Saturday, January 04, 2020

A Last Few Days in Hanoi

Old Town Hanoi...Oh How I Missed You

Even though I’d only spent a few hours wandering the Old Quarter in Hanoi when we’d first arrived (six days previous), I had instantly loved it, and I was delighted we were back. The old quarter is a complete hodgepodge of narrow street and alleys, crammed full of shops, hotels, and restaurants. Due to the French occupation a century ago, many of the buildings have French architecture and you get the feel of being in a super crowded New Orleans. 

When we got back from Ha Long Bay, it was too late to visit any museums or pagodas, so we just got lost in the twisting streets and eventually ended up at a Harry Potter themed cafe. The cafe was decked out in all things Potter, including letting you wear your house’s colors if you wanted. So donning blue and silver, I enjoyed a nice alcoholic butterbeer and Em enjoyed a potion in red and yellow.

We finished our evening off with a show at the Thang Long Water Puppet Theater. Water puppetry has roots dating back to the 11th century. It stems from a time when the rice paddy fields were flooded and villagers would make entertainment by standing in the waist-deep water with the puppets performing over the water.

The puppeteers stand hidden behind a large screen and control their puppets via large rods. This creates the effect that the puppets are moving across the water on their own. The stories the puppets tell are about the people and the myths of the area. The stories are told through the puppets and the accompanying music and song. We didn’t opt for the headphones and therefore just enjoyed the show without knowing more than the gist of what was occurring. The experience is not going to be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s cheap enough, that’s it’s worth the admission to check out and experience once; if for no other reason than to hear beautiful music and see a traditional art that is not practiced anywhere else in the world.

Only Full Day in HaNoi...Better Make the Most of It

We spent the majority of our only full day in Hanoi on a day tour that hit up most of the crucial tourist attractions within the city. A mini bus picked up us and about 15 other people and commenced to take us to many of the highlights of Hanoi. We started with a visit to the Ho Chi Minh Complex, which hosts the former president’s residence and place of work from 1958 until 1969, and his mausoleum (which is opened to visitors on the weekends, but entails standing in line for hours to see). Ho Chi Minh was a politician, writer, journalist, poet, and polyglot who loved his country and his people very much; and from what I’ve seen here, most of the people loved him as well. Minh never married and considered all of the Vietnamese as his children. Therefore, most of the Vietnamese call him Uncle.

After walking the ground of Minh’s complex and seeing how simply he lived in contrast to his status, we ventured to the One Pillar Pagoda. The One Pillar Pagoda was built by Emperor Ly Thái Tong between 1028 and 1054, after he had a dream in which the enlightened being Avalokiteshvara gave him a baby son resting on a lotus flower (at the time of the dream, the Emperor was childless). Emperor Ly Thai Tong commissioned the pagoda to be created in resemblance of this lotus flower which is also the Buddhist symbol of enlightenment. The Emperor remained in gratitude to the bodhisattva and subsequently to Quan Am, the Goddess of Mercy following the birth of his son. Inside the temple a richly gilded statue of Quan Am takes centre place at the main altar. The image of the pagoda is often used as a symbol for Hanoi.

The next stop on our tour was the mandatory sales pitch that seems to be built in to every tour we take. This time we visited a lacquer workshop where we got to see all the work that goes into making art from lacquer trees, other types of wood, and egg shells. The process was actually kind of fascinating and the end products beautiful, but I still hate that every tour has one of these “culture village” add-ones slotted into a tour. If you got to go to an actual village instead of a sales shop geared towards mass production for tourism, I might not be so against these detours.

Luckily, our detour was only 30 minutes and soon we were at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology. The museum showcases the traditional ways of life for the 54 different ethnic groups that reside in Vietnam. There are displays with translations in various languages and examples of real clothing, tools, everyday items, outside, houses. We ditched our group and tour leader to run around and see as much as possible in the short time we had there. If you’re nerdy or at all interested in learning about the diverse array of people that call a Vietnam home, I suggest you stop by for a visit.

After a scrumptious lunch at a local restaurant in the Old Quarter, we visited our last two stops for the day: the Temple of Literature and Tran Quoc Pagoda. The Temple of Literature is also known as the Temple of Culture or as a Temple of Confucius. The Temple was built in 1070 at the time of Emperor Ly Thanh Tong and contained Vietnam’s first national university, the Imperial Academy. The Academy was built to educate Vietnam’s bureaucrats, nobles, royalty, and other members of the elite. The best pupils had their names carved into stelae on the shells of stone tortoises. 

Our last destination on the tour was the Tran Quoc Pagoda in the West Lake. The west lake is the largest of Hanoi’s 30 or so lakes at around 12 miles in circumference. The Pagoda is the oldest Buddhist temple in Hanoi. You get to cross a small causeway to access the temple. In the front part, there is the tall pagoda that houses the remains of important monks. This pagoda was the tallest one at one point and is now surrounded by many smaller shrines. 

My favorite thing about this pagoda and the One Pillar Pagoda is that there are these cartoon panels that depict the karmic consequences of various actions. Some of the panels made perfect sense with sayings such as: “Protect innocent people from being bullied; get a safe life”, but then there are others such as: “Live without loving others; No Longer live with people” or “Waste time in playing games: hardly reborn into human life” that make me think many of these are propaganda and not original teachings. The fact that a Buddhist in our tour group also disagreed with many of the sentiments helps support my theory. Either way, the wacky illustrations and the outcomes for actions makes them fun to read (and just my writing this probably means I’m doomed to some terrible karmic fate).

