Asia 2008

Just got back to Hanoi from Hạ Long Bay, to discover that the visa I had expected to turn up tomorrow is not due until Friday. But I paid an extra $20 to avoid this. I am pissed off and very tired.

Vietnamese has six tones. Like all European-language-speakers, I find it hard to tell most of them apart, and impossible to reproduce them at speaking pace. (One, however, is easy: it starts high and goes higher, with a glottal stop in the middle, as if Vinnie Jones had grabbed your vitals.)

Nouns come with ‘classifiers’, of which there are many. There is one for ‘thing’, another for ‘fruit’, another for ‘animals (which includes knife), another for paper, etc.

There are at least ten words for ‘you’ depending on the relative age of the speaker and interlocutor.

On the other hand, the tense system shows just how much redundancy there is in, say, French. It consists of a tense marker, plus the (invariant) verb. English is pretty similar in the future tense. Thus:-

Ðã – past (the tilde denotes the strangulated shriek tone I just mentioned)
Ðang - present
Sẽ – future.

Food is pretty simple, too. None of your lovingly hand-crafted reduction of free-range Lincolnshire jus, or whatever. Stir-fried squid with lemongrass and chilli, for example, is squid fry lemongrass chilli – four syllables in Vietnamese.

I lunched at the Hanoi Hilton yesterday. Not the infamous Hanoi Hilton, obviously – more of that later – but at the Hilton Hanoi next to the Opera House. For obvious reasons it does not call itself the Hanoi Hilton. In fact I only went in to escape the attentions of a persistent taxi driver. Half the restaurant is outdoors on a terrace – out of the question in a baking 38 degrees – and half inside, under a glass ceiling but air-conditioned.

It was perhaps the best meal I have had in Hanoi, and the best part was the starters. A mix of fresh spring rolls, with pork, shrimp, green banana, pineapple and rice vermicelli; fried spring rolls, with crab, carrot and mushroom; and a salad with crabmeat, onions, chilli and peanuts. All fresh, subtle, and harmonious. Glorious.

This was followed by farmed crocodile with young galangal and shallots. This merely out of curiosity, of course. I expected to eat interesting things all over southeast Asia, but apart from the bamboo worms (actually caterpillars) and the sparrows, and the hundred-year-old eggs, I suppose, nothing has cropped up.

The crocodile was listed in the fish and seafood section of the menu. The same judgement has been made by the Catholic church, which adopted its own taxonomy to define the categories of flesh comestible during Lent and at other penitential times. Thus turtles and alligators have been classified as “fish”. The distinction is made, according to theory, on the basis of the temperature of their blood; the element in which they live or oviposit (if that isn't a word, why not?); or a distinction between pesce and carne in Latin languages. Or all of the above.

The flesh was completely white, and very soft, but also rubbery, so the meat was difficult to cut. It tasted of galangal. So that’s that – not worth bothering with again.

Dessert was a medley of cubes and mousses that sounded more exciting than they tasted. Coffee mousse, lemongrass ice cream, green bean and strawberry bavarois, Dalat red wine jelly, that sort of thing.

A blow-out beyond my normal budget on this trip, but great value for $42.

The other Hanoi blow-out was at Bobby Chinn’s. The owner-chef is Chinese-Egyptian and went on a rugby scholarship to Millfield School in England. He is a former banker, stand-up comedian etc and is, I imagine, someone who would describe himself as ‘larger-than-life’, a ‘bon viveur’ etc. The catering business is full of such extroverts.

Anyway, the menu is full of self-indulgent but largely amusing comments. The wine list enumerates the stages of drunkenness:

1. Witty and charming
2. Rich and powerful
3. Benevolent
4. Clairvoyant
5. Forget dinner
6. Patriotic
7. Kenny G is a genius
8. Witty and charming, part II
9. Invisible
10. Bulletproof.

There I also learnt a new cocktail. Karber’s Frenzy: Bombay Sapphire, tonic, codeine, lime. I like the sound of it.

The location is great: south side of Hoàn Kiếm lake. White tablecloths sprinkled with rose petals; a pumpkin soup amuse-bouche; huge wine glasses; great service. Warm seafood salad (excellent), lemon-scented poussin (over-nutmegged), whisky sour and glass of red wine, $49.

I did actually intend to write about the prison at Hoa Lo – another time perhaps.

Lots of tourists go mad shopping in Hanoi. I have found the lure resistible but I have bought some CDs: Champion Jack Dupree, le poids lourd du piano blues; Tomatito, Aguadulce; Andras Schiff, Well-Tempered Clavier Books I and II, Decca; Rubinstein, Schumann Piano Concerto, Liszt Piano Concerto No 1, Saint-Saens Piano Concerto No 2, RCA; Nathan Milstein, Prokofiev Violin Concertos 1 and 2, Sonata No 2, EMI; Du Pré/Barenboim, Elgar Cello Concerto, Pomp and Circumstance, Enigma Variations, Sony; Vienna/Böhm, Bruckner 4. And The Carpenters’ Greatest Hits (well, I don’t know the songs, and one’s supposed to). All for a few shillings.

