Hanoi

So, now to start actually blogging about my travels throughout Southeast Asia. I covered a lot of land in the three weeks I was traveling, so these will be more of an overview of what I did and my impressions with pictures than an actual recollection of all my journeys.

Motorbike traffic in Hanoi. Because that's honestly the first thing I noticed when I got there. We have crazy traffic in China, but motorbikes are just about nonexistent. We have those fancy battery-powered bikes, but that's about it.

A note before I get started: I'm a very Sinocentric individual. All of my impressions of Asian countries are filtered through a China lens; this reflects more my background and knowledge than anything else. This is especially apparent in Vietnam, owing to the greater similarities. I feel like this is an important disclaimer, because China's pretty much the bully in this part of the world (especially when dealing with countries other than South Korea, Japan, and the US), so I want to clarify, the comparisons I make to China are because China is the frame of reference I have in Asia, not because China is an inherently superior, older, more foundational or richer culture or any silly claim like that. Just so that's clear.

I left from Guangzhou on Friday, January 24, setting out to visit a variety of Luce friends and environments over the next three weeks while my coworkers all returned home to celebrate Chinese New Year with their family. While I was traveling for a long span of time, I actually was not gone for the entirety of the holiday. Because I work at a university and this holiday falls at the change between semesters, the university is out of session for a total of five weeks around the holiday. However, as I’m working with grad students, that doesn’t mean that everyone was back home and relaxing for that entire span of time. But we had no lab meetings during that span of time and it seemed to me that no one was actually expected to be in the office for those weeks. I worked two of them to make up for the fact that I had taken several weeks off around Christmas to travel with my family; plus, five weeks traveling seems a little excessive, even to me.

The first step on my journey was Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam, located a mere two hour flight away from Guangzhou along the Red River. Out of the three countries I visited, Vietnam is the only one that I had an impression of before this year, and that’s due solely to the fact that Vietnamese food is delicious. Also the Vietnam War. That too.

On a more light-hearted note, here's a woman on a motorbike.

In Hanoi, I visited Tarlie and Meg, the two Scholars living there, and we were joined shortly by Matt, one of the Scholars working in Taipei. For the most part, we spent our time in Hanoi wandering around the streets, drinking coffee, and eating food. I didn’t see all that many touristy sites in or around Hanoi, though there are several, but instead spent lots of time sitting on little plastic chairs on the side of the street, eating a variety of different noodle soups or spring roll-type dishes and drinking coffee or beer, depending on the time of day.

Matt and Tarlie discussing serious things over noodles

Meg and Tarlie discussing serious things in the Temple of Literature. We're serious people, so many serious discussions were had.

These past several months I’ve realized that the only non-American part of the world I actually have any understanding of is China and thus I spent most of my trip comparing everything I saw to China. Vietnam was definitely the most similar of the three countries to China: it’s dense, with that insane traffic and hustle on the streets that I’ve come to associate with big-city China, the language is the closest to Chinese (though still unrelated), and the Chinese influence is very strong.

 The markets I stopped through also reminded me strongly of China. Crowded, packed with rows and rows of stalls selling very similar goods, with a constant hustle as people go about their business. Right after I took this photo, one of the boys in the foreground turned around and made a face at me. Wish I had taken another photo as he did that...

 Near the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum, at a small temple.

 At another small temple, this one was in the middle of a lake, West Lake/Hồ Tây if I recall correctly.

 Yet another temple on the water, this one on the main lake in the Old Quarter of Hanoi,  Hoàn Kiếm Lake

The Chinese influence is the result of the fact that the Chinese had ruled Vietnam for several centuries (a fact that all Vietnamese are well aware of and that few Chinese seem to care about) and that Vietnam, like Korea and Japan, was definitely within the Chinese sphere of influence. This means that the Vietnamese use chopsticks as their main utensil, their major holidays almost all have Chinese roots, their traditional architecture is definitely Chinese-influenced, and that Vietnamese was traditionally written with Chinese characters. This last bit means that all of the temples are covered in traditional Chinese characters, though some of them were Vietnamese inventions; I found this fascinating because just about no one in Vietnam can read Chinese characters anymore (unless they’re studying it as a foreign language), so in essence they’re cut off from that part of their history. I have an easier time understanding what all of the characters on their temples say than most Vietnamese people do.