Our city tour may have wound down, but not our day. The receptionist at our hotel told us about a cultural show called My Village (Lang To), that was a must see. We purchased a set of tickets and headed for a night at the theater. 

The show immerses the audience in the life of a Vietnamese village through a combination of acrobatics, contortion, music, and singing. Everything revolves around bamboo, with large pieces use to create different props, sets, and structures throughout the performance. The show is preformed in low light and drab colors that add a great atmosphere to the production. I immensely enjoyed this show and was happy I got to see it.

After the show, we wandered the night market a bit and looked at all the products for sale. It was a good end to a long day.

There’s a Prison; Let’s Go Visit

In keeping with our tradition of seeking out and visiting the macabre, Em and I went to visit the “Hanoi Hilton” or as most people know it, the Hoa Lo Prison. The prison was built by the French to house political prisoners during the French Indochina War and then later used by the North Vietnamese to house US prisoners of war during the Vietnam War. Most of the prison was demolished in the 1990s, but the gatehouse remains as a museum. 

Most of the museum is slanted from the perspective of the Vietnamese (history is always written by the victors), but it’s still an interesting place to visit. If all the propaganda within the museum is to be believed, while the French were in charge, the Vietnamese political prisoners lived very difficult lives. They lived in terrible conditions and many were tortured. Even so, different secret communist party cells sprung up inside the prison and continued the teachings that landed them there in the first place.

In direct contrast to the way the French treated their prisoners, the Vietnamese treated the captured Americans soldiers (many were pilots shot down, including Senator John McCain) so well that the soldiers nicknamed the prison the “Hanoi Hilton”. When the soldiers were released back to America at the end of the war, many were friends with their captures and received souvenirs as they headed home.

On our way to visit the prison, we stumbled upon Hanoi’s famous Train Street. Train street is a section of the city were the train track cuts through the middle of a residential neighborhood. On either side, mere feet from the track itself, are shops, homes, and cafes. The residents in this area conduct there lives on and around the track and move whenever the train comes speeding by (there are two trains a day). 

Due to the increasing popularity of the street based on quirkiness and quaintness and the stupidity of Instagrammers attempting to get perfect shots of them with the train in the background (thus causing almost collisions), the street is technically now closed to the public. 

While walking to the Prison, Em and I just happened to come across one of the entrances to the street and wandered over. There are guards manning the entrances to the street and they blow their whistles and yell at you if you attempt to wander onto the tracks to take photos. You can get around this by accepting the offer of any of the various cafe owners with shops that line the picturesque street to sit down and have a cup of joe. The train guard will still glare at you, but depending on how out of the line of sight the cafe you go to is versus the guard’s post, you can still manage to snap a few shots in between enjoying sips of egg coffee. We did just this.

Our last little bits of adventure in Hanoi consisted of food, as is only fitting for some foodies. On the recommendation of a good friend, Pam, we headed for lunch at Koto Training Restaurant. KOTO stands for Know One, Teach One and is a one of a series of restaurants dedicated to teaching at risk and under-privileged youth life skills that will help them to lead better lives. They have a great philosophy and some tasty food (although I’d suggest picking a la carte and not the set menu (we did that and decided it wasn’t the best way to go).

Our final port of call was Loading T, a quant coffee shop hidden in a converted room of a dilapidated French colonial house on the edge of Old Town. From the outside, the building looks like it should be condemned, but on the inside, there various rooms which have been converted into different little shops. The house was built in 1932 for one family, but divided into 16 different homes/businesses in the 1950s. The architecture has remained the same and this provides as rustic and authentic atmosphere in which to enjoy a cinnamon coffee or fresh fruit smoothie.

Hong Kong Airport Sucks for Long Layovers

Em and my’s returning flight home (sniffle sniffle) came with a 14 hour layover in Hong Kong. If this layover occurred during daylight hours, then it would have been amazing, as the city is a quick 30 minute express bus ride away. Unfortunately, the layover for us started at 11 pm and ended at 1 pm the following day. Even so, we thought we could find some lounge chairs in a  corner to nap for a few hours before catching the first, 6 am, shuttle to town and tooling around for a little bit. While this idea seemed easy enough in theory after reading multiple articles online, it was a complete failure in reality. 

Our first mistake is that we crossed through the security point after arriving from Vietnam. According to the help desk, once you’ve passed through security, you’re no longer allowed to leave and then come back in. I’ve done it at other airports before, so I don’t think that’s true, but we didn’t want to get in trouble and decided we’d just stay. The second issue we ran into, is that many of the airport lounges that we’d previously been able to gain access to had changed their policies and we no longer could get in with our Priority Pass. 

Looking online, there are articles that tell of numerous areas throughout this gigantic airport that have lounge type chairs or seats without armrests where passengers can sleep. We couldn’t find any of them. There was lots of construction going on and I think the areas where the lounge chairs used to be where now areas where construction was. Additionally, all the seats had arm rests on them so the most space you could carve out was two seats next to each other. 

Giving up on finding a comfy spot to sleep, we settled on sets of two seats and tried to get some shut eye. It was hard going as the construction decided 2 am was the best time for power tools and jack hammers, the AC was cranked at night to freezing temperatures, and the airport runs 24/7 so there were always lights and announcements going on. I never thought the idea of getting on the plane to grab some shut eye would be the best alternative.

And so with a sleepless night in the airport and a 12 hr flight home, this adventure of The Scholarly Professor and The Raunchy Truck Driver comes to a close.

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