Hanoi is a hectic city, with horns blaring and motorbikes racing everywhere you turn. You take your life into your hands - or rather the hands of 1000 drivers - every time you cross the street. It keeps you alert - there is no mindless meandering around this city. Our hotel room also, enjoyably, faces the street, which means we get a welcome 1000-horn wake-up call at 7am.
Today, at breakfast, we ate fresh rambutans, which are a scary looking fruit - small and red - the size of an apricot - with all sorts of spiny tentacles protruding. You cut it open and there is a white, grape-like flesh in the middle, which is the edible part. It tastes like a cross between a grape and a lemon, but very sweet. After trying several, I was able to convince a skeptical Lena to eat one and she ended up asking for more.
We started off the day by taking a walk around the lake that's at the center of Hanoi - an island of semi-calm among the bustling streets. There's an old temple on one of the islands in the lake, and many Hanoians were visiting it, making offerings, burning incense and bowing before the statues of Buddah.
Then we walked through Hanoi's old quarter to a traditional Vietnamese house which has been restored to how it was in the 18th century. We were served tea and witnessed the work of a calligrapher, from whom we bought a small picture.
After lunch, we headed back to the hotel to escape Hanoi's opressive mid-day heat and humidity. For dinner, we went to a corner pho stall, where we sampled the cheap and delicious national specialty, in both soup and fried versions. Then, ice cream at a French cafe before attending a water puppet show at the Vietnamese art's national theater.
In water puppetry, the stage is a pool, and the puppeteers stand behind a screen, operating the puppets with long rods under the water. They can do some amazing moves, including fish jumping, kids piling up on top of each other, a full royal procession, a team of 12 dancers, and dragons spewing fire at each other. The performance was made up of about 15 2-3 minute-long vignettes, most seemingly related to some aspect of rural life, such as planting rice, fishing, swimming, and yes - ducks mating (who produced a jumping egg, which then turned into a small duckling). Lena has just informed me that they were not ducks, but phoenixes, but I thought they looked like ducks. All the scenes were accompanied by classical Vietnamese music, which is likely an acquired taste for non-Vietnamese, as it is made up of much high-pitched whining to drums and scimtar-type instruments.
You can see more picture from Hanoi at our photo album.
Comments