 Generally speaking, the Vietnamese aren't too fond of the Chinese, but they're still fans of the characters. They're so pretty!

 More characters, inside the Temple of Literature, a Confucius temple and the oldest university in Vietnam, built in the 11th century and modeled after the Chinese

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 A group of men creating and selling calligraphy of Chinese characters. Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of the men themselves, but they're really playing up the whole "Confucian gentlemen" image.

As I arrived in Hanoi, they were preparing for the major festival of Tet, the Vietnamese version of Chinese New Year. Talking with Tarlie, Meg, and some of their Vietnamese friends, it struck me how similar many of the celebrations are between Vietnam (Northern Vietnam at least) and Guangzhou. People buy flowers and tangerine trees, cover their houses in festive red decorations that read 福 or luck, give 红包, red envelopes filled with money, to each other as presents, and everyone goes home for the holiday, effectively emptying out the major cities. In China, these celebrations are all very regionally-based: in Northern China, land of dumplings, people traditionally spend all day making dumplings and then eat them at midnight of 除夕, Chinese New Year’s Eve, though this is not a thing in Guangzhou. I don’t want to say that Vietnam borrowed lots of cultures and customs from China, but it certainly appears that there was quite a good deal of cultural exchange, mainly one-sided.

 Preparing to eat a traditional Tet dinner (at lunch) with Meg, Tarlie, and Meg's landlady/housemate Ly

 The ceramic pigs are a traditional symbol of good luck in Vietnam, especially popular around Tet. The pikachu? Unsure, but as it was the only pokémon on display, it did not seem like the people of Hanoi were doing a very good job of catching them all.

A street market with people selling things for Tet. Those red lanterns and decorations are also quite common in China.

The language is also extremely interesting. Grammatically, Vietnamese is quite similar to the Chinese languages and phonetically, it sounds pretty similar to Cantonese. I often found myself trying to follow people’s conversations around me, because if I wasn’t paying attention, it sounded like people were speaking Cantonese, with many of the same vowel and consonant sounds. That said, Vietnamese is more closely related to Khmer, the language of Cambodia, than any language in China. Languages, like biological organisms, evolve over time and one can construct a phylogenetic tree of languages, grouping them into families based on their last common ancestors (though, interestingly, it appears that this grouping is more contested than that in evolutionary biology). When we talk about the Romance languages, we’re talking about the group of languages that evolved from vulgar Latin, the vernacular of Ancient Rome. Similarly, the Chinese languages/dialects are those that evolved from Middle and older forms of Chinese. When I say Chinese and Vietnamese are not related, I mean that their last common ancestor is so long ago that it’s not worth considering, whereas Vietnamese and Khmer’s last common ancestor is much more recent. However, on the surface, Vietnamese and Chinese appear much more similar, with what appear to be a variety of cognates between the two languages. Unfortunately, I don’t understand this situation (or linguistics in general) nearly as much as I would like, but the point is that the similarity between Chinese and Vietnamese is the result of sustained language contact, due to the Chinese influence in Vietnam, rather than them both being descendants of some  language in the recent past. Additionally, as I mentioned earlier, Vietnamese used to be written with Chinese characters and it’s the first non-Chinese language I’ve encountered that I think that makes sense for. There are so many homophones and near-homophones in Vietnamese that using a logographic writing system instead of a phonetic one seems reasonable. The logographic system, to my mind, makes it easier to distinguish words that sound the same or nearly so, as they’re written completely differently and the word and character are connected in my mind.

 More Chinese characters on temples and old buildings. You won't believe how many photos of this type I have.

