Ha Noi

Flying from Phenom Penh to Hanoi, we believed ourselves to be aboard a direct flight, but landed instead in Vientiene, Laos. We hoped to find time for Laos this trip, but after it failed our cheap transport test, we reluctantly discarded the idea. Ironically we found ourselves disembarking there, for only one hour. Nora tried to convince the airline workers to let us stay in Vientiene, a supposedly gorgeous city, but from the plane appeared to be a gorgeous village, for one night and leave on the same flight the next day, but they refused. As we waited to board for Vietnam, a plane approached the gate in front us. It was the only plane visible in the tiny airport besides the plane that we just left. And, it was Laos Airline: the one airline that I refused to fly. Our guide book, which readily recommends such amusements as swimming in bug infested waters or jumping from some certain acclaimed precipice, includes a warning not unlike the following: for those who seek to grand stand by flying Lao Airlines, determined by the government and proven by experience to be unsafe, you do so at your own risk, for all others, do so only if you are left no choice in the time of an emergency. I had somewhat jokingly referred to this warning in earlier discussions: now I tried to reserve my amused term while stressing that I was adamant: No way in hell was I getting on that plane. Maybe Nora was going to get her wish to spend the night in Laos, after all. However, after about a half an hour, we boarded the same plane we had just abandoned and off we went.

We drove from the airport into Hanoi past sunset, so the city was illuminated to us only by the rings of streetlights and the outline of windows. But it was quite obvious that this was the largest city in which we have stayed since Bangkok, and, the most developed. There were on ramps and off ramps, not just random pocked crossroads. There were grand elegant bridges, not the heart racing constructions of bamboo and chain we crossed by some foreign God's acquiescence in Cambodia. There were freeways, wide and cluttered with the constant crossing and slowing and weaving and honking and darting of motos carrying perhaps one, two or three people...but not a family of five as we regularly documented in Siem Reap or Sihanoukville. And, there was the unique spectacle of Hanoi architecture: extraordinarily thin and tall buildings in every conceivable style, some lone, most shoulder to shoulder, standing in the night like a long smile of uneven teeth. We passed residential areas more modern and inventive than any I have seen: contemporary structures of glass and steel and sometimes stucco. All only a few meters wide, some seven or more stories tall, stretching back an almost equal distant. Like rows of cereal boxes turned to read the nutrition information.

We have spent the last two nights, now, amidst the origin for this alien architecture in the Old Quarter of Vietnam's northern 'captial'. The winding, narrow streets here were originally constructed around the year 1200, following 36 guilds of local craft and manufacture. The street names still include the name of the guild. And, since the Vietnamese letters are used by us as well, we have been able to find our way around, well, a little. And then, twice, we have failed and become terribly and hysterically lost. More on that later.

The buildings that line the streets are also partially ancient, with numerous revisions and divisions, so that today, many of the stores open to the street are only four or even three feet across. Behind or above are the homes or apartments, also only the width of some Americans and extending up or back some three or four stories. (I'll add more to this later..we have to go)

But,