From Hoi An I took a 5:30 bus to Danang Airport for my flight to Hanoi. There was only one other passenger on the bus, a young blond Mexican man with a neck tattoo and goatee. We hardly spoke, but we wished each other well as we parted.
Barbara was waiting at the airport. She had taken a car to Danang to see the pagodas of Marble Mountain and had loved them. She even said I would have loved them. I must return to Vietnam.
Being of that generation, the "Vietnam" War (the "American" war here in Vietnam) is etched deep in my consciousness. The name of Hanoi will always be associated with the enemy capital, even though I sympathized with the Vietnamese in that war and knew we were wrong to fight it. The more I've learned about how the Vietnamese won it the more my admiration for them grows. It was only the last war in a forty-year struggle for national liberation and self-determination. It had taken them almost twenty years to get rid of the very brutal French colonial regime, which they had managed by 1954, only to find themselves confronted with an imperialist power, us, trying to hold back the implementation of the Geneva accords, and then trumping up a pretext to bomb the North in the infamous Gulf of Tonkin resolution, where Johnson claimed a US ship was fired upon by the North Vietnamese. Only it never happened. Anyway, the war was really about making money for those patriotic companies that run the military-industrial complex, that Eisenhower warned us about--in vain. Johnson has been quoted as saying that he couldn't stop the war, because too many of his friends were making too much money on it--win or lose.
Well, our country lost, and big time, while these armaments suppliers won big time. Now I was arriving in the headquarters of the effort to defeat us, which they did, heroically. I found myself admiring of them, while at some primitive reflex level, if only through a conditioned association with the name Hanoi, feeling I was entering enemy territory.
Except that when we arrived at the Charming II hotel, where we had our reservation, we were received like long-lost relatives. It was 11:30 at night, and we were given watermelon juice and escorted to a beautiful room. It seems the staff couldn't do enough for us, and this continued through the end of our stay there. Overall, we've encountered exceptional friendliness here among this gentle people, making the fact that we bombed them, and so self-righteously, even more outlandish. Of course, I must also acknowledge that about 70% of the population hadn't been born or come of age at the time of the war, so it's just history to them, not memory.
We confirmed our reservation for the two-day overnight cruise on Ha Long Bay for Wednesday and Thursday, which left us the day Tuesday to wander around Hanoi. So the first thing we did was to head for the Ho Chi Minh Masoleum. Except that we couldn't find it and ended up in the Ho Chi Minh Museum instead--not a bad substitution.
In addition to photos and documents tracking the life of the visionary leader, there were side exhibits on cultural influences on him, notably surrealism, 19th Century radical thought and culture, and Picasso's "Guernica." There were portraits of Dali and Andre Breton, Einstein, Gustave Courbet and Edvard Munch, and three-dimensional blown-up excerpts from "Guernica." It was both an acknowledgement that Ho Chi Minh had embraced the radical cultural changes in Europe and America that accompanied liberation movements in the colonialized world that their corporations and governments dominated; and a quick dazzling survey of these cultural changes for the school children who swarmed through this museum. What a contrast this was, knowing that Ho Chi Minh was so eager to absorb these insights from Western sources, to the much narrower nationalist minds of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot! I really had to learn more about this guy.
One large space was occupied by a symbolic representation of Ho Chi Minh's mountain redout, when he was conducting a guerilla war against the French, in the form of a stylized interior of a brain! It was labeled so.
The exhibit extended to Ho Chi Minh's death in September of 1969 at the age of 79, and the tributes that poured in from around the world.
We left at 11:30, which was when the Masoleum closed, too, so we missed it. I understand he wanted to be cremated and his ashes divided among the North, Center and South, but they embalmed him, and he lies there like Mao and Lenin.
As we walked out a scooter driver came up to us and offered to drive us to the wreckage of "John McCain's B-52." Now, I couldn't pass this up, but Barbara considered it more propaganda, so off I went without her. We wound around through narrow streets and came to a square lake in the center of a neighborhood. In the lake was some twisted metal, including what looked like the skeleton of a wing that could have been that of a large bat. A plaque identied this as a B-52 shot down in 1972, and my driver assured me it was John McCain's. I later found out that he was shot down in 1967, so it wasn't his. The B-52 Cafe was just off the lake on the south side. Across another lake, a rectangular one, were some fancy homes that my driver said belonged to "corrupt generals."
We then drove off to another series of wrecks from the war, this time in front of the Army Museum, which he said was closed for lunch. There were also anti-aircraft guns and their grandiose radar receivers, as well as other weapons of war.
