Hanoi goes Lunar

It’s that time of year again, where Vietnam gets busy preparing for the Lunar New Year. Everyone is buying cumquat trees and purple peach blossom. Paid summer holidays are for the few, so many people only get back to their home village during this week of Tết. Families and friends eat traditional food, drink rice wine, and spend days visiting each other. A wife’s priority is to go to her inlaws’ home, in many cases to work hard to provide food for others.

Roads near us are jam-packed with the buying and selling of the various plants. The atmosphere is serious, slightly tense, but not more so than us lot doing last-minute Christmas shopping, I suppose. People pile their bikes higher than normal, there are more small bumps between bikes, and shops, cafes and bia hois close down for the week so that foreigners who haven’t arranged their ticket out of here begin to worry that they will run out of essentials.

I wish you all a serene and pleasant Year of the Goat

Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!

 

My Hanoian geography

Only a few months to go now, here are some places that I will miss. I’ve played quite a bit of tennis, at UNIS and at the Trade Union place. Thanks guys. Regular singles partners over the years include Gareth, Andrew, Shinichiro, JV, Pho and Oanh. Here from a viciously-fought doubles match.

There are places selling nourishment (the term “restaurant” seems overblown) where one hopes they take more care with the hygiene when it comes to the food and crockery than they obviously do for the walls, the floor, the toilets. As AA Gill wrote of a restaurant in Vietnam before going on to praise the meal, “It was without a smear of doubt, the filthiest room I’ve ever sat down in. Not just eaten in, but been in.” Often though, the food is outstanding. I spent the first month not daring to go into one of these places. Now I only go to Western places when outvoted.

I am a regular at a bun cha plastic-stools place. I have brought ill kids there to put them on the road to recovery. Once, when I took Saskia, the nice griller of meat asked, “Is she your girlfriend?” “No. She’s my daughter. How old do you think she is?” “13?” Me: “Err, no, she’s 14 but what are you saying?”. Mind boggling, I tucked into the pork noodles. Then once as I got off the bike with an English friend and her teenage daughter he said: “Is that your wife and daughter?” “No, It’s a friend and mum”. When we left, he said, “So how old is your mum?” “No! That’s the girl’s mum, not my mum”. Exit chuckling Tim and soon-to-be-outraged guest.

Two of my favourite art galleries/painting shops. I started buying rocks and stones after realising I had bought more paintings than we have space for in our modest residence in Norway.

Typical of Hanoi, this opticians shop is well-hidden, you almost have to know it is there to be able to find it. As blogged about previously, they have thousands of frames to choose from, will determine your prescription and produce the spanking new glasses within an hour.

The ubiquitous microbreweries in Hanoi, known as bia hoi. A regular partner pictured at a pretty decent one, though on that occasion we didn’t finish the main course, put off by the beak.

A friendly place with fantastic spring rolls on Hoang Quoc Viet:

Sometimes I watch football at a Western place. And sometimes to watch real non-plastic football (a.k.a. the English Championship) I have to take Jemima to a place that is prepared to stream channels for which they may not have fully paid the subscription. We have seen some good matches here, but none will ever beat the second leg of the playoff semifinal vs Leicester in May 2013. The rest of the pub gawped as we leapt around the place.

 

Cob-web in Hanoi

Vietnam, you know I love you. But while the occasional power cut can lead to a charming game of cards by candlelight, the instability of the internet in what is supposed to be an up-and-coming economy is more annoying than words can say.

You are treating the internet as an optional extra, like many hotels in England also do: “Yes, here’s the key to your £100-a-night room. Internet? Yes, just plug in the modem and that’ll be £16.95 for each new 6-hour period for a maximum of two devices and please don’t stream anything because it uses the bandwidth”. Go away.

The internet here seized up a few days ago. Oh, it is painfully slow. Some people say that an undersea cable near Hong Kong has been severed by a shark. Oh really. So why do most websites work slowly but Gmail not at all? The girls can’t do their homework and more seriously, I can’t keep up with Watford FC’s latest self-inflicted disaster.

They say it will take 11 days to fix. How can they know this? “Shark bite, yup, 11 days. Lucky it wasn’t a catfish, squire, they take 3 months to heal.” Oh such epistemological woe. In the end it doesn’t matter whether it is some form of censorship or whether it is a mishap: sort it out, Vietnam, or prepare for some seriously-irritated internet users. On the other hand, it might be good to get out of ScreenWorld for a while. And anyway, perhaps it is unreasonable to expect reliable web access when people around us have to worry about shelter and food. Having pressed F5 enough times in vain, I went out to document the poverty in our neighbourhood.

