Hanoi

hanoi

A very important purchase

Water  puppets!

Snacking like a Hanoian: Lemon iced tea and sunflower seeds on the sidewalk

The gothic St. Joseph's Cathedral

Discovering milk apples at Hoan Kiem Lake

Hanoi is an immediately likeable city.  The Old Quarter is a fun and easy area to explore, where the small streets and alleys are named after the products that were sold there by the medieval guilds (P Hang Gai, for example, translates to "Silk Street").  Shops have diversified somewhat, but you can still walk for blocks down a main road and find only rows of hat shops, or vase shops, or silk dress shops, etc.  Hanoi sidewalks are used for everything but walking.  Hanoians cook, sit and drink, repair shoes, cut keys, play badminton, and sell produce and bread on the sidewalk, forcing pedestrians out to the street to contend with the over two million zooming motorbikes.  A small two lane street might have ten "lanes" of motorbikes navigating around each other.  How do you cross a street where the traffic never lets up?  The best strategy is to very slowly step out into the street and just keep walking.  The stream of motorbikes break around you, and as long as you keep walking and do not make any sudden movements, they will compensate for you.  It is terrifying at first, but once you get the hang of it, you feel a bit like Moses.

Our time in Hanoi was divided into two main segments: the hour we spent attending the Municipal Water Puppet Theatre, and the steady and endless emotional let-down of the days that followed.  The art of water puppetry originated over one thousand years ago in the flooded rice fields of the Red River Delta in northern Vietnam.  Farmers carved the puppets from water-resistant timber, creating miniatures of themselves, animals from their work and leisure (water buffalo and fish), and mythical creatures such as the dragon and unicorn.  Traditionally, the skills to operate the puppets were only passed down from father to son out of fear that daughters would learn the secrets and then share them with the males of the family they married into.  In our urban performance, eleven puppeteers stood out of site in waste-deep water behind a bamboo screen where they controlled the performance.  The murky water on stage obscured the puppet-operating equipment below, so in our darkened theater it appeared that the water puppets were standing on or swimming in the water independently.  A ten-plus musical ensemble performed the soundtrack (a great performance in itself) and we were transported.  We howled with delight as a fisherman puppet battled with his catch, eventually being pulled into the water to swim alongside it, as a young male puppet struggled to climb a coconut tree to spy on the village girls bathing in the river, and as a carp magically transformed into a dragon, leaving the water and flying around the theater while breathing fire.  It was graceful and hilarious.  We'll see it again in Saigon.