Silver Case

Being driven from the airport to the Hanoi Metropole hotel, the car approached quite a large, arcing bridge. At the start of the bridge two hapless policemen stand guard to prevent motorcycles and lorries from driving across it. Only cars are allowed.

Why do I know that? Because I saw one of the cops running on foot after the first of two motorcycles. He gave up and instead flagged down the second approaching motorcycle. Motorcycle[2] slowed down as the cop approached and right when the angry officer walked near, the motorcycle scooted away, up and over the bridge.

The funniest part was when the frustrated cop tried a hail-mary throw of his traffic baton in attempt to knock the motorcyclist down. Didn’t exactly exactly work, the plastic baton flew about 20 feet and clattered to the ground. What a job!

Ling was putting Luke to bed.   I try not to be around, because it means I have to sit in the dark and wait for him to fall asleep.  It’s trying.  So instead, I took my bike out and went to a Jazz Club that I had heard about.  Unfortunately, I went there at 7pm. At that point there are no customers and there is no music.  Band doesn’t start until 9pm.

So I went off in search of something else.  I ended up stopping at a totally random street-food place that was quite busy.  I pointed at what the other tables were eating and said I’d have that.  One table was eating towgay (bean sprouts) which I love to eat.

They brought me a heineken, this bean sprout dish, and a plate of, basically, fried rice.

The heineken was cold.

The towgay dish was bean sprouts stir-fried with mixed animal organs and quail eggs.  I don’t know exactly what parts, but things like bits of kidney, liver, esophagus, lung, whatever.   The towgay wasn’t cooked adequately so it had that nasty rhyzome/green taste to it.

The fried rice was quite oily, but what was weirder was that it was cooked to the point that %25 of it was cooked to a crisp.  Not very pleasant.

Then I looked under the tiny table I was sitting at (everyone sits on tiny stools 6″ off the ground and tables 14″ off the ground), kicking away all the waste paper and squeezed limes, to reveal approximately a half-dozen gnawed-on chicken claws-and-calf.  That was pretty rude.

Airborne

Originally uploaded by karavshin.

Still puttering around. Luke’s cold has took a notable turn for the better. He’s not producing 12oz of snot each day, for instance.

Luke keeps asking to go see the (water) puppets again. Ling keeps persistently saying he won’t be interested a second time. I doubt her. So tomorrow she’s going shopping and he and I are going to the puppet theatre again.

Ate at a “well thought of” (a friend told me about it, I didn’t go based on the insipid review) restaurant, Green Tangerine, today. Lot of decorative French fusion. ZZZZZZZZzzzzzz.

It brought me to the realization that, like Steve McQueen, I demand authenticity [in my food]. (McQueen demanded authenticity in his crummy movies). Real stuff, where the focus is more on using best ingredients and preparing it right and with care. Not, like tonight’s example, covering a dull fish tartare (really just a ceviche) with a “latticework of homemade pasta.” The pasta was bone white. They used a fucked-up flour for it, and I think it wasn’t air-dried. That’s why it looked and tasted like soft paste.

*Also, the softshell crab appetizer was shit. They put so much fucking oregano in the marina that it stunk. The last time I ate something so over-herbed was when Megan and I poisoned ourself with a pizza made mostly of sage.

It’s alright, because I found a really good guide to the food scene in Hanoi. It gives excellent citations (so far everything I’ve tried has been good) and it gives current, accurate addresses. I find Hanoi perhaps the easiest city I’ve ever had to navigate. Every single street is clearly marked (unlike Chengdu). Every single building is clearly and consistently numbered (unlike Tokyo). And I bought a small street directory book (instead of a crappy folding tourist map) which is complete and accurate and indexed.

I unfolded my Dahon this evening and took it out for an hour’s spin while Ling put Luke to bed. It was teriffic. The temperature was mid 60s? A temperature that you don’t even notice, yet just cool enough that even at 80% exertion on my bike, I wouldn’t sweat. The driving scene here is insane, so it felt like being a bicycle courier or something, weaving traffic, swerving, wrong-ways on one-ways, etc. Although, it’s actually quite harmless and there is some sort of chaotic organization to the place. Sort of like how they say flocks of birds or fish show complex organization even though they have no leader and they follow only a few simple rules.

Hoa Binh Dam

Photographed by Cục Sắt.
We took a two-hour drive into the countryside today to visit the Hoa Binh Hydroelectric dam.

The dam was started in 1979 and finished in 1994 (I think) at the cost of, apparently, one hundred eighty “workers and expatriates [Soviet workers]“.

I was disappointed, as when I heard “dam tour”, I thought that would include seeing the power generation/internals. I was looking forward to seeing nasty 1970s Soviet Power Engineering. Alas, this is still an ostensibly communist country and they still enjoy their petty secrecies, so I only got to see the damn wall and sluice gates. Apparently there are eight 240mW turbines at the facility.

Also, these photos are not mine. This time of year the air is terribly hazy. It was also 2pm, perhaps the worst time of the day to take a photo. Lastly, the sluices are closed. So the gate was dry as a bone. Instead I am including this link to a photos from a more ferocious time of the year. For my own photos, I settled for some moody shots that I might work into a photo fiction some day.

Waiting for Flight to Hanoi

Originally uploaded by karavshin.
A day’s worth of photos posted

Flew to Hanoi with Ling and Luke this morning. Will be here on vacation until next Sunday.  Staying at the Hilton Opera House.  Nothing special to report yet.  City is a lot more like Vientiane than Bangkok.  Went outside tonight and bought a couple maps and guide books. Brought my Dahon folding bike and Luke’s seat.  Will get Ling a bike somehow and then we ought to be pretty mobile.  Weather in the 50s (night) 70s (day).