The CDs look legit - they even have anti-piracy badges - but there are some curious mis-spellings. Piano, for example.

Vietnam, the 150th member of the World Trade Organisation, is required to enact laws that protect intellectual property. If it has any, it doesn’t seem to enforce them. Vietnam is pretty much the world capital of counterfeiting (this is a factoid I think I got from The Economist a couple of years back). If you want to pay royalties here by buying legitimate goods, forget it. Gresham’s Law: bad money drives out good. The same with consumer goods.

Even my copy of The Economist turns out to be photocopied. The wonder of it is than any countries do actually protect intellectual property.

At least one of the CDs won’t play, but I’m not keen to take it back. The guy who sold it to me, while very polite, had a preposterously long nail on his little finger, which made him look like a Chinese gangster.

*****

Last night I went to a concert at the Hanoi Opera House. The Opera House itself – built in 1901-11 - is constructed in classical style, with boxes and a circle, but in miniature. Indeed, it is said to reproduce the Palais Garnier in Paris. It is a lovely venue, actually.

It was the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra playing Ravel, Messiaen and Svendsen, conducted by Pierre-André Valade. Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin did not grab me, even though I have it recorded somewhere. To my surprise, the Messiaen Le Tombeau Resplendissement was a lot of fun (I like Messiaen when he is loud and bashy, less so when quiet and introspective), and the finale spellbinding. I’m going to buy it. After the interval, The Waist by Vietnamese composer Trần Kim Ngọc was also, as far as I could tell, excellent and certainly interesting, but my concentration was shot.

The audience was slightly smaller than most at the Wigmore Hall. About a quarter looked European, in a broad sense. Blessedly, not a single mobile phone rang during the concert. I have had one concert in London ruined by the person next to me snoring all the way through; that didn’t happen either.

But a lot of people strolled in after the first piece had started. Much worse, quite a few people seemed to think it was acceptable to talk during the playing, as if the orchestra was their personal band playing divertimenti for them. To my left, some people held a long conversation at normal speaking volume during the piece by Kim Ngọc. Even during the quiet parts, they neither paused nor whispered, but just carried straight on with their property deal, or whatever it was that was more important.

Not to mention the overenthusiastic applause. Not just between movements, but even within them.

*****

Tomorrow, the Perfume Pagoda.

Being a city boy, I like to take photos of animals whenever I see them. We only get rats and pigeons in Elephant and Castle. Around Laos and Vietnam, you see a lot of pigs, goats, chickens and water buffalo. It's time for some photos and I don't have much time, so here are some animals.

This was a huge moth on the floor at Lao-Vietnamese border.

This was a large ant above Càt Càt. It may not look like much, but it is not easy focusing on a moving ant.

This is how they carry pigs around on bikes in Cao Tre. The pigs could not move a muscle.

Pot-bellied pig and terraces in Cat Cat.

Pot-bellied piglets in Cat Cat.

Pigs sleeping at Cau May.

Feeding frenzy.

Buffalo:

A bug's eye view of the Old Quarter, Hanoi.

I'm typing this (with a chocolate brownie in front of me) in the Hanoi Press Club, where the cafe has a free wifi service that is fast enough to access this website. Other wifis are not so fast. It's forecast to reach 37 degrees today and 38 tomorrow, which makes wandering around town a moist experience.

I haven't taken to Hanoi at all, or more specifically to the Old Quarter, said to be one of the densest collocations of humanity on the planet. It's certainly one of the densest collections of scooters, cars and bicycles. My hotel is in the Old Quarter. It's sucked up all my energy.

I was in a foul mood for my first couple of days back in Hanoi. I was woken up before six by an Orwellian amplified voice, and then by the constant lament of a band; someone opposite the hotel had died at the age of 90. An oboeist accompanied by a single-string zither and a drummer played a strange melody: tonic, third, seventh (at a guess) followed by a few trills, repeated about every twenty seconds or so. He started before 6 am; he was still going at 11 when I left the hotel; he was still going, parked right opposite the hotel, when I returned at 7 pm. I thought that six floors and 102 steps up I was above the noise, but at any altitude I wouldn’t have been above that oboe. He started again before 6 the following day, but then mercifully disappeared.

Right outside my bedroom door they are building something. It looks like an oven but has electrical sockets. Today they are painting the ceiling in my room...