Next he took me to the Museum of Vietnamese Ethnicities, which was rather far from the center of the city. It gave me an appreciation of the immense diversity of peoples that inhabit this country as well as the cultural practices that make them distinct.
I ran into a school group of maybe 12-year-olds, and one of the girls wanted to have her picture taken with me. I was only too happy to oblige, and of course, I ended up photographing the entire group. Their teacher also taught English, but I still found him rather difficult to understand.
Behind the museum was a large area with stilt houses, wooden temples, a long boat and an artificial lake.
I had lunch at the small restaurant there. My driver came back to pick me up and took me to the Fine Arts Museum, an excellent institution, even richer than the one in Ho Chi Minh City. Most impressive were the laquer paintings, the same medium used to create the quantities of kitchy images in the sheltered laquer painting factories I had been dutifully delivered to on various tours (including this very same motor scooter driver--and he thought he was revealing something new to me!), except that these were powerful and original (and large) works of art. Some of them had martial themes, but they went beyond propaganda, and were distinctly NOT socialist realism, rather more expressionistic.
There were also two rooms of paintings on silk, which have a dreamy quality to them, going beyond watercolor.
Emerging from the museum after an hour and twenty minutes, I allowed myself to accept a ride from a bicycle rickshaw man, who I thought said something about two dollars back to my hotel. It turned out to be 200,000 VND, which I refused to pay him, only giving him 110,000, and not going all the way to the hotel. A taxi would have cost me half that amount, but it wouldn't have given me the amusement-park style ride of being on a cushioned bench confronting the phalanx of motor scooters with nothing, nothing between us, and emerging unscathed. I had him stop along the way when I noticed a street with a railroad track running through it and people living their lives around it. I walked down that street about 250 meters and took some interesting photos of the modest but happy family lives of these folk.
Back at the hotel, Barbara wanted to try a fine restaurant she had read about, so we took a taxi to Pots and Pans, over near the Opera House. It was indeed a beautiful place, with soft lighting, abstract paintings on the walls, and air conditioning, of course. I had a delicious stuffed eggplant, which was just a little meager, and Barbara had the sea bass, which was more than ample. We also treated ourselves to dessert, which was a sculptural composition in my case, with passion fruit sorbet, a slice of banana with a caramelized crust on it, and a deep fried coconut square. Service was impeccable.
Barbara was waiting at the airport. She had taken a car to Danang to see the pagodas of Marble Mountain and had loved them. She even said I would have loved them. I must return to Vietnam.
Being of that generation, the "Vietnam" War (the "American" war here in Vietnam) is etched deep in my consciousness. The name of Hanoi will always be associated with the enemy capital, even though I sympathized with the Vietnamese in that war and knew we were wrong to fight it. The more I've learned about how the Vietnamese won it the more my admiration for them grows. It was only the last war in a forty-year struggle for national liberation and self-determination. It had taken them almost twenty years to get rid of the very brutal French colonial regime, which they had managed by 1954, only to find themselves confronted with an imperialist power, us, trying to hold back the implementation of the Geneva accords, and then trumping up a pretext to bomb the North in the infamous Gulf of Tonkin resolution, where Johnson claimed a US ship was fired upon by the North Vietnamese. Only it never happened. Anyway, the war was really about making money for those patriotic companies that run the military-industrial complex, that Eisenhower warned us about--in vain. Johnson has been quoted as saying that he couldn't stop the war, because too many of his friends were making too much money on it--win or lose.
Well, our country lost, and big time, while these armaments suppliers won big time. Now I was arriving in the headquarters of the effort to defeat us, which they did, heroically. I found myself admiring of them, while at some primitive reflex level, if only through a conditioned association with the name Hanoi, feeling I was entering enemy territory.
Except that when we arrived at the Charming II hotel, where we had our reservation, we were received like long-lost relatives. It was 11:30 at night, and we were given watermelon juice and escorted to a beautiful room. It seems the staff couldn't do enough for us, and this continued through the end of our stay there. Overall, we've encountered exceptional friendliness here among this gentle people, making the fact that we bombed them, and so self-righteously, even more outlandish. Of course, I must also acknowledge that about 70% of the population hadn't been born or come of age at the time of the war, so it's just history to them, not memory.
We confirmed our reservation for the two-day overnight cruise on Ha Long Bay for Wednesday and Thursday, which left us the day Tuesday to wander around Hanoi. So the first thing we did was to head for the Ho Chi Minh Masoleum. Except that we couldn't find it and ended up in the Ho Chi Minh Museum instead--not a bad substitution.
