Since we had the week off for Seol (The Korean Lunar New Year) we decided to take the opportunity to see another Asian country. We decided to visit Vietnam on a friend's suggestion and see the country that Ho Chi Mihn made famous. We spent seven days wandering around Hanoi, Vietnam and taking a few trips to some other places around Hanio. To make it easier on everyone I am going to break this up into multiple blogs.
We knew little of Vietnam before coming. As with many Americans, we knew of the Vietnam war, the location of the country, the communist rule, and the food but not much else. What would this country be like was left to the imagination. Reading the guide books gave us no real preparation for what we were to encounter over the next week.
Our first two days were spent in Hanoi. We wandered the streets and did some shopping had great food, which was very different from Korean food, and saw some very beautiful handcrafts. Vietnam makes a lot of lacquer products and embroidery products. Chris was fascinated with the lacquer and I was fascinated with the embroidery. The hustle and bustle of a city getting ready for a major holiday is always interesting. It becomes especially interesting in Vietnam since the major form of transportation is motor bikes and scooters. The statistic we were told was that there are 2 million motor bikes for the 4 million people living in Hanoi. Just imagine everyday sounding like hells angels is coming through town and you pretty much got the feel.
The craziness that gets added on top of this transportation is the things that people strap on their motor bikes and bicycles for that fact to get things from point A to B. Chris and I were having a good laugh about it. Some of the more interesting things we saw were two 250 pound pigs (dead this time) strapped to the back of a motor bike, a live pig that looked about 60 pounds in a cage, panes of glass, cherry tree branches which are part of the Tet celebration, four foot potted cherry trees, five four foot potted kumquat trees, five people, a women breast feeding on the back of a motor bike, massive baskets of vegetables, three foot by three foot mounted maps, a medium sized refrigerator, and this is just to name a few items. A Canadian family we talked to our last night had the winner though, a full size leather couch. And we in America need our SUVs to hall the junk in our lives; who knew a scooter could be so useful. In all reality most of these things would never be allowed in the US.
The other adventure with the millions of motor bikes is the simple fact that when you have to cross the street you have to do it in oncoming traffic. The one saving grace is that many of the streets in Hanoi are one way so you can try to concentrate on traffic coming from one direction as you play your game of chicken with the traffic inching your way across the road and trying not to get clipped by a motor bike. This is not the case on all the streets. It especially gets exciting in the evening because not all of these motor bikes choose to use their headlights. In addition, the sidewalks are usually used as parking lots for the motor bikes so you are forced to walk in the street with the motor bikes, the bicycles, the few cars, the buses, and the cyclos (a three wheeled bicycle like taxi). On top of this everyone of them is honking some kind of horn to say "I am here and you are in my way now get out or ringing a bell to say I am here, do you want a ride?". By the end of the week we got used to the horns and the traffic but then came the bottle rockets. Those noisy little suckers that make a loud bang which added to the adventure.
As we walked around Hanoi, the things we noticed most was the influence of the French architecture, the motor bikes, and the prominence of the communist posters. Next month Vietnam celebrates 75 years of communism so all of Hanoi is plastered with the Vietnamese flag and those flag pole banners that say 75 years of communism.
The buildings are very strange in Hanoi. They are all very narrow in the front and very long and deep. We had ask our guide later in the week and he said it was because that was the way the rice fields were divided between the families that worked them. There seemed to be a whole little back alley culture that was there for the locals that we did not bother to take an interest in case we wondered down the wrong back alley.
Vietnamese culture appears different from Korean in the aspect that Vietnam as a country does not appear to be as clean. Everyday is trash day and every street has litter.
Vietnam is still very much a third world country. The activities on a single street's sidewalk can range from someone selling bread, a local street restaurant, to a street side barber shop. None of these businesses have actual store fronts but are only set up on the sidewalks between the parked motor bikes and the extended displays from the actual store fronts. Hanoi had a wonderful central park that has a lake to it. As you try and avoid the street children trying to sell you everything from books to shoe shines you can enjoy the beauty of the older architecture and the reflection of the balloons, the temple, and the older building located in the center of the lake.
Our first impressions of Vietnam are those of a land which is dramatically different than our own and one that we realized we would not have enough time to see all the possibilities and get to know Vietnam fully.