Wrapping Up Vietnam

A few last ramblings about the Vietnam leg of our trip...

-The night we stayed in a hotel on Cat Ba Island I woke up at 3 or 4 or some crazy hour of the morning to watch football. It was the NFC Championship game. The Packers were at the Bears and it was that strange game where Jay Cutler was supposedly hurt, but stood on the sidelines looking like an asshole. Everyone thought that he wasn't really injured and he didn't seem to be encouraging his back-ups or showing any emotion. It was pretty bizarre. Anyway, Tor is a big Bears fan so he wasn't too happy to hear it. Two weeks later we landed back home in Korea on Super Bowl Sunday (which was actually Monday for us). I hustled to a PC bang (public computer room where all the gamers spend every spare minute) to watch the big game. But that is a story for another day.

-The first book I read on our vacation was Matterhorn, a novel about Marines in the Vietnam War. It was a good story and I recommend it, but I kept trying to imagine scenes from the book playing out in the landscape around me and I just couldn't. Maybe if we had been camping at night out in the mountains it would have gotten to me, but as it was, we were engulfed in the neon buzz of the major cities and surrounded by either fat, middle aged tourists in shorts, socks and sandals, or tattooed and dreadlocked backpackers who never went home. Anyway, I plowed ahead in the book almost every opportunity I had. When I finished we were being ferried back across Ha Long Bay to the van that would take us to Hanoi. Since I require constant entertainment, the four of us played a game of pinochle. Sami and I were on opposite teams for once, and this was probably a good thing. We've never really meshed as pinochle partners. She takes too few risks and I take too many.

-Shortly after the banana incident in Hanoi, we bought tickets to see the water puppet show at the Thang Long Theater. After the Chinese acrobat show in Shanghai a year ago, this was the most incredible and authentic live performance I have seen (and yes, if 25 year old me would have read that sentence three years ago he would have rolled his eyes and gone back to playing Tiger Woods Golf on Playstation). The theater was built during the Vietnam (or as they say- American) War. The seats are set at a steep incline looking down into a square pool of water. A live orchestra featuring musicians and vocalists adorned in traditional garb stood to the left of the pool. The wood puppets are supported by an underwater rod and are controlled by puppeteers hidden behind the pool and pagoda setting. The implements seemingly dance across the water and re-create nationalistic fables of farmers and royalty. The live music is a shrieking combination of what sounds like Beijing opera, drums complete with crashing symbols and the ubiquitous sounds of stringed instruments so stereotypically far east. The only drawbacks were that the rows of seats were set painfully close together and no one was asked to refrain from taking photos. As a result, the place was lit up with illuminated view screens and constant flashes. Despite the distraction, I am certain that none of the pictures turned out very well. At least mine didn't.

Can you see all the camera framing screens?

-The next day, we rose early to get to Ba Dinh Square, the location of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, where the famous communist leader's embalmed body can be viewed. It took us awhile to find the place and when we did there was a big grass field between us and the mausoleum. We attempted to cut through it but were thwarted by what appeared to be elderly gardeners. Fearing we had unknowingly performed an horrifically insensitive act of disrespect, we walked around, but soon noticed that large numbers of Asian people cut across without admonishment. We had to go through a long security line and pass through a metal detector before entering. Everyone's cameras (even those belonging to Vietnamese) were confiscated and would be returned after the viewing. The guards even attempted to disallow Sami's prenatal vitamins and morning sickness pills. They relented after an impressive display of frantic arm waving and facial pleading from my wife. Inside, the long single-file line moved fluidly over a red carpet that directed us in a rectangle around the raised glass coffin. At least a dozen impeccably uniformed guards watched over every step. The scene was eerie and the mood intensely serious. The body was small and thin. The face waxy and deeply lined with the famous goatee intact. The entire process of walking past the body probably took less than two minutes. When we left and walked back out into the brightness of outside, I joked "Mommy, Mommy! Let's go on the ride again!"

The mausoleum and the field we tried to cross

-My biggest regret in Hanoi was that I never was able to find the vaunted "Chicken Street" supposedly lined with vendors all selling grilled cuts of bird over an open flame. We were slated for a red eye flight to Bankok so an hour or so before we left for the airport, I decided to walk around the alleyways near our hotel looking for some. I knew I wasn't on Chicken Street, but I figured the taste of anything I found couldn't be that different. What I didn't count on was how difficult it would be to find the local culinary treasure. I circled blocks for nearly a half hour before finally giving up and settling for chicken pho. It was one of those authentic street restaurants with tiny red and blue plastic stools. There were easily 100 locals dining in this small area on the sidewalk. I pointed to the nastiest looking cuts of meat and made my order. Sadly, I didn't have my camera with me, but the soup arrived with all sorts of tendons and what looked like gray rubber golf balls on a string. There were at least a dozen of them and when I bit into one I noticed the texture of a hard boiled egg, but with a runny yolk. Of course, it wouldn't be Hanoi without being ripped off. This time, I didn't have enough money to pay for my soup and beer even though I was obviously being charged more than twice what the locals paid. The server stood there angry as hell, but I just shrugged my shoulders more embarrassed than I have been in years (of course, I didn't want the beer and didn't ask for it, but she set it down on the table and like an idiot I opened it). I was feeling the eyes of every diner turned on me when the couple sitting next to me offered to pay the difference. The server accepted the payment of what turned out to be the equivalent of a US quarter and gave me one last scowl. It turns out that the woman at the table was an English teacher in Hanoi, and she kindly explained to me that, as a foreigner, I was expected to bargain with the server beforehand. Her sympathetic husband, noticing how flustered I was, offered me a cigarette. Even though I don't smoke, I took it and smoked and drank beer and ate hot soup with runny golf balls. I consumed all three poisons as fast as I could, knowing full well that my tardiness was most likely stressing Sami out.