Sunday 27 May 2018

We're staying in the old quarter of Hanoi, which contains among other things Buddhist temples and pagodas, cafes and restaurants, government buildings and the Hoa Lo (Hanoi Hilton) Prison. We'll go tomorrow to look for John McCain's name scratched onto a wall.

Speaking of the ubiquitous temples, nearly everything in them is adorned in shiny, gaudy, gold colors. Signs at entrances request visitors act with dignity and not damage the relics. Apparently this is the stuff piled up around alters, which includes such things as plastic Buddha dolls, tins of crackers and pyramids built from cans of local beer. One source says 85% of Vietnamese are Buddhist. Wikipedia claims less than 13% are with the other 72% atheists or practitioners of folk religion based on the syncretism (yeah, I didn't know what that meant either) of Taoism, Confucianism and Mahayana Buddhism and involves lots of magic. Whatever.

Hanoi has sidewalks, but like everywhere we've been in Vietnam they don't seem to grasp the concept. While they are indeed located on the sides of streets, no one walks on them due use for other things like parking scooters, piling up merchandise, locating furniture, selling Coke or just sitting. Pedestrians must walk in the street and leap back into the occasional open spot when danger approaches. As this happens a lot one tends to dart from one sanctuary to the next, using an adroitness necessarily learned either quickly or previously as a youngster playing Pong or Space Invaders (that doesn't date me does it?), making foot travel somewhat discontinuous, but never boring.

Adolescents congregate in parks and on walking streets freely kicking around a weighted badminton looking thing very similarly to hackey sack. Just read an article indicating Hanoi is more tolerant than both Boulder, Colorado, and Santa Cruz, California, both of which have made this illegal. Whatever.

Jack