In addition to photos and documents tracking the life of the visionary leader, there were side exhibits on cultural influences on him, notably surrealism, 19th Century radical thought and culture, and Picasso's "Guernica." There were portraits of Dali and Andre Breton, Einstein, Gustave Courbet and Edvard Munch, and three-dimensional blown-up excerpts from "Guernica." It was both an acknowledgement that Ho Chi Minh had embraced the radical cultural changes in Europe and America that accompanied liberation movements in the colonialized world that their corporations and governments dominated; and a quick dazzling survey of these cultural changes for the school children who swarmed through this museum. What a contrast this was, knowing that Ho Chi Minh was so eager to absorb these insights from Western sources, to the much narrower nationalist minds of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot! I really had to learn more about this guy.
One large space was occupied by a symbolic representation of Ho Chi Minh's mountain redout, when he was conducting a guerilla war against the French, in the form of a stylized interior of a brain! It was labeled so.
The exhibit extended to Ho Chi Minh's death in September of 1969 at the age of 79, and the tributes that poured in from around the world.
Detail from the gift shop.
We left at 11:30, which was when the Masoleum closed, too, so we missed it. I understand he wanted to be cremated and his ashes divided among the North, Center and South, but they embalmed him, and he lies there like Mao and Lenin.
As we walked out a scooter driver came up to us and offered to drive us to the wreckage of "John McCain's B-52." Now, I couldn't pass this up, but Barbara considered it more propaganda, so off I went without her. We wound around through narrow streets and came to a square lake in the center of a neighborhood. In the lake was some twisted metal, including what looked like the skeleton of a wing that could have been that of a large bat. A plaque identied this as a B-52 shot down in 1972, and my driver assured me it was John McCain's. I later found out that he was shot down in 1967, so it wasn't his. The B-52 Cafe was just off the lake on the south side. Across another lake, a rectangular one, were some fancy homes that my driver said belonged to "corrupt generals."
The homes of the "corrupt generals."
We then drove off to another series of wrecks from the war, this time in front of the Army Museum, which he said was closed for lunch. There were also anti-aircraft guns and their grandiose radar receivers, as well as other weapons of war.
Next he took me to the Museum of Vietnamese Ethnicities, which was rather far from the center of the city. It gave me an appreciation of the immense diversity of peoples that inhabit this country as well as the cultural practices that make them distinct.
I ran into a school group of maybe 12-year-olds, and one of the girls wanted to have her picture taken with me. I was only too happy to oblige, and of course, I ended up photographing the entire group. Their teacher also taught English, but I still found him rather difficult to understand.
Behind the museum was a large area with stilt houses, wooden temples, a long boat and an artificial lake.
I had lunch at the small restaurant there. My driver came back to pick me up and took me to the Fine Arts Museum, an excellent institution, even richer than the one in Ho Chi Minh City. Most impressive were the laquer paintings, the same medium used to create the quantities of kitchy images in the sheltered laquer painting factories I had been dutifully delivered to on various tours (including this very same motor scooter driver--and he thought he was revealing something new to me!), except that these were powerful and original (and large) works of art. Some of them had martial themes, but they went beyond propaganda, and were distinctly NOT socialist realism, rather more expressionistic.
There were also two rooms of paintings on silk, which have a dreamy quality to them, going beyond watercolor.
Emerging from the museum after an hour and twenty minutes, I allowed myself to accept a ride from a bicycle rickshaw man, who I thought said something about two dollars back to my hotel. It turned out to be 200,000 VND, which I refused to pay him, only giving him 110,000, and not going all the way to the hotel. A taxi would have cost me half that amount, but it wouldn't have given me the amusement-park style ride of being on a cushioned bench confronting the phalanx of motor scooters with nothing, nothing between us, and emerging unscathed. I had him stop along the way when I noticed a street with a railroad track running through it and people living their lives around it. I walked down that street about 250 meters and took some interesting photos of the modest but happy family lives of these folk.
Back at the hotel, Barbara wanted to try a fine restaurant she had read about, so we took a taxi to Pots and Pans, over near the Opera House. It was indeed a beautiful place, with soft lighting, abstract paintings on the walls, and air conditioning, of course. I had a delicious stuffed eggplant, which was just a little meager, and Barbara had the sea bass, which was more than ample. We also treated ourselves to dessert, which was a sculptural composition in my case, with passion fruit sorbet, a slice of banana with a caramelized crust on it, and a deep fried coconut square. Service was impeccable.
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