Hanoi Happenings, Pt. 2

The wonders never cease here at 142 Au Co. I just drove home and found that all of the electrical wires on the lane that leads to my house are about 3 feet from the ground, so it took a lot of intricate driving on my motorbike (and help from a bunch of the kids on the street) to make it to my house. I also had my first experience driving a motorbike across a bridge here – I drove to and from “Long Bien” district, which is right next to Tay Ho, the district I live in. The bridge is HUGE and rather terrifying, partially because the barriers keeping you from falling into the water don’t look all that secure and also because many couples stop at various spots on the bridge to sit on their bikes and look out over the water together. The bridge and its view would be very romantic if the whole thing wasn’t so death-defying.

I hope you all had wonderfully holidays! Since the last time I posted, I’ve been around the world and back, and have been having a great time on both continents. One of the things that struck me the most when I traveled back to the US was the smell of fried and baked food in the Atlanta, GA airport – that, and the fact that I could understand everyone’s side conversations. Since returning on January 3^rd, I’ve done and seen quite a bit. I bought a motorbike (before I was just renting one) for a good price. It’s called the Attila Victoria! I also started working at the Save the Children office (before, I was working out of the local NGO that is sponsoring my research project), which has been great so far. Right now, one of my tasks is to design some activities for children affected by HIV in two provinces near Hanoi – Hai Phong and Quang Ninh. These kids have little chance to talk about the stigma and discrimination they experience in their everyday lives. Two co-workers and I are working to come up with some games and discussion topics to start a conversation about how to counter that negativity. And my research is moving along; by next week, I’ll be contacting parents of children randomly selected to participate in interviews with my translators and I.

In a complete 180 from my research and work at Save the Children, my roommate and I are participating in a “Hanoi Heartthrobs” competition during the month of February. A magazine called “The Word Hanoi,” which serves as a guide to all of the things that are happening in Hanoi, is doing a feature where eight guys and eight girls are interviewed and photographed, then featured in the February magazine. Readers vote on who they’d like to pair up to go on an all expenses paid date (hopefully karaoke) in Hanoi. Wish me luck!

About a month and a half into my stay here, my roommate and I visited the “Hoa Lo” prison, aka the Hanoi Hilton, which is the prison that the Vietnamese army used to hold American soldiers captive. It’s also the same prison that the French used in the early 1900s to house Vietnamese prisoners. The entire place has been turned into a museum. The first half, meant to depict what the French did to the Vietnamese, shows some horrific pictures of heads in baskets, torture devices, and even displays the guillotine that the French used on prisoners sentenced to the death penalty. The second half is a depiction of how the American soldiers were treated during the American-Vietnam war. The feel of the second half is entirely different than that of the first (there’s even more upbeat music to replace the ominous sounds that greet you during the first half). Photographs on the walls show American soldiers raising chickens, playing pool, being taken care of by doctors, receiving gifts when they leave the prison, etc. I’ve posted some pictures from the museum below. On the flight from GA to MD when I was flying home for Christmas and New Years, I met a woman whose husband had fought in the Vietnam war. She and her children had just been looking at his diaries from the war the day before we met. It’s crazy to think about how much both American and Vietnamese history is rooted in the terrible conflict that happened not so long ago, but that I can feel so welcomed into and embraced by the culture here.

Here’s some more food for thought – Vietnam’s economy is moving into the “middle-income” bracket, which many people praise as a sign that its economy is picking up. This shift is largely due to the influence of “PetroVietnam,” which controls Vietnam’s burgeoning oil and gas industry (almost 30% of Vietnam’s GDP!).  Once a week, I tutor for some bankers who have talked to me a great deal about the growing interest that foreign investors have in the country. However, being a middle-income country also means that Vietnam receives less foreign aid, so the have-nots (of which there are many) are going to get even less help in the future than they do now. What a bizarre, tragic reality.   

In addition to the pictures from the Hanoi Hilton, here are some pictures from my trip with PHAD (the local NGO I’ve been working with) to Ninh Binh province, 100 km away from Hanoi. We took a day trip in early December to the biggest complex of pagodas in Southeast Asia. Although much of it is still under construction, it is already one of the prettiest places I’ve ever been to. After traveling to the pagodas, we ate goat meat and had “watermelon jelly” aka goat’s blood in a soup with peanuts and leaves! It was quite delicious. 

First, here are some pictures from the Hanoi Hilton:

And here are some pictures from my trip with PHAD to Ninh Binh!

^Our group - there were quite a few of us!

You can't see it in this photo, but surrounding the walls of this pagoda were 1,000 golden buddhas that people could "buy" for 10 million dong (about $500 USD) to have their names engraved.