Hanoi and Hue, Vietnam

I wonder if in 30 years our son or daughter will be
sitting in a corner cafe, drinking cheap beers and
making friends with the locals in Baghdad. I'm sure 30
years ago my parents never thought we'd end up in
Hanoi at a corner cafe. For that matter, I never
thought we'd end up here. But after 5 days, Vietnam is
becoming the sleeper hit of this trip--and we haven't
even hit the beaches yet. This place is great!

Where to start? Well I'll start with the cheap beers
because they are cheap and plentiful. It's called Bia
Hoi here which translates to Happy Hour all the time.
The "bars" are just street corners with child sized
chairs and a lady called Old Mama who serves up 12 oz
beers from a keg for 12 cents. Yes, that's right.
We're buying rounds of beers for anyone in sight
because we can. And it's good beer. Fresh, light, kind
of citrusy. The view is priceless as we could sit for
hours and watch the scooter traffic weave around us.
Our favorite part: someone yells police and we all
have to drag our chairs out of the street and squeeze
onto the curb for 30 seconds while the police roll by.
Then back to business as usual, spilling out into the
streets. For a second Geoff and I thought we were at a
high school party--but the beer tastes slightly
better.

My next favorite thing is the national dress of most
Vietnamese women. It seems to have evolved into
pajamas all day, every day. I could get used to this.
They are lovely pajamas. Cotton, matching tops and
bottoms, slippers. But it's hard not to laugh when
they are riding on a scooter or eating dinner in their
jammies. This is my kind of town.

And of course I can't write a blog without mentioning
the Vietnamese national currency is the Dong. I can
hardly type it without laughing. I'm immature, I know,
but paying for hotels, dinner, water, always elicits a
tiny snicker from me. It's funny. I'm sorry. It just
is.

For those of you at home betting on the Matrix of
Danger, if you had the square for
Erin--Vietnam--Causing a scooter accident, then you'd
be a winner! Let me begin by saying no one got hurt
unless count the banged up scooter. Also, I should
preface with the fact that I am a very skiddish street
crosser. In the metropolis of Chapel Hill I look
several times before crossing. Traveling through
Vietnam, I knew I would be challenged. 90% of the
traffic is scooters and there are no stoplights. It's
an amazing feat at intersections when it seems every
bike knows the right dance moves to waltz right on
through. People rarely slow down they just all know to
anticipate everyone else, and although there were some
almost misses, we never saw a bump. And these are
people on cell phones, families with infants, men
carrying bushels of fruit--and they all seem to move
effortlessly. Now insert foreigners who only have
crossed streets like these when playing Atari. Books
tell you to walk slowly and traffic will move around
you which sounds easy in theory but we've stood on
curbs for minutes trying to find the right break. And
if you take the time to pause and look while crossing,
you'll instinctively freeze in fear, which is worse
than moving. Fast forward to me making a go at it on
a random Thursday afternoon. I was sure I had found my
break and sans Geoff I went for it, at a good pace,
across 3 lanes of traffic. It seems I underestimated
the speed of one scooter and as I reached the opposite
curb I turned back to the loud noise of two people
sliding across the pavement under a scooter. I froze,
on the verge of tears. Was that my fault? It seemed to
be as several locals pointed at me. Geoff was stranded
on the other curb watching as the two boys
miraculously stood up, brushed off, checked for broken
bones (none, thank god), picked up their taillight and
rode off, never looking back at me. Meanwhile I've
started crying out of guilt and fear and mostly
because I'm now stuck on the same block , only taking
right turns, until 2 am when the traffic slows down
enough for me to try to cross back over. In hindsight,
Geoff says that it probably wasn't my fault (well,
mostly) and it's better I didn't look or I would have
froze and surely that wouldn't be good. I'd like to
believe they were purse nabbers and I was only helping
some old lady stop the burglars. So now I'm relegated
to holding Geoff's hand with the Vulcan death grip
while crossing. We have a break while we're in the
countryside, but Saigon will be a whole new monster
with 8 million people and 4 million scooters.

We've now moved down the coast to continue our 3 part
series of depressing war torn areas. This time we took
a tour of the Demilitarized Zone of central Vietnam,
seeing the Vinh Moc tunnels, the Ben Hai River and the
Khe Sanh American Combat base. It's almost hard to
believe that 40 years ago this country was bombed and
burned to pieces. The Vietnam countryside is some of
the most beautiful we've seen with rolling hills and
re-emerging jungles. Along the highways, bomb craters
litter the rice paddies, now turned into watering
holes for water buffalo. Vietnam has been another good
testament of a country moving on and forgiving.

We're off to Hoi An, the sewing capital of the world
(your Gap shirt is probably from here) where I'll be
buying a custom-made dress and some fabric and Geoff a
brand new custom suit, shirt and tie. They're probably
pretty good at tailoring for the smaller framed man.
Look for our next post at our half way point next week!