The Vietnam Top Ten

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The Top Ten Series: Vietnam

1. War? What war? This thin slice of Southeast Asia has been bombed, napalmed, mined, gassed and poisoned into oblivion for years. French, Cambodians, Chinese, Americans and, last but not least, Vietnamese tried their best to slaughter Vietnamese. Coming from a country where after 60 years way too many idiots are still making a huge fuss and cannot come to terms with what, compared to the Vietnam conflict, was basically a pub brawl in terms of cruelty and losses (I refer to the Italian theatre of operations), I expected dislike, contempt and a certain dose of scorn. But the Vietnamese would have none of it. Probably all the people who can remember have died already. It’s all about a new generation. The young people cannot care less about B52s, Napalm, Vietcong, Cu Chi tunnels and also about communism, for the matter. They do care about Arsenal, internet (not censored), ADSL (ubiquitous), Honda Wave II special, Saturday rides along the avenues with the girlfriend, Cell phones and business. That is a lesson. We Europeans are like elephants, and remember way too much and far too long. We probably need a faster generation renewal.
2. The potential of a scooter. Vietnam is the country that St. Christopher has chosen to test the maximum loads a two-wheeled, 110cc Honda. The test results are as follows: 3 adults, 2 adults AND two children (the woman can be pregnant), 2 goats (alive), 20 chickens, several bunches of tied up frogs, 2 buckets full of fish, pigs, cats, and dogs (there must be a rule animals MUST be transported alive), 8 five-gallon canisters of liquids, over 50 lunch boxes balanced on the left hand (the latter shrewdly unencumbered of the clutch lever), over 200 shoes, 2 tourists, 2 fat tourists, 1 gate, 2 doors, over 100 bricks, 4 concrete sacks, 3 draughts beer kegs and an overwhelming volume of dried rice stems.
3. Restaurant galore. Society evolves when agriculture can provide a surplus to feed others, ergo to feed others is the first business in history. Ok, maybe the second. Where there is business, there is a Vietnamese. Taking care to define a restaurant activity something that involves the preparation of a certain food (thus excluding the selling of food), the locals start from the basics, which are a portable coal pan over which any substance belonging to the animal and vegetal kingdom can be cooked, and a grill. To broil dried squid is a favourite among the bipeds who lost the sense of smell. If a lady toddle by and stops to cook one of these tiny but equally foul aliens in front of a pub, call the police. The following step up from the single pan pocket joint is the double pan pocket restaurant. One pan contains the ingredients, dishes and cutlery (if any), the other the coal/burning device. Excellent solution for traffic-pestered streets. If this career prosper, the woman can dream to open her own street kitchen, where she stands like a Buddha in the middle of a first ring made of great variety of ingredients and cooking surfaces, and a second ring of very small stools where customers try to sit down to eat. These joints might fall into three main categories, the boilers, the broilers and the friers. Among the former, I strongly recommend the crab spots, but do not accept their rags to wipe your hands. Bring tissues aplenty. If the accounting shows nice figures, the lady can move up to a street restaurant, only apparently the same as before, but the difference is great, for here part of the actions goes on indoor. Once this simple but essential step is taken, making the activity a fixed rather than a nomadic one, the sky is the limit. The activity moves gradually indoor with its clients, stools becomes chair, doors are closed, AC put in, the Lonely Planet mention is reached and we end up in Sheraton’s 23rd floor restaurant in Saigon.
4. Marlboro marriage. Try, if you can, to be invited to a marriage party. It should not be too difficult: bride and groom stand out of the most luxurious joint their status can afford and offer presents to the guests and passer-bys. They will be able to spot a Caucasian in a crowded market, probably due to the fact that the average Swedish stands out a whole yard, and if your face is not flat you stand a good chance to be invited in to drink a nice glass of rice wine (with a snake in the bottle) and enjoy a fag. Why a fag? That’s what they give away at the door as a symbol of their wealth, cigarettes. Now, the cost of a pack down there averages 30p., which is around 19 times cheaper than in Chelsea. Ok, maybe we should start giving away Marlboros out of St.Paul’s when we get married.
5. Party murals. Those reactionaries stating that tube trains and city walls are victims of a leftist crusade against the productive bourgeoisie might be a little far fetched in their opinions, but they might get unexpected assistance by the Vietnamese communist party, second to none in the use of wide surfaces to deliver anti-capitalist messages. Sure enough their characters’ variety is not restricted to proud workers, happy peasants, post-orgasmic women and smart students staring at a better and bright red-flagged future with a pastoral background of cranes and derricks. The funniest of all is a wide murals where an amusing band of smiling condoms (yes, there is no typing error, condoms) captures in other condoms a nasty gang of viruses, supposedly representing HIV.
