Seen around Hanoi

Here’s me and the boys on the Long Bien Bridge, which was finished in 1902 and bombed and rebuilt so many times during the American War, as it’s known here, that today it is a hodgepodge of construction styles.  It’s about a mile  walk across the Red River, which sort of splits Hanoi and runs north to south.  We walked it today as part of a three mile march through the city trying to find a way to get to Halong Bay, where we’re headed to spend a few days, on our own without joining a tour.

Hanoi is a remarkable, very enjoyable city, full of pell mell traffic, thousands of street side restaurants, and a melange of the cosmopolitan, of tiny neighborhoods each with their own distinct style, of hustle and bustle commerce side-by-side with little enclaves of stillness, as in the Buddhist temple and garden we happened on completely by happenstance, after turning down an alley off a  4-lane avenue lined with machine shops and throbbing with automobile horns and diesel trucks, commuter buses and the requisite thousands of motor scooters.

We met a young student there whose family was at the temple to pray for his grandmother, who died three months ago.  He walked us around, into the temple area where families post pictures of their departed loved ones, and past the mango trees and Quan Yin statues, and we listened to the bamboo chimes being struck and the chants of his family. 

We told him we were headed for the Long Bien bridge, and he said he goes there when “I am worried,” and finds he becomes calm.  Which is interesting, because the Long Bien is a very long walk, with a waist-high, often rusty rail of uncertain strength and age, on inch-thick concrete pavers that seem precariously secured and ocassionally wobble, and through which you can see the Red River 50 feet below.

Here’s another common sight, one of those I love so much, the inside of someone’s home opening right onto the narrow and crowded sidewalk of a busy nightime street in the Old Quarter.

 

Here’s another, of a man at work in a construction site:

 

And another, of a boy at work, on a styrofoam/found art project (look closely at the boy – see how local Langston’s look is getting!):