{"id":860,"date":"2024-01-01T12:19:14","date_gmt":"2024-01-01T12:19:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aerowalsh.com\/cr\/?p=860"},"modified":"2024-01-10T03:43:44","modified_gmt":"2024-01-10T03:43:44","slug":"mon-1-jan-hanoi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/?p=860","title":{"rendered":"Mon 1st Jan – Hanoi"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A sad, long day today as Declan has woken up sick (but COVID test negative) and gets worse during the day. He started with a sore throat and then has a nap at 10am before we check out and doesn’t have much energy after that. It’s a difficult city to be sick in, made worse by the fact our overnight train leaves at 9pm, 9 hours after our check out time. I am also worried we won’t sleep well on the train (it’s reputed to rock a lot and we are sharing a cabin with two strangers).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We do a light wander, check out a bookstore, get a coffee but it’s all very low enthusiasm. Declan is glassy eyed and aching. The unknown and potential discomfort of the night train hangs in the air like humidity. Our only real activity of the day is a cute Vietnamese lesson booked via Airbnb Experiences. We learn all the basics: counting to 10, the differences in tone, how to ask for a banana and how to say no to streetside hawkers. At dinner I think I ask for the bill correctly in Vietnamese but the bill never arrives so I chalk it as ‘needs improvement’. I do a poo in here but the flush button doesn’t work. I don’t know what to do and walk away ashamed and equal amounts grateful my hospitality days are over. All in all, an average day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing this as we kill an hour in the lobby of our hotel before getting a taxi to the train station. Await tomorrow’s edition for the debrief on the overnight train adventures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This is the infamous Cau Long Bien bridge designed by Gustav Eiffel and failed to be destroyed in the Vietnamese War. Maintenance seems to be a low priority and the entire thing is rusting. In this area an old Lady approached us and tried to speak to us and everyone was confused. DW. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Songbirds in cages are a common sound around Hanoi. This bothers me and it’s taken me a few days to ascertain why. It’s not so much the caged animals – these birds don’t seem that smart and I am sure breed easily. What irks me is the pretense of nature and beauty, in a city that in no way values either of those concepts. The tiny gesture towards something that is apart from the wear and tear on the environment at the behest of humans only serves to highlight how far you are from aloneness, quiet and variation. CR.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Tying modern mechanical impact to human historical fable sits as a much truer representation of Hanoi, in my eyes, and this demonstrated in the artwork found by bridge Declan photographed above. CR.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The description of the artwork above. CR.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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A clothes hawker walking her cart on the highway. CR.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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There is a lot of verticality to all of the buildings. They are between 4 to 8 stories typically and often there is commercial on the bottom and residential above. Anything can be on the bottom floor from a scooter service centre, cafe or clothing store. DW<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Caitlin continues her sterling negotiation skills. When attempting to buy 1 banana and handover money, she encountered a confused lady. A nearby man, clearly amused, burst out laughing and they kept piling bananas onto Cait. Whatever she is paying, it is well under market rate. DW<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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A typical street meal on the ubiquitous plastic furniture. You can see cyclos in the background which we are too afraid to try after smart traveller has identified them as a scam hotspot. DW. Smart Traveller identified them as a safety risk, not a scam, but nearly everything in Vietnam has the veneer of being both. CR.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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My fifth book completed while overseas. The Lover by Marguerite Duras was one that I picked up at Sapphos in Glebe with no background. In fact, I picked it up and put it back multiple times that day before deciding to buy it for $14. I was drawn in my the author’s foriegn name and the slimness of the volume. I was put off by the unappealing front cover and contrived title. What swayed my decision in favour of the book was the ambiguous and lyrical opening two pages. Research post finishing the book revealed that it was made into a movie. While the blurb and title convey an erotic storyline, this is misleading, and the thrust of the very simple plot is a fifteen year old French girl searching for an escape from her present (her family and her predicament as one of the only white girls in her Saigon boarding school). I would recommend this novel, even for those not travelling in its setting (Vietnam). I very much enjoyed it. Like The Cove, The Lover benefited from being on holidays. It needs a close attention span to get the most out of it – tenses and phrasing can be difficult to follow, and first person swings to second which was confusing until I realised it is the narrator as an older woman addressing her younger self. An atmospheric read.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

An excerpt from The Lover that resonated with me while travelling through Vietnam:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The noise of the city is very loud, in recollection it’s like the soundtrack of a film turned up too high, deafening. I remember clearly, the room’s dark, we don’t speak, it’s surrounded by the continuous din of the city, caught up in the city, swept along with it.<\/em> There are no panes in the windows, just shutters and blinds. On the blinds you can see the shadows of people going by in the sunlight on the sidewalks. Great crowds of them always. The shadows are divided into strips by the slats of the shutters. The clatter of wooden clogs is ear-splitting, the voices strident, Chinese is a language that’s shouted the way I always imagine desert languages are, it’s a language that’s incredibly foreign.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Outside it’s the end of the day, you can tell by the sound of the voices, the sound of more and more passers-by, more and more miscellaneous. It’s a city of pleasure that reaches its peak at night. And night is beginning now, with the setting sun. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bed’s seperated from the city by those slatted shutters, that cotton blind. There’s nothing solid seperating us from other people. They don’t know of our existence. We glimpse something of theirs, the sum of their voices, of their movements, like the intermittent hoot of a siren, mournful, dim<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Vietnam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":859,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,4,11,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-860","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-holiday","category-review","category-summer-2023"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=860"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1046,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/860\/revisions\/1046"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=860"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=860"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cr.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=860"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}