6. Landscape? Where? If your favourite holidays must include Canadian-style valleys, Swiss villages, Yosemite peaks and Australian clear skies, don’t even think about buying a flight to Hanoi. Landscape is not a strong point in Vietnam. Some potty Anglo-Saxons go trekking in Sapa: they probably come from Liverpool and never got out of the city limit before, and no one told them that Switzerland and Scotland do exist indeed. With some luck Mount Fansipan might appear out of the mist a couple of minutes in a week or so of marching around terraced rice paddies, clear-cut slopes under reforestation with corn, landslides, mud ponds and aggressive local minorities in strange robes selling handicrafts imported from China. And these are the grandest sights of the country. Imagine the rest. The views of the cities are distressing, of the suburbs repulsive, of the rivers unhealthy and the sights of the plains stressful. Small corner of country life do exist must be thoroughly searched.
7. Water and students Which is the main difference? Simple: while water molecules flows touching one another and two flows of water cannot therefore intersect, the same law is not valid for students. Two flows of students (and, for the matter, of Vietnamese scooters) can intersect perfectly and crashes seldom occur. Due to the slight prevalence of students over classrooms, there are boys and girls coming and going all the time, with a peak hour at 12, when streets and roads are invaded by an endless flow of pupils, black pants, white shirt or ao dai, and red bandana. Unisex. You can enjoy visions of young and slender Vietnamese girls, exceedingly cute, gliding across streets where trillions of scooters flow incessantly, without even looking, and arriving on the other side unscathed. I could not say how they achieve this, because every time I instinctively shut my eyes, for I cannot stand the sight of blood.
8. Houses by the slice. Architects know: the main factor determining a style is not culture of fashion, but taxes. Vietnam, the most open market on the planet, measures income according to street width, that is why houses look like a bowling lane with 4 levels. They sell by the slice. The ground floor (or first, according to where you are) is usually a garage, but due to the fact that no one owns a car; the garage hosts the scooters and, incidentally, the family business, public and private. Do not marvel if someone is washing the clothes right behind you, who were thinking to sit in a bar. One can easily observe that every single activity happens in the ground floor (that can be very, very long): people sell, sleep, watch TV, entertain friends, wash, cook, read, work and think just there. The second floor is used for drying clothes. The third and fourth are a mystery to me. But, considering that the house is finished and painted only on the street side (the thin one), that towns are just a single line of houses along the main street and that I never saw a house from behind, I concluded that Vietnam is just a Hollywood cheap set
9. Market regulations: I am positively sure that the Vietnamese invented markets, accounting and packaging. A perfect spot to practice hardcore communism. How could you deprive those old ladies of their accounting books, blocs of paper so precise and densely written you need the Enigma to understand? Compared to any matron standing in a street restaurant, a hat shop or a massage parlour, Kenneth Lay looks a mere amateur in accounting miracles, Margaret Thatcher a sophomore in the college of you-do-not-know-who-I-am glances and the Pope (not the last one) a part-time TV salesman in broadcasting candour. How could you fix by law the volume of goods you can pack in a box, preventing those entrepreneurial kids to achieve a perfection that would save billions to DHL? How can you regulate by law the prices in a public market where not a single price tag has ever been written since the beginning of bartering? How can you regulate the various activities that take place in a Vietnamese market? Can you standardize the way a lively frog is decapitated? Can you legalize the number of eels squashing around a tub? Can you climb the Everest of dried mushrooms, the K2 of fake Pradas, and the Kilimanjaro of real North Face backpacks to count them? Can you measure the miles of hideous textiles, the yards of cow-tongue, the kilometres of chicken legs, the hectares of cheap aluminium pots and the whole provinces of vegetables under a single roof? After you, uncle Ho.
10. To each his own minaret. Hanoi (and basically anywhere else) 6 a.m.: the loudspeakers start the daily party indoctrination. For a country with non-existent legislative, information, democratic and parliamentary systems, all the regulations for life are transmitted via radio, and then translated into practical rules by word of mouth after the police filter has been tested. Never will you see the difference between to hear and to listen better explained. The relationship between the Vietnamese people and their government is certainly peculiar, and it is a fact that they both want to have the least to do with each other. While the people speed further and faster towards the future, the party is still trying to justify its choices with the past. Thank god there is barely a rag for a legal code and a constitution, that each day becomes less and less important. People and the world will stop noticing that almost everything that happen in Vietnam is practically illegal .The future is the law, and very few shreds of past will regulate the country’s growth. Right the opposite of Europe, where our past and laws and regulations try much harder than the communist party to address our lives. True enough, the universe tends towards a perfect balance. It’s just a question of time.

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Comments

[Ben]

nice trip mates
Very astonished being the first here!! Bravo guys, keep on travelling!