Oh, and Communism. Like China, Vietnam is a Communist country with a one-party system. However, it seems to me that corruption is worse in Vietnam and that, overall, the system is not as efficient. Meg and Tarlie both mentioned the very real possibility of having to bribe police officers while driving around the city – I have never heard of a similar situation for foreigners living in China. That’s not to say that corruption doesn’t exist in China (it certainly does), but it’s at a higher level, one that I will never really interact with. 

Police. At the moment, not collecting bribes.

Ho Chi Minh, or Uncle Ho as he’s often called, has a similar cult of personality to that of Chairman Mao in China, but the Vietnamese always had a better relationship with the Soviets than the Chinese did, so the hammer-and-sickle imagery is much more visible there. 

 A big boulevard in Hanoi. That symbol in middle of the decoration, in front of the hammer and sickle, is a common symbol used to represent Hanoi, supposedly stylized from a Chinese character that I forget at the moment.

 At the park across from the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum (which is a very hard word to spell)

 The mausoleum itself.

I'm not sure how much Lenin approves of these boys playing soccer in his park, but they seemed pretty good to me.

Now, food and drink. Before arriving in Vietnam, I knew there were three things I wanted to consume in massive quantities: Vietnamese coffee, bánh mì, and phở. Coincidentally, those three items were the sum of my knowledge on Vietnamese cuisine. I’m not a big coffee drinker, generally speaking, but Vietnamese coffee is an exception. I love the smell of coffee, but my problem is that often, the mouthfeel of coffee is not nearly as rich as the flavor. American coffee is often watery, which to my mind is just completely out of place with the intensity of the flavor I want from the coffee. Therefore, I've found that I tend to prefer espresso and Greek or Turkish coffee, where the drinks are small and intense. Vietnamese is similar, except that it’s served filled with condensed milk, leading to an intensely sweet coffee that still has the denseness and coffee flavor that I enjoy. This I all knew going into Vietnam. What I discovered after arrival is that the wonders of Vietnamese coffee are not limited to the simple serving style I had tried in the States. A variety of different and uniquely Vietnamese presentations exist, all using the same coffee as a base and all sweet. Though the original is hard to beat, my favorite of all of them would have to be yogurt coffee, which is exactly what it sounds like: dense, Vietnamese coffee poured directly into a glass filled with wonderful, natural-flavor, sweet yogurt. The result is incredible and one I sought out every time I was in a café. Vietnam is very definitely a coffee culture, with very little tea to be found, and mostly Lipton at that. The French effect is strong. 

 

 One of the (many) cafes we drank coffee in.

 Yogurt coffee in the front and normal Vietnamese coffee, cà phê sữa đá (served black, poured over ice and condensed milk) in the back

 A third variety of coffee, coconut coffee. Served over a coconut concoction that had an almost water ice-like texture

The other important drink of my trip in Vietnam was beer. The beer in Vietnam is like the beer in most of Asia: a weak lager. The beer of Hanoi is, appropriately, Bia Hà Nội (read that out loud), which proudly declares that it’s made from ingredients found all over the world.

So it’s not the beer itself that’s special, but the way it’s most often drank. In China, people drink mainly at dinner, with bars being a decidedly non-Chinese way of drinking, though one that is growing in popularity. In Vietnam, the way to drink beer is bia hơi, little roadside places where you pull up little plastic stools to little plastic tables and drink glasses of exceedingly cheap, exceedingly low-alcohol homemade beer. It’s a very fun way to drink beer, surrounded by tables of largely older Vietnamese men drinking and snacking, though most of them tend to close up shop relatively early by Western standards. 

One of my favorite nights in Hanoi was towards the end, when Matt, Tarlie and I went to a bia hơi place after dinner. We were the only foreigners there and Tarlie was the only woman other than the women running the stall. Right after we got there, I had to pee, so Tarlie asked the woman who owned it where a bathroom was. The woman responded by asking Tarlie, “Is the bathroom for you or for your friends?” pointing to Matt and I. When she said it was I who needed to use the bathroom, she laughed and pointed at the wall across the street from us. We all laughed and I started to walk towards the wall, only to be hailed by a nearby man who grabbed my arm and led me to the appropriate part of the wall to pee on. 

