February 6, 2012

• Vietnam Part 2: Touchdown.

  We landed in Hanoi in the morning, if I recall. My parents had never been to Hanoi, as after 1954 the north had closed off its borders and people from the south couldn’t visit, much like North and South Korea today. At the airport, we cleared through customs with no interruption (relatives we visited would later inform us that customs stopped asking for bribes years ago due to complaints).

  

  The cab from the airport.

  Hanoi is a crowded, busy city. Surprisingly, despite being equatorial, Hanoi is far enough up north that it was actually cold. We had landed right in the middle of monsoon season, so the skies were cloudy and it was around the 60’s. It was dreary, cold, and dingy in the wet, crowded streets near the hotel we were staying at. In fact, it rained about 90% of the time we were in Vietnam.

  The first thing you notice is that all the buildings are built very narrow, but built very tall. Due to surprisingly high property prices, building up rather than out is all people can do. Our hotel was in a busy part of town, my brothers’ and my room on the second floor. All we could hear outside our window was the constant honking from the street below.

  

  The room where my brothers and I would be staying for the next four days. The BigBro looks up how to “hack” Vietnam’s firewall to access facebook and does so in a matter of minutes.

  

  The bathroom. Notice the short shower curtain- basically every time anyone showered, the bathroom floor would be flooded with water. So terrible.

  

  The view from the second floor balcony.

  With our luggage in our rooms, we set out exploring the nearby streets and alleys. And that brings us to getting around Vietnam:

  The good thing about Vietnam is that there’s no jaywalking. The bad thing about Vietnam is that there’s no jaywalking.

  

  Basically when you’re crossing a street full of Vespas and motorcycles, you do NOT stop for traffic. You follow a slow predictable path crossing the street and everyone will weave around you. If you stop, you’re more than likely to get hit, albeit at an extremely low speed. Out here, people don’t drive more than 15-20 mph because there’s just too much going on in the streets.

  

  For all the joking about “terrible asian drivers”, I’d have to say the spatial perception of asian drivers is incredible, surpassing the US. People out here drive like schools of fish in the ocean- seemingly all over the place, but rarely ever colliding. The constant honking out here is more a practicality- signaling more “Hey, I’m behind you” rather than the road-rage inducing honking out here in the States. The street lines are more of a suggestion; the motorists are fluid, dynamic. If they weave into the oncoming traffic, the oncoming traffic is flexible enough to move out of the way without honking, whereas in the US, people are inflexibly confined within the two parallel lines delineating a lane. In that respect, perhaps the Vietnamese are more practical drivers, with many intersections having no street lights at all, but not that much congestion.

  

  There are a lot of people sitting around seemingly doing nothing at all hours of the day in Vietnam. There are also scooters parked all over the sidewalks in front of stores at all hours of the day in Vietnam. My dad asked one of the guys in front of a store what he was doing and he told him that for 5000 dong (the equivalent of $0.25), people would park their scooters on the sidewalk in front of the store and he would watch their scooters. And in that way, people made their living.

  

  Produce literally sold right out on the sidewalks.

  

  

  We start off on a walk to visit my dad’s uncle, my grandmother’s younger brother and the last surviving sibling. This is the Hanoi Opera House, which is called “Nha Hat Long Ha Noi” which I like to translate literally into “Ha Noi’s House of Big Singin’”.

  

  My great uncle’s house. The area he lives in is pretty much the equivalent of the River Oaks area in Houston. His father-in-law was on good terms with the prime minister in the old days, and the prime minister provided them with a plot of land spanning a few housing units. Those housing units belonged to his wife’s family and my dad’s uncle had been living there ever since with his son and his family.

  

  The interior. It goes up several stories. My dad’s uncle is a spritely energetic old man of 92 years, something that I noticed with most all elderly relatives I met in Vietnam- they were particularly lively, unlike my grandmothers when they came to live in the states. I take it in part to being in a walking city, meaning no one had a sedentary lifestyle like they have over here, as well as not being quite so isolated in a foreign country. We met the family and one of the constant re-occurring conversations throughout the entire trip when meeting any relatives in any city was the following:

  Relative: Are any of you married?
  Me and my brothers: No, not yet.
  Relative: But you’re all so tall! How are you not married? If you lived in Vietnam, there’s no way the girls here would let you go around unmarried!

  

  Our first dinner was at a nice Vietnamese buffet/restaurant.

  

  Kind of like an american buffet, but not.

  

  The first of my “try every different beer in Vietnam” challenge. I decided to drink beer instead of sodas for meals at first as it was “healthier” without all the sugars. But then after a while, you get tired of drinking beer for lunches and dinners.

  Upon arriving in Vietnam, there are two hard and fast rules that everyone tells you- “Don’t drink the ice” and “Don’t eat raw vegetables.” You grow up hearing stories of how they clean plates in restaurants by merely wiping the dishes in the same stagnant water bucket used to clean every other dish. I would have to say, though, that I never saw this happen the entire two weeks I was in Vietnam (and I was reassured that Vietnam has gotten much better than the olden days). Beers are served room temperature over here, with one solid brick of ice in the glass to pour over. So you can either drink tepid beer or watered down cold beer. By the third day, the tropical heat in most areas left me saying “Screw it” and drinking all the ice all over the place. And once you make the decision to drink ice, avoiding raw vegetables pretty much goes out the door too.

  

  

  

  The family photo.

  End day one.

  • 12:03 am
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