My mood is not improved by the insane traffic, making a walk of a block an adventure (you can’t walk on the pavements because they’re blocked by motorbikes, or by tables, or by people digging up the pavement, so you have to walk where the moving motorbikes are); and the constant pestering by mototaxis “Hello motobai?” "Where you going?" and by other hawkers, 100 times or more a day.

Not to mention ending up with mud all over your trousers any time you take a walk.

There are some decent spots: on Hoàn Kiếm Lake, for example, or here at the Press Club, or in the commercial district. Fortunate, as I may be stuck here for a while. I need to renew my visa, and you can't stay anywhere in Vietnam without a passport.

*****

The World Bank is next door to this cafe. The people having lunch next to me seem to be from that august institution. I feel like going over and talking about credit crunches.

Not really.

*****

Premiership football is not as obsessively watched here as it is in Thailand, but it is still followed: say 'England' and people respond 'Chelsea, Liverpool, Man U'.

I watched the last 30 mins of Arsenal-Liverpool at Red Beer on Pho Ma May, and the game finished 1-1 although Arsenal were vastly superior. It looked like a classic Premiership match: very fast; both sides trying to win; psycho tackling. The expression on Wenger’s face said ‘season over’, although his subsequent statement did not.

*****

Spring is the time when many Vietnamese visit the Perfume Pagoda, one of the most important Buddhist sites in Vietnam (actually it is a collection of temples). They go during a festival that begins on the sixth day of the first month of the VN lunar calendar, and ends at the end of the third month.

Lots of them go. I have already been warned off going to the Perfume Pagoda because of the crowds. The worse days to visit the Perfume Pagoda, are even days. The less crowded days to visit are the odd days of the lunar month. But which are the odd days of the lunar month? I could just ask someone, I suppose, but that would spoil the fun.

The Vietnamese lunar calendar has months of 30 days. As in the pre-Julian Roman calendar, there are intercalary months so that the lunar year stays in track with the solar year (the calendar is therefore lunisolar). It is based on the timing of

- the new moon and

- the principal points of the year, which include the solstices and equinoxes, and correspond roughly to zodiacal transits (they divide the ecliptic into equal areas).

Intercalary is an excellent and underused word, which the French have co-opted to mean “divider”.

The Vietnamese lunar calendar is similar to, but not the same as the Chinese. VN New Year (Tết) and Chinese New Year do not always coincide, because it depends on the timing of solstice, and that depends on local time. So the most famous Tết in recent history - 1968 - did not coincide with Chinese New Year, for example.

It took me a long time to find the dates in the Vietnamese calendar for 2008 – the UK Vietnamese Embassy site has the dates for 2002, for example - but here they are: http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~duc/amlich/.

Today, 8 April, is the third day of the third month of the lunisolar calendar. The odd days are therefore the even days of April. That includes this Thurs and next Monday, Weds and Friday. (Weekends are bad days anyway. That rules out 12 April.)

So I’ll try Thursday. I hope this works. You could say I’m agoraphobic in what I imagine to be the original sense, of hating crowds.

*****

“Acute diarrhoea” is hitting Hanoi. It may be a euphemism for cholera. From the Vietnam News website:

"…The number of known infections totals 279 and 85 have now proved positive to the [vibrio cholera] bacteria, including 44 in Ha Noi. A further 70 patients suffering acute diarrhoea were admitted to the National Contagious and Tropical Disease Institute on Wednesday; another 40 were received at Saint Paul’s Hospital.

"The epidemic follows two outbreaks last October and the Health Ministry has decided that all of the patients will be treated free. Ha Noi Health Department director Le Anh Tuan said the ministry had been asked to vaccinate all the city’s resident against cholera without charge.

"A National Hygiene and Epidemic Institute survey shows that the disease is prevalent where market gardeners use night soil for fertiliser. Most of the patients in the latest outbreak had eaten raw vegetable, said the National Contagious and Tropical Disease Institute’s Dr Nguyen Tuong Van. He urged people not to eat raw vegetables."

I always knew that vegetables were bad for you. I am more at risk from half-cooked nem; I had some last night and they were indeed poisonous.

*****

Lots of dives in Hanoi sell bia hơi, which is freshly-brewed beer. It’s a very light straw colour, with a good head. It’s light and, at worst, tastes of not much. I’ve had some bia hơi that isn’t bad at all: slight fresh-bready, good enough to enjoy. Whether or not it's the greatest beer experience, it is the cheapest: a glass costs VND 3-4,000, or 10-13p.

*****

There is a fashion for forty- and fifty-something western expats in Hanoi to wear their residual hair in a short pig-tail. De gustibus, of course, but it looks sleazy to me.

*****

More than half the population of Vietnam is called Nguyen. Almost every ruler, general, king or poet in its history was called Nguyen. There was a Nguyen era. So the name doesn't really fulfil its function of distinguishing its bearer from other objects. The other two names are needed to do that.