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A long delayed transcript of the notes I took on my phone while in Vietnam, Part 1. Enjoy, you :)
n1. Joy hostel has a narrow staircase. There's an interesting light switch system as you go up. We were given the room at the top, where the lock didn't work. Ran up and down to change keys and finally changed rooms. This one is first floor :) and bigger. Let's hope they don't take this opportunity to charge us higher rates... Also, no kettle. I had the idea of using the heater instead (though Zhu says no. haha.) -- D2. Traffic is insane here. There are no rules, the horn is used as a warning instead of signal lights when overtaking and to clear the way. As a result you hear a LOT of noise, especially in the morning. (addenum: Weekends are pretty quiet, though. Go figure.) Surprisingly, though, most drivers go slowly (our taxi driver from the airport drove at about 80-90) and are gracious enough to give way when necessary. Things work differently here. -- D2. Learnt the art of strolling across busy streets - a necessity in Hanoi. The car and bus horns here don't toot once, they do it continuously in bursts, creating strange harmonies on the road as different horns interact. We had pho bo for breakfast (nice!) and Com Minh Dan for lunch. Low stools, small tables makes for an interesting meal. Both times we had a drink that tasted somewhat like tea, but with a bitter aftertaste like beer. A rather common drink, from the looks of it. (addenum: It was green tea. Zhu said afterwards, and I concur, that it can't be beer because there wasn't foam. Besides, we tried the bia hoi that night and it tasted nothing like that.) (side note: I mispelled Com Minh Dan earlier. Here's the correction note: Oh right, it's com minh dan. As in gong ming fan, or peoples' meals. Vietnamese (or North Vietnamese anyway) sounds somewhat like an offshoot of Cantonese.) -- D2 still. Wandered into a random desert/smoothie shop. Zhu got a mango, I ordered a mixed. This should be interesting. Okay, tried it. This is good :) Thick and smooth. Still tastes like mango, though, with a bit of kiwi and papaya. (addenum: Zhu said later that mine was better, because his was a little too thick. It made him rather thirsty. We don't have easy access to drinking water here.) -- D2 afternoon. After a bit more walking, another stopover at a cafe north of Hoan Kiem Lake. Slightly more high class this time, indoor with proper seats and a bit of warm brown deco. We are slackers, and it's really hot. -- D2, in the hotel room. More random walking and a Chinese Chess set (addenum on evening of D4: which has served us well so far!) Got back to the hotel at about 4.30pm. Really early. My camera's dead, it died at 9am and I've been spending the whole day borrowing Zhu's phone. -.- (addenum: It's okay, though. We walked around to many of the same places on D4 and re-took some photos XD) -- D3. Beef pho bo, discovering the balcony in our room, power outage after breakfast wtf? (It was okay, we were checking out anyway. There was a more manly power outage in the evening, at Ninh Binh.) We then had a Navex to the bus stop in order to take bus 32 to Giap Bat bus station. -- D3. Just had lunch on the back lanes near Ninh Binh market. It was spring rolls, beef and starfruit and leaves wrapped in rice paper and dipped in peanut sauce. Ordering was a lot of pointing and gesturing by us and showing around the kitchen by them. Friendly uncle :) Also, I met a Vietnamese girl Mai on the bus to Ninh Binh and we had a short chat. She's a uni grad and has been working for HP for a year, and she's only a year older than us -.- Army sucks. -- D3 evening. Mega long note. Cycled in a tropical storm today. Fun. We got bikes from the hotel, started out easily on the roads, then somehow wandered into the rural villages and got totally lost -.- concrete gave way to gravel, sand and eventually mud, and the directions suggested by a kindly family (they even offered us a beer! O.O) brought us on a mud path through the rice paddies. Great weather (intermittent drizzle, a bit heavier rain, still nice to travel in), amazing scenery, the wind at our backs (most of the time), except that the mud eventually got so thick our bike wheels got jammed and we had to drag and carry the bikes the rest of the way to the next village. Decidedly NOT fun. Poor Zhu got mud all over his jeans and shoes; mine didn't fare much better (shoes, I mean. I didn't wear jeans.) The view and the experience more than made up for it, though, so I'm glad we went that way. Vietnamese people are really friendly. One woman in the village used a sickle to help me get the mud off the