No, it seems the locals soldier bravely on.

So, to calm down I went for a haircut. A proper man’s haircut, where before snipping off a few millimetres they wash your hair 7 times, massage your scalp, cheeks and eye sockets, and then when you are pushed upright you are allowed to put your glasses back on.

Time to lie down again.

 

Greyscape

The weather is closing in towards winter. Four months of greyness envelope Hanoi. It’s not too cold outside, just that it’s the same 17 degrees inside too. It is almost too cold for toeless sandals on the concrete jetty bar sticking out into the lake. From there you get an atmospheric greyscape view of Hanoi.

Even the West Lake turtle has had enough.

My answer to most such challenges is to hop on my bike and get out of town, the reasoning being that one can escape Hanoi’s persistent greyness caused by a stable weather system combined with pollution. I went to a nearby national park. The rides up and down were glorious.

It’s just that at the top the cloud won the day.

Because the views are supposed to be fantastic, I wanted to go again. I checked the weather forecast and shot off. However, sometimes one’s luck is out. This was the view second time around.

More drastic grey-escape measures were needed. I went with a friend to Yen Tu, one of the holiest Buddhist shrines in Vietnam, about 100 km from Hanoi. We rode through rain and mud. Base camp was a mini-village of pho stalls and restaurants and uninformed uniformed tourist guides. “This ‘ere cable car, what time does it shut?” “It is being repaired”. “Oh. Will it be working tomorrow?” This one was answered in a variety of ways including “Yes”, “No”, “Maybe”, “I don’t know yet”, and “3 No Trumps”. We read between the lines and understood that this meant there was absolutely no chance of the cable car working within our lifetimes. The claim from the hostel owner was that it would take 7 hours to get to the top and back, so we surmised that this was no easy stroll up a gentle slope but rather a true, brutal pilgrimage, and settled in for the evening, beer and noodles on offer, and agreed on an early start for the next morning.

At 7 we set off and were pleased that it was not too hot. After a kilometre the perspective changed as we were soaked from walking in cloud. The walk was severe. The steps were often uneven and hacked out of the mountainside. Perfume Pagoda is an amusement ride in comparison. We saw very few people. A dog followed us most of the way. There was one shack selling drinks and various pagodas dotted along the route. One was often unsure whether this was the right way. Then unsure whether it was sensible to continue. It was knackering and there were moments of weakness but we really had to make it to the top.

Everything was soaking. There was nothing to dry my glasses on. It wasn’t hot but we had raging thirst. Still we pushed on up the mountain, led by the dog. Buddhas appeared through the mist. Slippery rocks, no-one selling drinks, a signpost to the top, “only” 720 more metres of this. Then we got there!! Visibility was worse than at the national park, it was greyer than even Hanoi knows, and yet it was a triumph.

I supped some rainwater from the collection vase. It was hideous, bitter, brassy and life-saving. On the way down my phone drowned and only recovered after a day at home. Anyway, we hereby challenge all-comers to beat our time of 4 and a half hours. Top tip: Bring your own drinks.

I used to want to go to the South Pole, but no more: Yen Tu scratched that particular itch for me.

 

 

 

Hanoi gadgets

Here are some machines that feature in our lives in Hanoi. Some make it liveable, some pamper us, some we will take home with us.

They say you shouldn’t drink the tap water so we don’t, but rather use this contraption.

This cooker, we will be bringing back. It is quick, quiet and unobtrusive and always knows when the rice is done. I have only just got over the shock of seeing the cook make mashed potatoes in it too.

Prevent your clothes from going going mouldy by having one of these in each room. In the humid part of the year (only lasts ten months) these will collect a few litres of water every day.

No rucksack for me on motorbike trips. I attach this beauty to the back of my seat. You get some funny looks because they are not very common (yet). Imagine what they would say if they knew I was transporting flapjacks and silk pyjamas around their national parks…

Most Vietnamese homes have fans… 

…but very many don’t have air conditioning. So for most of the year, I just don’t know how they do it.

And today was the first time this “winter” that I switched modes so that the thing blows hot air. It may be 18 degrees indoors but it’s draughty.

