Hanoi Highlights

Back to city life, and we couldn't be happier. We like the noise and grit and action and just being able to walk through regular neighorhoods and see how people live.

1. My favorite part of the our Hanoi visit thus far was the Cyclo ride. For an hour, Jordo and I were driven around on seats attached to the front of bikes -- separate ones for each of us, or the poor old bike guys would have had heart attacks-- and we got to tour various neighborhoods. Street crossing here is an art. There's even something in our hotel room giving advice about it, saying to keep a steady pace and don't look back. Well, when you're on the cyclo, helpless to control the action, it's fascinating to look up and see a wall of mopeds heading right at you, death seeming imminent, and then somehow the wave parts and you survive. I just kept laughing every time we made a turn into traffic because, really, what else was there to do? The cyclo driver didn't speak much English, which was actually good because then I could just sit and take in. We passed the lake where John McCain was captured during the Vietnam War (The American War, as they call it here.) We drove through alleys where craftsmen were shaping metal for things like kitchen stove domes. We passed a few temples and vendors and it was just so interesting. Amazingly, although Jordo's cyclo was right in front of mine, and at times I was sure we were going to crash into it, we only bumped once. These Cyclo guys, they know their stuff.

2. We saw a tradiational Vietnamese Water Puppet Show. Water puppets are kinda creepy looking, especially some of the human ones with their fixed stares and crazy smiles. They reminded me, in a way, of the Shuffletown People. That reference will be lost on everyone except Susan, so a quick explanation: In the mid1980s, the three of us shared babysitting duties for a family that lived near me. One of the kids had a game called "Shuffletown." Basically, it was a little village with a firehouse and a school and a store and stuff and the people of Shuffleton glided along through the town to various locales. (You couldn't just lift them up. They were stuck on their shuffle track.) So I would play this with Zack, the oldest boy, and instead of a fun game of playing house and school, it became a shuffling town of horror. All of the townspeople, controlled by Zack, would try and get my one Shuffleperson, who would be frantically shuffling away and getting more and more frustrated since I couldn't just lift him up and run to safety. (I knew I could outrun a 6 year old.) I swear, Zack was like Damien when he was moving those Shuffletown People, surrounding my guy, and I would just scream and try to distract him with treats to save myself. It never worked. My player was always killed by the mob. (Ever since then, the Shuffletown People have appeared in Susan and my lives via postcards or notes they leave around. I think the little bitches even put something in my wedding album.)

But back to the water puppets, see here for more information and a few photos: http://www.thingsasian.com/stories-photos/1239 Basically, it's puppets moving on the surface of the water, their handlers out of sight, and it's pretty cool for the most part, except when your husband says things like, "Imagine them gliding towards you in the tub. Or the shower. Or any body of water, really. Or they'll be in the pipes, using their little puppet hammers to get out" (He says this knowing I had shower anxiety for weeks after seeing "The Ring.")

So the crowd was a bunch of white people like us who, most likely, had no idea what the Vietnamese narrator was saying. (Note: We've noted that at breakfast ,they seem to group the white people together, so we've taken to calling it "Anglo Alley.") Never mind, as the shows were largely without words, just music, and depicted different scenes from village life. Jordo and I danced with the music as it changed and cheered for the dragons and the phoenixes, who got it on right in front of us and produced an egg. We noticed that in many of the sketches, there was one puppet that wasn't quite like the others, so we made it our game to find him in each one. Was he the fish that couldn't jump in sequence with the rest? Had he been demoted to simply holding the water lily puppet in place? What was life backstage like for the puppet handlers? Was their jealousy? Rivalry? Disgust over their gimpy compadre? ("Jesus, did you see how Thi Ca is lead in the phoenix dance today? What genius came up with that idea? His phoenix has the grace of a water buffalo! That should be MY part.")

In short, we laughed and had fun throughout the show.

Not true the woman to my left, Hostile Helga. (She was German.) She glared at both of us for laughing and me in particular for coughing, sneered at the puppets, checked her watch repeatedly, leaned back so it looked like her eyes was closed, whispered to her husband, and seemed to roll her eyes a few times. Really, Helga, you gotta dance with the one who brung you, and with that attitude, you're not going to any OktoberFests.

3. Man oh man oh man, we have been eating so so so so much. Noodles and rice and fried rolls of all sorts and any sort of deliciousness that comes our way. On the plane ride from Bangkok to Hanoi, Jordo asked if he thought the seats were smaller than the ones we'd flown in on. I sadly informed him the seats were the same but our butts were bigger.

More later on "Uncle Ho."