inside of the mudguards, and people everywhere (okay, kids, but still) were eager to say hello and help with directions (this, more the adults do). Who would do that at home? After a tiring time we eventually hit the highway again. It was a short ride to Tam Coc, the landlocked Ha Long Bay. The view was again amazing but the rowboats weren't operating because of the weather :( We still managed to cycle part of the river, though, so it wasn't a total loss. (addenum on D4: and we booked a tour to Ha Long Bay today for the next 3 days, so we're golden!) Zhu is a reluctant photographer. Rather a lousy one, too :P Return trip was via highway (yes, we cycled on the highway. It was fun. No, we didn't get horned by every driver that passed us because we were lousy. Everyone horns in Vietnam.) Our bikes win the most cui award today! (Nobody else's even came close, I believe. See pictures for verification.) Composed this while waiting for Zhu to bathe (addenum: and transcribing it to email now it seems MOTHER LONG O.O) and after dinner when he was using the com and wth the power just went out! They set up these candles on the stairs and now zhu and I are playing Chinese Chess at the lobby. More later. -- N3. No power, no Internet, no aircon, no fan, possibly no breakfast tomorrow. Murphy sucks. -- D4. Power restored just before 11pm. Joy! (addenum: We checked mail in the morning and Zhu said they cut the power to some transformer stations as a precaution. That must have been what happened.) Woke at 5am, as usual. Can never sleep in strange conditions. Sunrise came at 6am, much earlier than expected. Storm has passed Ninh Binh. Weather reports state Hanoi has a 90% chance of precipitation today though (addennum as of 6.40pm: which we haven't seen yet, thankfully!) -- N4. Coming to you from the Joy Hotel lobby :) Okay, there's still some stuff in my phone to be transcribed, but my phone's charging and it's getting kinda late, so I'm typing this out here first. -- D4 evening. After dinner we went to catch the water puppet show at Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre. A short performance, scarcely an hour long, it was rather interesting to see. My camera conked out early (and it couldn't really capture well in the dark theatre anyway), which means that I had more opportunity to enjoy the show :) It will simply have to live in my memories now. All in all the performance was a rather light performance. It started out with a display of traditional music (mostly Chinese instruments like the dizi, erhu and drums, but there was an interesting single-string instrument that had a vibrato handle. Refer to pictures), a solo by said single-string instrument, and then the performance proper. The water puppets were manipulated by people from behind a screen, and performance segments ranged from light-hearted renditions of everyday life to more serious depictions of stories and legends. We have puppets planting rice, fishing, trying to fish from a boat but falling into the water, catching another fisherman's head instead of a fish while fishing with a basket, and so on. We have puppets playing instruments (drums and cymbals) and lions jumping/splashing around in a depiction of lion dance, though the music was rather Western-sounding with its beat, and so this part was a bit off. Then they performed the legend of King () returning the holy/sacred sword to the Turtle of Hoan Kiem Lake, in Vietnam's own King Arthur story. The performance ended with a flourish of 4 sacred animals, namely the Pheonix(es), Turtle, Dragon and Lion. This was really, really short, like Zhu said "just an ending flourish", but it was interesting in that it showed the different movements of the puppets. The lion was really active, splashing and jumping around. The Turtle and Dragon, on the other hand, were serenely swimming, with the Dragon making many long, languid turns while the Turtle swam slowly and gracefully. The Pheonix's movement was forgettable, but ok la, how do you mimic flying in the water? =/ We watched the 8-9pm show, which in retrospect was a good idea (I think) because we were kinda tired while watching it. I can totally imagine the farmers watching this performance after a long day or season's work, enjoying the caricatures of daily life (which perhaps were even exaggerations of epic fail moments that happened this season, like Zhu suggested!), falling silent when the more serious legends come up, prompting contemplation and reflection. That's if the water puppetry stays true to tradition. Which is a very big if. Anyways, that's all for tonight. I have to wake up early tomorrow. :) -- |
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