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Published: January 30th 2010
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We left our hotel in Ho Chi Minh city before the sun had come up, stepping over the hotel staff sleeping (erm, guarding) the door in. After an uneventful flight (aside from the Vietnamese people who took Pablo's Economists out of the seat pocket in front of his seat and started to page through despite the fact they probably didn't speak English), we landed and were picked up by a partner firm to our client. First stop, Hoa Binh - a small rural and manufacturing town in the valley of some mountains 100 km or so away from Hanoi. We toured some factories, and the next morning, saw a thick fog had set in, and it was starting to drizzle. Little did we know that this was to be the start of a nearly 6 consecutive days of rain!
We made it to Hanoi, but spent most days piling into a van and driving an hour or two out of town to visit factories as part of the research portion for our internship. Despite the rain, we were able to explore at nights, and luckily, the rain, though not the fog and chilliness lifted for our last day in Hanoi
before we made it back to Ho Chi Minh.
Hanoi is definitely, a very different place from Ho Chi Minh city, and not just with the climate. People look, and from what we learned, speak very differently - to the point where sometimes, people from the north and south cannot understand each other. I saw a stronger Chinese influence in terms of people's faces, the architecture, and even the style of knick knacks being sold in the market. It shouldn't be much of a surprise that southern China is only a few hundred kilometers away.
Dress
Other major differences are in the way people dress... I think that the best way to describe it would be "worker" chic. Many people wear tight jeans, with bomber-style leather jackets and the kind of hat that Lenin is always sporting in pictures. People are also much more aggressive in the North, and the touts really get in your face and start to get mad when you yell at them to go away. Luckily, one of the first words I learned in Vietnamese (and probably one of the few I actually pronounce correctly) is the equivalent of an emphatic
"get lost"!
Walk at your own risk
One of the first things you notice walking the streets, is that there's nowhere to walk! The streets are narrow to begin with (would probably be the equivalent of a one-lane road in the US in many places), and the sidewalks are all clogged with parked motorbikes. Mix in street vendors, people just hanging out and squatting or sitting on little plastic stools, and the best place to walk is on the street itself. Of course, there's cars, cyclos, and motorbikes wizzing by, so you have to be as close to the curb as possible, while other people walk in the opposite direction, and constantly looking over your shoulder to make sure that some car isn't barrelling through so close for comfort that the side mirror could clip you. On top of that within the middle of the street, there's people milling around everywhere as the motos wizz by (
see this vid)! As in HCMC, people will drive and walk
pretty much anywhere.
Food
The food is also quite different we discovered. The north is much more centered on soup-based dishes where you put rice in a bowl, and then the soup on top, putting in bitter
vegetables into foods, and fried things. There are especially a ton of deep fryers set up on the streets, where a vendor is dipping things in and out and selling the whole oily mess right out of the fryer! We did manage to make it to some pretty tasty places though, especially among them, and amazing buffet called Sen Nam Thanh which had among other things, a great raw and sushi stand, snail dishes of all sorts, crocodile nuggets (which were pretty good), and potato knishes. The service was excellent as well, and they even brought out staff with umbrellas for us to wait under while they hailed us cabs. A lot of restaurants in Hanoi are very small, multi-story affairs with 2-5 tables each story. Many of the buildings look centuries old from the inside, and what amazed me was the huge distances in terms of flights of stairs that our dishes had to travel to our tables. Two last interesting culinary tidbits: something that was oddly popular which we saw on the streets for dinner, was vendors selling huge dried squid, and people setting up tiny charcoal pits on the street, lighting up, and then cutting the dried
squid into strips and placing it right on the coals. Not sure what such a dish might taste like, but man that's a lot of effort to put into a simple meal. The other thing which we unfortunately didn't have the time to try is the snake wine. People will put venomous snakes into jars of rice wine for years, as the snake disintegrates into the wine. It's not supposed to taste great, but rather drunk for medicinal purposes - most usually, to promote vitality in the sack! We also saw something a bit grosser - a fetal goat wine... Definitely not appetizing. No idea what sort of medicinal properties a goat would contain.
Sights
We were finally able to do some sight-seeing in our last afternoon in Hanoi. Luckily, most of the sites can be done in exactly that amount of time. We started in the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum complex. Talk about a state security apparatus - after having been separated from our bags, and then our cameras, we were made to walk serenely in twos at a decidedly military cadence, as we and visitors from around the world processed to pay our respects to Ho
Chi Minh... He was protected by an honor guard inside (Ho Chi Minh has been embalmed), and looked quite lifelike lying on the bed. Ceremonial music was in the air, and for a tiny second, I almost thought I saw him move. After getting our cameras back, we went to the One-Pillar pagoda, which was much smaller than we would have thought, and checked out the Ho Chi Minh museum which interestingly has taken pretty much every object the man ever owned, document he wrote, and picture taken of him, and has made a display out of it. We got slightly lost in the complex on the way out and before we knew it, were at a gate to the outside and were emphatically asked by the security to leave.... We still wanted to see the presidential palace and the Ho Chi Minh house, but after the thought of getting frisked again by security, opted out and just got our bags back instead.
It was still quite early in the day, and made it to the Temple of Literature - which dates back to the days when Hanoi was the biggest town in Vietnam and students from all over
the countryside would come to do university work, mainly on Confucianism, in town. The temple was built as a tribute to the scholarly culture, and lining the courtyards, are stilae on turtles where top students names and hometowns were noted. There's also an interesting Confucian temple inside.
We stopped for a brief bite at KOTO, a restaurant founded by an Australian-Vietnamese guy to take poor kids off the streets, and teach them how to cook in order to give them a source of livelihood. The restaurant has been a success with many alumni working at top hotels's kitchens, some coming back to teach incoming classes, and the restaurant at the beginning of a franchising expansion. The food was very good.
We finished up the afternoon with a visit to the Hoa La prison which was used for many years by the French to house political activists in pretty bad conditions. Interestingly, there was a picture inside of John McCain visiting in 2000. After the sight-seeing, we made it back to finish up some work and pack for yet another early flight back to warm and sunny Ho Chi Minh City for the last week of our internship.
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