The ultimate Hanoi accessory recently came into our family. Don’t judge us too harshly, we are but the product of our times: It is a remote-controlled selfie stick.

 

 

 

 

Perfume Pagoda 2

My nifty nephew joined me for The Return to Perfume Pagoda, following our family trip there over two years ago. This time though we went by bike. As ever, the first hour and a half through Hanoi and the filthy, dusty roads spidering away from it was a dangerous, uncharming challenge of overtaking lorries, reversing vans, railway crossings and schoolchildren wandering about, but then you turn off into the countryside and all is put behind you. We didn’t have much daylight to play with and we pushed on via detours on new roads not on Google Maps, asking the way a few times, before stumbling upon the village of Perfume Pagoda.

It was out-of.season, like visiting the arcades in Eastbourne at this time of year. Shops were closed, blue-stool restaurants open for family members only, but one friendly bar on the town square took us in. They served us duck and the beer was plentiful, which made the rock-hard bed adequate. Up early next morning to a well-haggled motorboat ride to the foot of the mountain where the pagoda is situated.

The steps to the temple have been hacked out of the mountainside, uneven and lop-sided. Though it took about an hour, the walk seemed much shorter than I remembered, but on the previous occasion I was having to help cajole three children who were outraged that we hadn’t taken the cable car up. There were no other tourists that morning, we only had a few pleading shopkeepers to break up the walk. We bought some bracelets and drinks for next-to-nothing from a woman who said that she had never been to Hanoi.

Then we were alone in the temple-cave. It was special. You could easily imagine Indiana Jones cavorting around.

On the way down we spotted a business idea too cruel for words and so brazen even Ali G would have been embarrassed by it.. 

So, for 100 000 VND these gruff, insistent women would undertake to release a squirrel for you; a squirrel that they themselves were keeping captive. Their manner was unpleasant and smug, and to show they meant business they poked the squirrels with a stick for us.

Then there were shackled monkeys that you could buy fruit for: Not much higher up on the business ethics scale.

Then at the restaurant on the way home, the affable old lady told me that all her animals were for eating. We had the beef noodles.

Time was stretched. We were only away for 24 hours but you live for longer out there because we did nothing in an action-packed sort of way.

 

Sixty years since a decisive battle

The French were directly involved in the running of Vietnam for 90 years until the battle at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. This was the first of General Giap’s historical triumphs. He led Vietnamese troops to victory in the city of Dien Bien Phu, 500 km from Hanoi, near the Laos border. There was a long build-up of tension: Both sides knew that if diplomacy failed there would be a battle and both sides were confident of victory. Amongst other factors that tipped it in Vietnam’s favour was their incomprehensible ability to transport heavy artillery across mountains with no roads. There are accounts of armies moving only at night through forests for hundreds of kilometres to reach DBP. This is an enemy that is more determined than you are. By this time the French effort was largely financed by the US. The US had many observers and advisers present, they saw what happened to the militarily superior French and yet they didn’t learn the correct lessons.

The French were in the valley where the town is, and the Vietnamese were in the surrounding mountains. The French knew that the Vietnamese didn’t have much bombing capability up there, except that they did. And they bombarded them from invisible mountain hideouts for just less than two months until the French surrendered, Giap deliberately prolonging the siege because they had a grip on the French supply lines.

So, a while ago I set off to find DBP, to see the lay of the land. I have been through many Bosnian towns that were difficult to defend because they were surrounded by mountains. Sarajevo is one case, not to mention Olovo and Tuzla. More benignly, when driving in Tromsø, and even more so in Grenoble, one navigates by glimpses of the mountains. So it was a bit of a surprise that the mountains around Dien Bien Phu seemed much further away than all of these towns.

The statues commemorating the battle comprised chunky, determined figures.

The museum to celebrate the victory was slightly interesting, it was cheap, but really it was poorly-curated and uninspiring to the non-Vietnamese speaker.

The town itself was pretty unremarkable, but the scenery each way was super. Parts looked like lakes that turned out to be cloud, other parts looked just like Telemark.

I don’t think school attendance is as high as one would wish it to be. On the way one sees plenty of children working with adults on the land, happy to be photographed.

Corn is grown by the tonne.

And this is how you dry it.

So, not the most exciting town to visit but a great relaxing ride, not too many lorries (compared to going North…), a bit hot, mainly blue skies, beer and pho. This was one of those trips where the journey was more important than the destination.

 

Eating snake

Well, I’ve stayed off dog but, biblically enough, have now been tempted by a snake. The restaurant was tucked away in the middle of nowhere, across a bridge and down some lanes but my friend knew where it was. The owner used to run a restaurant at the Intercontinental Hotel and is now, presumably, following his Freudian dream.

There were snakes in cages. Which one would sir fancy?

And fear not: If serpent is a no-no, you may choose one of these aesthetically-challenged rodents cuddly charmers instead.

The man picked up a long skinny slithering beauty of a bamboo snake for me with a rod like the ones they use in the jungle on Discovery Channel. With his thumb on its neck he got out a razor blade and sliced it open. “This is the heart”. He wanted me to drink it in a spirits glass but I couldn’t bring myself to so he drained the blood into a bottle. Then we went to the kitchen where they scraped off the scales, skinned it, boiled it briefly, and then expertly hacked it into the bits needed for the 6 courses.

There was soup, spring rolls, mince in la lot leaves, crispy fried skin, rack of snake, and filet in lemongrass and ginger. The filet was delicious, the spring rolls great, and the best of all were the la lot leaves.

There were snake products around the place, from carvings to wallets to whopping jars of cobra-infested spirits.

The chef was in his element and turned a reptile into a feast for eyes and stomach. Even beyond the novelty value, the meal was genuinely good and I would repeat. I don’t think I’ll be able to get the family to join me at this restaurant, but may take unsuspecting guests who have overstayed their welcome.

 

The perils of automatically translating your menu

The local bia hoi used to have a scruffy piece of cardboard for a menu. On it there were translations that made you wonder (“frog cement”??) and ones that made you laugh out loud: “Fried motherboard”. With silicon chips perhaps?

Recently I came across a restaurant full of business folk at lunchtime, possibly the sort of place looking to attract foreign customers, so they have the menu in English too. A down-to-earth beer parlour, one accepts, has neither the wit nor inclination to translate things properly, but a fully-fledged restaurant? I suspect though that they just bunged their dishes into Google Translate and printed the results, not asking a competent speaker to have a look, or if they did do so they found one who got kicked out of Monty Python for being too wacky.

Here were some of the pleasures on offer, and you will find other novel delicacies in the pictures below.

Three three-frequency medicine: By prescription only, presumably.

The grilled fish tail leaves the guise: In disguise?

Fish tail the head cook baked beans banana: The seafood chef fell into the vat of beans and fruit? Is there much call for this cannibalistic concoction?

Devil fish baked in the banana downstairs: Pity. I would have preferred the banana oven on the second floor.

Fried frog discharge pepper: NB. Not to be tried before you are firmly connected to a stomach pump.

Om sour frog cement: Ah, our old favourite.

Supergetty: a very rich pasta dish, I suppose.

And in keeping with these times of austerity and cutbacks:

Streamlined administrative beef broth pepper

So please contact clam prawn for more information.

Oh Hanoi, you crack me up.

 

 

 

Glimpses of Hanoi and beyond

I think Saskia originally suggested that I should call this ‘ere web-log something like “Random stuff from Hanoi”. Well, she wasn’t wrong: Here are some pictures that didn’t make it into other entries.

This is how you make sugar cane juice.

In the West, one often hears about the tyranny of “health and safety” regulations. Well, this is why you have them:

(He didn’t fall off)

Cute picture taken in Ha Giang. With my limited Vietnamese, I thought the sign said “Parking for vehicles with children” so it made me chuckle. Apparently though it means “Parking for medium-sized vehicles”, so if you are amused by the picture, you’re only showing your ignorance.

A somewhat self-contradictory scribble, I would have thought:

And anyway, this witticism is already to be found near Hoan Kiem

A shiny dragonfly on a shiny tyre.

Family planning in the countryside: “Each couple should only have one or two children”

This guesthouse is presumably trying to advertise the availability of internet and not that you could find your spouse upstairs.

A thin plastic sheet failed to protect the ping pong table from a humid-to-dripping Hanoi winter

I suspect that some of these growths are unknown to science.

And in news from abroad, according to the Vientiane Times, the leaders in Laos have now caught up with the 1990s:

Talk about hedging your bets. This Norwegian journalist can’t make up his mind whether Ingebrigtsen won or not.

And just to show that I am not all Taiwanese about signs and signposts, this is Ho Tay, the lake we live by. Beautiful, n’est-ce pas?