderly people who are seriously hungry -- so much so that they're
really excited about finishing things off my plate. I sit for a couple of hours talking with a 20-year-old who initially approached me trying to sell me T-Shirts. Both she and her husband come into Hanoi from their village a few days a week, hoping to sell enough T-Shirts to feed themselves. She says that there's really high unemployment and no job prospects. |
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And nothing like unemployment insurance or the dole. And now families have to pay to send their kids to school, and still there's not enough school supplies. Kids are constantly approaching me on the street begging for me to give them a pen. I wonder how Vietnam can consider itself a "socialist" state. It seems to me that, above all else, socialism should offer people the necessities of life, and no one in a socialist state should go hungry. | |||||
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Museums are really interesting. Really poor conditions for conservation/preservation. Most are not air conditioned, and at most only have fans. Items displayed are a weird mixture of original documents (some of which show such bad light deterioration that theyíre barely visible), and document photocopies (many of which are really poor photocopies). Museum displays are a mixture of technologically advanced and quite primitive. | ||||||
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The War Museum has a number of dioramas. Most intricate is a huge one on the Battle of Dien Ben Phu. A 40-foot wide diorama shows the valley where the 1954 battle took place defeating the French. It has a 4-foot wide video projection of a documentary film (oddly projected onto a white and blue sky portion of the diorama, not onto something white and made for projection). There are several colors of lights within the diorama, and these are keyed to the video. So as the video explains the battle, the lights show what itís explaining (encampments, troop movements, attacks, etc.). There's also a set of spotlights that highlite portions of the battlefield at appropriate times. Reminds me a lot of the civil war diorama at Stone Mountain (?) outside of Atlanta. Thinking back over it, it seems that maybe the audio and the diorama lights are tightly synched to one another, and that the video projection is almost supplementary footage that doesn't need to be tightly synched. | ||||||
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| The Ho Chi Minh museum also has one interesting technological item -- a large display that lights up when someone approaches it (but I couldnít figure out what triggers this). I actually found the War Museum moved me. I think of the Vietnam War as one of the last wars that could be won against technologically superior forces. They had a special display on mothers who gave their sons to the war, and this made me think of how any war effects family and friends on all sides in a similar way. Other interesting displays included punji stick traps, and a sculpture made of shot down enemy planes. The Ho Chi Minh Museum was really something else. Total deification of Ho. But lots of other interesting things. Clearly the Vietnamese see their "revolution" as linked to others that came before and after it. One room was dedicated to other revolutions that considered the struggle of the Vietnamese as inspirational. Another room had an incredible set of images etched into glass, arranged in a kind of glass maze that you could get lost in. The images were all focused on the turn-of-the-century ferver in France that supposedly influenced Ho. They included: the surrealist manifesto, paintings by Henri Rousseau and Picasso, a photo of Ernst or Duchamps, stills from the earliest films, a model of the Eiffel Tower, etc. Still another room discussed Hoís anti-fascism by focusing on Picassoís Guernica, including: models of images from Guernica, as well as other odd things (like a reproduction of an Ernst painting). Another very revealing item: The French CIA-type organization had been tracking Ho (who then went by another name), and arranged for Hong Kong police to arrest and charge him in 1931. Interesting that there was such international spying and cooperation between superpowers at that point in time. |  |
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