The part of the wall in question. Why I made sure to take a photo at the time is beyond me. I was in tourist mode.

In Hanoi, I mainly ate phở and other bowls of noodle soup, leaving bánh mì for the south, when I was in Ho Chi Minh City. All of these were incredibly delicious, bowls of delicious, meaty broth (mainly beef, sometimes pork), tons of rice noodles, herbs, and wonderful cuts of meat. 

 

After sampling the phở in Hanoi, however, I can confidently say that I have had plenty of good phở before. In two separate locations. Perhaps a little surprisingly, these two places were Cleveland, Ohio (an interesting city filled with lots of good food and beer, despite what the haters may say) and Budapest, Hungary.

 Best phở in Europe…probably. As a side note, this photo was taken stealthily (hence the parts of people's faces and my finger) because the phở stall was in a small market in Budapest of dubious legality and it was made clear that they were not comfortable with people taking photos. Woo Budapest! Also, that Chinese says "Hanoi Eatery," which I don't recall being able to read when I was there (well, literally it says "Hanoi beautiful-food-place," but close enough).

The phở in the picture above, from Hanoi, was the way that the phở in Budapest was always served: accompanied by a large plate of herbs and a little jar of pickled peppers and garlic, a wonderful accompaniment that I, disappointingly, was never able to purchase separately. So coming across such a similar presentation in Hanoi made me instantly nostalgic for my spring in Budapest two years ago.

In addition to all of the Vietnamese food I ate across the city, most of it in small stalls on the side of the street, I also had very good European-style food in some rather hip joints. This was pretty surprising to me, as these kind of places tend to be a little hard to find in China, but it was to become a theme of this trip.

Fancy Western brunch in Hanoi. Plus Matt and Tarlie, looking classy.

 

That’s all for Hanoi, though not Vietnam, as I visited two other locations there: Mộc Châu in the northern countryside and Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon in the south. Since I’m doing this in roughly chronological order, I’ll talk about Mộc Châu next, followed by Laos. 

How I got to Mộc Châu. The way back was much more interesting.

And one final language comment.  You probably noticed all those funny little marks hanging around the Vietnamese words I typed above. And if I was being technical, the name of the city is Hà Nội, not Hanoi. So Vietnamese is tonal, with 6 tones: rising, falling, mid flat, staccato, question mark, and break tones. That's how they were described to me by Tarlie and they feel like pretty reasonable descriptions. You'll have to ask someone more knowledgeable than me to describe what they sound like, but they sound pretty bizarre to my ear. Anyways, since Vietnamese is nowadays written with a phonetic script (what squares), they mark the tone of a syllable on the written word. That accounts for most of the strange-looking marks: mà, má, mả, mã, and mạ (the mid flat tone is unmarked). The other marks: ê, ư, â, ơ, ă, and ô, are all ways to differentiate the various vowel sounds in the language. So in total, those diacritics either mark tones or differentiate vowels.

Unrelated to language, but I couldn't find an appropriate place to fit this photo in. We saw lots of people burning stuff in the street. Apparently it's largely paper money, burned as a kind of offering or gift to one's ancestors. This is also done in China, though to a much lesser extent and mainly at shrines on holidays.

Vietnamese is a really cool language, and spending time there made me really wish I could study it some (another language to add to the list, it can get in line with Spanish, Russian, Slovak, Esperanto, Hebrew, Arabic, Hungarian, Farsi, Turkish, all of the Chinese dialects and minority languages, Thai, and Korean...). One of the most fascinating things about it, in my opinion, is the history of written Vietnamese and the accompanying heavy Chinese influence. A huge number of words have Chinese roots, especially those dealing with science and government. Though apparently Vietnamese is not nearly as averse to borrowing words from foreign languages as Chinese is, so you have many words with European roots as well, which is also interesting. Anyways...languages!

And now, to finish this post, I leave you with the following photo: