Embroidery, Weaving, & Textiles

This may be the least surprising of Vietnam’s wonders. They’ve been doing this for centuries, and it shows. First up is Tailor Cát, a shop specializing in extravagantly embroidered modern versions of traditional áo dài and blouses. We learned, by the way, that áo dài is pronounced ow zye. The hard D is the letter Ð.

Embroidery

Would you be surprised to learn that Dorothy bought an embroidered piece? They recut the armscye to fit and had it ready the next day.

Tailor Cát was not the only high end embroidery shop.

Embroidered paintings are also a thing here. We saw more spectacular examples in Hội An, but these smaller pieces were all over the souvenir shops.

Totes

Another manifestation of the weaving heritage shows up in tote bags, one of Dorothy’s favorite forms of weaving. She has harvested woven totes at every one of our stops, adding up to quite the international collection.

Fabric Markets

Hà Nội, no surprise, also boasts several robust textile markets. One was just around the corner from our apartment in the Old Quarter, but the big one, Chợ Hom, was a short cab ride south.

Vạn Phúc Silk Village

Making traditional Vietnamese dinners for us (twice!) apparently wasn’t enough for our host An and her daughter An Binh. They also docented us on a trip just south of Hà Nói to the Vạn Phúc Silk Village. We probably wouldn’t have gone without them, but even if we’d found it, the experience would have been much the poorer for not having our ridiculously adorable hosts to guide us.

The whole range was on display in Vạn Phúc, from weaving on vintage Jacquard looms to fabric by the meter to finished goods. This was an absolute highlight of our stay, and we almost missed it. This was our next-to-last day in Hà Nói.

The shops were full. And the village was full of shops. Over 1,000 households in Vạn Phúc are involved in some part of the silk production process. It felt like we visited all of them, but I suspect we fell short.

Those of you who have been following us know that we rarely post pictures of ourselves. That’s a reflection of the fact that we rarely take photos of ourselves. At any given location, we are absolutely guaranteed to be the least interesting thing there. Other people, however, seem to find us fascinating.

But I’ve saved the best for last. As delightful as the setting was, as spectacular as the offerings were, the highlight was seeing vintage Jacquard looms in operation.

Joseph Marie Jacquard invented, in 1804, a method for using punch cards to control a loom, automating the weaving process and initiating a Cambrian Explosion of textile complexity, spawning designs that were inconceivable by hand.

More than that, it is widely acknowledged as the first computer, and was one of the forebears of Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. The first electronic computer, ENIAC, was programmed by Jacquard-inspired punch cards. My college statistics class in the 70s required writing a program with punch cards. The Jacquard Loom is the OG.

I have no idea the precise vintage of the looms in Vạn Phúc. I’m sure they don’t date to 1804. But these were old fucking looms. Seeing a room full of them in action was like stepping into a time machine. A mill in Jacquard’s time would have looked much like the room we were in.

Every so often on this journey we have been in places that offered a hallucinatory stereo vision, where past and present coexist and can be viewed in the same frame. That’s a mind-blowing, double-rainbow experience, and Vạn Phúc’s Jacquard looms offered it up in spades.

Here they are, as they are meant to be, in action.

There’s a wooden paddle at each end that slams the shuttle back to the other side once a weft row is complete.

You can clearly see the intricacy and delicacy of the brocade. It’s just astonishing that this level of complexity is possible with 200+ year old technology. Like sending people to the moon with sub-iPhone computing power.

Ceramics

We have reliably gobbled up ceramics on every one of our stops. Mexico, Cuba, Morocco, Tunisia, Turkey… They’ve all had some take on ceramics so seductive we’ve had to tamp down our acquisitiveness. We’ve safely muled home a lot of heavy, breakable specimens, but there’s only so much we can do.

The good news in Southeast Asia, I suppose, is that we haven’t been truly beguiled by the local ceramics. We did find one shop in Cambodia that had things that spoke to us, but for the most part we found the pieces either too utilitarian or too subtle for our clown car aesthetic. Same for Vietnam. Maybe Hội An will have something tempting, but we’re leaving Hà Nội completely bereft of pottery.

I know this stuff is objectively beautiful, but there’s too strong a flavor of turn-of-the-(last)-century Chinoiserie for me to overcome.

Mandalas

One of the delights of staying someplace for an extended period is getting past the tourist shops. There are always treasures, but they’re hard to find on a tight schedule. Wander around aimlessly long enough, though, and you’ll stumble on something amazing.

Just so with these insanely beautiful hand-painted mandalas. Specifically, these are Thangka mandalas, most often associated with Nepali Buddhism, but also made by Vietnamese monks.

Lacquerware

Lacquerware is another major art form here. Unfortunately, the options ranged from exceedingly expensive fine art offerings to cheap tourist ware. There weren’t a lot of attractive options in the affordable middle. We would up with a few lacquered coconut shell bowls, because the deep lacquered colors, even on tourist goods, are pretty awesome.

Propaganda Posters

This was kind of a surprise. There are multiple shops in Hà Nói where you can buy either hand-painted reproductions or prints of the hand-painted reproductions, and there’s a museum with an impressive collection of originals.

This is what’s on offer in the shops.

And this is the museum collection. Captions courtesy of Google Translate. Most of them are fine, but the first one is kind of word salad. I asked our host’s daughter, An Binh, if she’d translate for me, and she didn’t do any better.

Mother Of Pearl

We didn’t see much of this in stores, but there was a museum that featured sumptuous use of mother of pearl.

Signage & Graphic Design

Don’t be like that. The commercial arts are still arts, and they offer entertainment and delight everywhere we’ve been.

Shoes

I made the mistake of mentioning to my sister Nef that Vietnam didn’t seem to be a shoe culture. Then we found these. I stand grievously corrected.

Bamboo carving

This guy was set up on Hoàn Kiếm Lake and we ran across him on Day Two. We didn’t know that the balancing hummingbirds were in every souvenir shop, but he was legitimately cutting the bamboo by hand.

Random Acts Of Art

The Plant (& Carved Wood) District

Shut up. Plants are art.

The plant district is a long stretch of road with plant stores, aquarium stores interspersed throughout, and carved wood shops at one end. It’s well outside the Old Quarter, at the foot of West Lake. We picked up a couple of lovely house plants. Maybe silly, since we were only in Hà Nói six weeks, but they brightened our apartment and we left them behind for our host.

Hanoi Ceramic Road

In 2010 Ha Noi celebrated its Millennial Anniversary, 1,000 years since its founding as Emperor Lý Thái Tổ’s capital, Thăng Long. The Hanoi Ceramic Road was started in 2007 and was completed in 2010 in time for the Millennial celebration. It runs four full miles, and includes work by both Vietnamese artists and friends of Vietnam.

Driving alongside it is quite the experience. It just keeps going.

Temples

Hà Nội is a festival of little temples and pagodas all over the place, and they are their own legitimate art form. While we didn’t get any good pictures of the exterior of Emperor Lý Thái Tổ’s Temple, there was plenty to love inside.

Here’s one of our favorites, the Little Spite Temple That Wouldn’t.

The Lý Triều Quốc Sư Pagoda is just another little temple along the shore of Hoàn Kiếm Lake. In case you’re concerned, I asked permission before taking pictures. As is my habit.

Here’s one more temple we didn’t even get the name of. These are just everywhere here. The critter in the middle is the Vietnamese version of the Cambodian Moon Eater. They’re all over the Angkor-era temples, and share a Hindu/Buddhist origin story. They tend to sit over doorways as protectors.

The altars are a major part of each temple. They hold offerings for the ancestors, and trend heavily towards packaged foods. There’s a street in the Old Quarter with nothing but shops specializing in snacks in fancy boxes suitable for altars.

This temple was in the botanical garden.

Architectural Detail

In addition to the temples, there is a metric buttload of carvings, friezes, and woodworking adorning buildings throughout the Old Quarter.

Places We Didn’t Go

Much like Oaxaca, Hà Nội is surrounded by a nimbus of craft-oriented villages. There’s the Bát Tràng Ceramic Village. The Quảng Phú Cầu Incense Village. The Ha Thai Lacquer Village. The Làng Chuông Conical Hat Village.

All of them sounded interesting, all of them were close to Hà Nội, and all of them were available on inexpensive tours, about $15/person for the whole circuit. We skipped them all.

We’re not a big fan of packaged tours with other folks. We did a few in Turkey and didn’t really care for them. We much prefer to be on our own cadence and follow our own interests. But the real problem was that all of these villages were curated tourist experiences. Make a ceramic bowl. Make a conical hat. Make incense. Make a lacquer bowl. Take your treasures home with you!

Pardon me, but eww. We’re interested in how artisans create art, and we’re interested in the art they create. We don’t see anything of value in the summer camp lanyard-making experience. Which is not to say we haven’t done any classes. Dorothy and my sister Nef took a two-day intensive course in Oaxaca on using natural materials to dye fabric. They took a class in Marrakech on traditional Moroccan cooking. But those aren’t the craft version of a ladies-who-lunch Mahjong game. That’s useful knowledge that can be applied in real life.

I contacted the main pottery collective in Bát Tràng and asked if we had to come on a tour or if we could just show up and look around. I was told that the actual production work was done in people’s homes, so there really wasn’t a tour available in that sense. The tour groups come in, do the hands-on thing, and then shop in the showroom. But you can’t just show up, even for that attenuated experience.

The whole thing seemed very EPCOT Center, so we passed. All of those crafts were available in shops in Hà Nội, without the tour group hassle and the playdate ambiance.

The journey is as much about having wonderful experiences as it is about avoiding those we know won’t work. Check.

The Ethnology Museum

The Vietnam Museum of Ethnology is unlike any ethnographic museum I’ve seen. Yes, it has a museum with galleries and explanatory placards, just as you’d expect. But the bulk of the grounds are taken up with houses brought in from all different ethnic groups and regions that have been rebuilt on site. Rather than just reading about how the different groups lived, you can go in their houses and feel it for yourself. Being able to enter all these different houses may well have been Hà Nội’s highlight.

What’s not obvious at first glance here is the extent of Vietnam’s ethnic diversity. There are 54 distinct ethnic groups in Vietnam, but the vast majority, 85%, are ethnically Viet. The next largest ethnic group, the Tày, is only 1.92%. Vietnam has a population of about 100 million, which, surprisingly, ranks it 16th largest in the world, but that’s still not a lot of people, divvied up into 53 groups. The smallest 45 ethnic groups account for only 3.7% of the total population.

The Vietnamese government values and supports the diversity these ethnic groups represent, which is the only reason many of them still exist as intact cultures and not just DNA fragments. It’s hard to keep groups that small discrete and unassimilated, so props to the Communists.

Ede House

A long house from the Ede tribe, this house was built for a powerful family in 1969 and relocated to the museum in 2000. The house is 140 feet long and 20 feet wide, and is oriented, as is traditional for the Ede, on a north/south axis, with the main entrance at the north end and the living quarters at the south. The extent and quality of the carvings speaks to the prominence of the family that built it.

Viet House

This Viet house is notable for the splendor and artistry of the wood carving. No mud house this.

Tay Stilt House

This is a multi-generational home built entirely on stilts. There are separate rooms for married children, a dedicated kitchen, and a master bedroom. The space underneath is multi-purpose, for everything from domestic animals to tools and a mill for pounding rice. It’s a playground for children and a place for elders to rest in the shade. The range and quality of weaving techniques is impressive.

Bahnar Communal House

Not housing, but a communal house from the Bahnar people, used for a variety of social and ceremonial activities, as well as serving as a guest house for visitors. As the largest, most impressive structure in the village, it was meant to communicate strength and power.

Every one of the houses at the museum had a video running inside documenting the reconstruction of the structure onsite, but watching this being built, with craftsmen climbing up the partially completed structure like acrobats, may have been the most impressive.

Khmer Junk

This Khmer junk is 84 feet long, and was built for racing during the annual moon worshipping festival. Also, not technically housing, but pretty fucking awesome. In 18 races, this baby came in first 14 times and second the other four.

The museum even has a water puppet theater.

Vietnam Women’s Museum

Well, the gals have their very own museum in Hà Nội, and you have to be just thrilled for the little darlin’s. I’m sure they’re all puffed up. There are exhibits on Women in the Family, Women in History, and Women’s Fashion, but the standout exhibit was on Đạo Mẫu, the worship of mother goddesses that dates back to the 16th century.

Central to Đạo Mẫu is the practice of hầu bóng, literally “serving the reflections,” a ritual involving dressing up and presenting as one of the deities. This is most often performance, but there are priestesses who act as mediums, allowing the goddesses to incarnate through them. Not unlike Santeria’s channeling of Orishas.

Either way, the ritual involves elaborate costumes specific to the individual goddesses, and the museum has an excellent selection. As well as videos of the performances, which may well have been nothing more than ritual performance but certainly had the ecstatic veneer of channeling spirits.

If you can, I strongly suggest zooming in on these pictures. The embroidery is breathtaking.

Đạo Mẫu rituals also involve paper representations of the stories being told, as well as fancy paper decorations. Paper seems to be an important part of many Vietnamese rituals, from altars to the streetside burning of joss paper for ancestors. The museum’s collection of the Đạo Mẫu paper goods was every bit as spectacular as the costumes on display.

Hoàng Thành Thăng Long – The Imperial Citadel

The Imperial Citadel is yet another box checked on our UNESCO World Heritage bingo card. It was Vietnam’s capital city from the 11th to 18th centuries, and was the very last thing we did in Hà Nội, the day before we left for Hội An. It is part monument park, part museum, and part active archeological site.

There were delightful details scattered throughout.

As beautiful as the grounds and buildings were, the standout was the museum, specifically the spectacular terra cotta collection. It’s hard to fathom how so much terra cotta has survived from the 11th century, especially given how much of it was rooftop decoration.

However, the highlight of our visit, for me, took place in one of the galleries. Two young boys, maybe ten years old, were loose from their parents, and one mustered up the courage to say hello to us. I replied Xin Chào, and he screamed like the family chicken had just politely enquired after his father’s health. Sometimes being a dancing bear is just flat-out entertaining.

Vietnam National Fine Arts Museum

Vietnam has been civilized for a long time, having had organized societies for at least 4,000 years. And organized societies have a penchant for creating art. Not that the National Fine Arts Museum has pieces going back 4,000 years, but there’s a rich heritage to mine, and the museum’s collection covers more than a thousand years of that history.

The Hall Of Wiggy Patriarchs

My favorite exhibit, it’s a series of life-size effigies of various patriarchs of the Tây Phương Pagoda near Hà Nói, all created in 1794. More than just life-sized, they are remarkably lifelike, each with its own personality. Unlike many of the Vietnamese figurative sculptures, they all look like very specific individuals, with nothing generic about them. Being in a room full of them, it was hard not to feel their presence.

Sculpture

I love how playful and spirited these pieces are, with an almost cartoony style. These wooden sculptures are all 17th century specimens.

The stone sculptures were just as entertaining.

Bodhisattva Avalokisteshvara

There were two of these in the sculpture hall, and they were both magnificent. This first one is from the 1500s.

The second one is from 1656, and is specifically referenced as the Thousand-armed and Thousand-eyed Avalokisteshvara.

Lacquer Paintings

Relatively modern, lacquer painting in Vietnam dates back only to the 1930s. We didn’t know you could paint with lacquer, so their collection, with pieces from the 30s to the 70s, was a lovely surprise.

Silk Paintings

Silk painting as a technique has a long history in Vietnam, but there obviously aren’t many ancient examples still intact. The museum has a thorough selection of modern pieces, though, which very much capture the range of expression that’s possible. Here’s a few from the 60s to the 80s.

Let’s do some of each.

Water Puppets

Like Cambodia’s shadow puppets, Vietnam’s water puppet shows have a rich, deep history. Unlike Cambodia’s shadow puppet shows, which suffered a genocide-induced time out and had to be recreated from scratch, Vietnam’s water puppet shows have been performed continuously since the 11th century, when bored farmers took to flooded rice paddies to entertain their neighbors.

Like many traditional performance arts that have survived to today, the water puppet repertory has hardened into canon. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. We saw what happened when the Cambodian shadow puppets offroaded into farce. Or tragedy. It’s a fine line.

Hà Nói’s water puppet theater is the Thang Long, which has been in continuous operation since 1969, and in its current location right on Hoàn Kiếm Lake since 1991. It’s a lovely theater and a very professional production. Front row seats were a ridiculous $8 USD each.

There’s a live band, which also provides the dialogue, and the show opened with an instrumental piece. The band was really good, but the highlight was the woman on the left who appeared to be playing a theremin.

What she was actually playing was a Vietnamese instrument called a Đàn Bầu, a one-stringed zither. The notes are created based on where she plucks the single string, and moving the buffalo horn shaft on the right bends the pitch. It looks like a theremin, because it’s hard to see the single string, making it seem like her right hand is floating in air and creating the sound. And it sounds like a theremin because of the pitch bending.

Pictures, obviously, are not up to the task.

The other pleasant surprise from the band was locating the ringing, bell-like sound, which was coming from a woman sitting right in front of me wielding… tea cups. I was so close to her I was uncomfortable taking her picture, but I scraped this, so you can get the idea.

I’ll confess to some nerves after the Cambodian Shadow Puppet Fiasco, but there was nothing to worry about. The performances were charming.

Here’s some dragons dancing. And spitting.

Some spritely phoenixes dancing, without spitting. Dragons, am I right?

An agricultural fantasia, with plowing, planting, and the traditional slapping of the water.

And finally, a hapless fisherman.

The puppets are operated from behind the curtain on long bamboo rods, so you never see the puppeteers. Until the very end. A thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Plastic Dinoland

This was our big gallery experience. The Japan Foundation in Hà Nội staged Plastic Dinoland by Japanese artist Fuji Hiroshi. There was plenty of hoorah about the artist’s commentary on plastic waste and consumer culture, but mostly it was dinosaurs made from toys. Inherently, objectively, awesome. Not much to say. Enjoy.

Lotte Mall Aquarium

We had to go back to the hypermarché at the mall. It was hot. The mall had an aquarium. It was air conditioned. We went.

We went to the mall aquarium, and it was good. It was not the very best aquarium we’ve ever visited. But it was good. Well curated, well laid out, well maintained. But it wasn’t special, except that it was a surprisingly good aquarium in a mall, which is, I suppose, its own kind of special.

Other than a mind boggling fish feeding station, it was notable perhaps only in its obvious preference for painterly fish. Almost the entire collection looked like it had leapt off an Olde Style Asian painting, no matter what part of the world it actually came from.

So there’s nothing mind blowing or revelatory about the pictures or the experience. Except that aquariums are cool and fish are cool. Kind of like a slippery art exhibit.

No one has ever accused us of undersharing.

The main attraction: fish!

I mean, who doesn’t love they some Grooved Razorfish. But what is up with these guys?

The other primary feature of the aquarium was young ladies living the selfie lifestyle. On the one hand, the elaborate yet delicate posing was clearly an art form of its own.

On the other hand, Jesus fuck me, get over yourselves. The self absorption, the indifference to situational awareness, and the sheer, giddy vanity would be heroic if it wasn’t so sad.

The few remaining shabby pieces of our culture that Facebook didn’t destroy itself have been demolished for our overlords by Instagram.

Thanks, Obama.

The Hall Of Painterly Fish

Fish Feeding

There’s some kind of nutrient in the baby bottles that the koi clearly love. It’s not merely a bonkers sight, it’s quite the sound. You can hear the fish sucking from the bottle. I don’t know why we didn’t saddle up, but we were perfectly happy to watch the kids do the heavy lifting.

Sister Ray

A Smack Of Jellyfish!

Sometimes I think the internet doesn’t need AI to hallucinate. I searched for the collective noun for jellyfish and the internet returned smack. OK. Sure. Fine. Here’s an entire smack of jellyfish, all in one tank.

What We Missed

There were also experiences we chose to skip. Train Street was one of them.

Train Street is one of Hanoi’s iconic images. If you just Google “Hanoi” and click on images, Train Street will be right there. Since we didn’t go, here’s a picture I scraped.

So what’s the big deal? It’s a really narrow street fronted with coffee shops, where you can sit inches from a train as it zooms past. People have been injured. Stupid people, so it’s OK. But still. Hà Nội is such an otherwise placid locale, you need to jack up the adrenaline by having a near-death experience.

Pass.

The other experience we chose not to experience was the Hoan Kiem Extravaganza. It’s a multimedia retelling of the story of the Golden Turtle god and the theft and return of his magic sword, Heaven’s Will. We were at the lake one night during the performance, much of which occurs on the bridge to Turtle Island and is visible from the shore.

It was an attractive concept specifically because it would clearly be cheese-stuffed, but what we saw was plenty, without feeling the need to immerse ourselves in it fully. It was a little riper than we’d expected.

Taken in total, Vietnam’s economic system feels like Western capitalism with some of the Darwinian struggle for survival shaved off. It’s tough to argue that that’s an inherently bad thing. You can debate the particulars, but it hardly seems like a system that threatens our way of life.

Where capital C Communism is felt most strongly here is in the political system, rather than the economic structure, and in a post-colonial nationalism that is the primary justification for that political system. Much like in Cuba, the single-party system is a bulwark against Western fuckery. That’s not a convenient justification, that’s a fact. Multiple political parties would permit dark money to flow in from Western actors who have an economic stake in a compliant government. We may not be blockading Vietnam, as we are Cuba, but that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t fuck it in a heartbeat if we could.

Economically, the difference between the US and Vietnam is a values-based fork in the capitalist road. We favor rugged individualism, and we’re happy to let you die to prove the point, while Vietnam favors the collective good. That’s on Vietnam’s side of the ledger, in my book. But what about the distinctions between our multi-party free-for-all and Vietnam’s authoritarian one-party rule? It’s not clear that we win that duel, either.

The purported virtues of our system are: transparency – the ability to see and understand how our government functions and makes decisions; accountability – a free press that exposes our government’s failings, allowing voters to hold politicians responsible for their actions; and competition – a marketplace of ideas that allows debate and an informed electorate.

That all seems positively quaint now, doesn’t it? Transparency and accountability have always been in conflict, with government trying to shield its inner workings from prying eyes. That’s been turned up to 11 lately, but it’s hardly new. And we seem out of the habit of holding politicians accountable for their sins. As for the marketplace of ideas, there hasn’t been any genuine conflict since FDR, with both Democrats and Republicans alike faithfully representing the donor class. An oligarchy that cosplays as a Free Market is still an oligarchy.

So how about the evils of Communism? Vietnam’s government criminalizes dissent and has no free press. It is notably corrupt, both at the petty greasing-palms level and at the senior abuse-of-power level. And it makes decisions that have broad impact without input or oversight.

We’ve had the luxury here, as we did in Cuba, of having more access to locals than in many of our destinations. We’ve been able to have pretty frank conversations with our host’s daughter, An Binh, and our guide in Lan Ha Bay, Ryan. An Binh and her mother have been by twice to cook us traditional meals, and on their second visit we asked An Binh if she was comfortable discussing her government. She was.

We asked her about the whole notion of dissent or disagreement, and she seemed genuinely puzzled. Her position was that her government was responsibly acting in its citizen’s interest, so there was no need to disagree or protest. The government passed the laws and it was every citizen’s duty to obey them. Failing to do so is, and she had to look the word up to make sure she got the right English word, reactionary.

There’s a number of ways to look at that belief. You could claim that “Vietnam is just an obedient culture,” but a) there’s no metric you could use to validate that statement, and b) it’s pretty fucking reductive. Like “China has been ruled by emperors for centuries, they’re used to being told what to do.” Kind of insulting, so I’m not inclined to go there. It would be like claiming that the current situation in the US is because “we’re just a lawless culture.” Maybe, kinda, but also, shut the fuck up.

You could claim that it’s the result of lifelong educational indoctrination, and the use of the specific term “reactionary” gets you at least part of the way to that explanation. But it’s not like we don’t use our educational system to indoctrinate the young with specific values. In fact, we fight over what those values should be all the time.

You could chalk it up to a genuine credulousness, but that doesn’t square with the rest of An Binh. She’s a bright, articulate young woman with a good head on her shoulders. I’m hesitant to lob “credulous” in her direction.

Which leaves one with, à la Occam’s Razor, that she was expressing a genuine, considered belief. I’m inclined towards this explanation, as we pushed back gently, explaining that US politicians often acted in self-interest, rather than for the good of their citizens, and that’s why we needed a free press and the right to protest.

We also asked about urban renewal and relocation. Some of the denser parts of the cities lack adequate public services and can only be brought up to safe, modern standards through demolition and rebuilding. Residents get relocated, and we asked An Binh about the tradeoff between the individual right to stay with their communities vs. the state’s right to rebuild according to plan. She explained that in those situations families were compensated, and if you thought your compensation was unfair you could petition for an increase, and even be represented by a lawyer.

But at no point did An Binh question the right of the state to take actions it deems fit for the greater good. And, again, we do the exact same thing. Eminent domain.

Our other data point was our Lan Ha Bay guide, Ryan. We had a discussion with him about the government’s mandated changes to the historic floating village way of life. He was less “everything they do is for our benefit” and more “they make the rules, what are you gonna do?” There’s a little daylight between his position and An Binh’s, but certainly not enough to drive a protest through. We suspect the difference is that Ryan, as a member of the floating village community, has felt the impact of the state’s decisions in ways decidedly less abstract than An Binh, who’s college educated and solidly middle class.

When you look at the scoreboard it’s hard to give a definitive W to the US of A. We have a theoretically vibrant information economy, whose openness makes it prone to propaganda and exploitation. Vietnam has state-owned media that serves as an organ for government propaganda. If that’s not a tie, it’s 51-49 for the US.

Vietnam jails protesters and dissenters, and we practice extraordinary rendition on the street. That’s just a straight-up tie. And, “Yeah, but we just started” is a pretty lame defense.

Economically, we have late-stage capitalism’s death grip on our institutions, while Vietnam has a centrally planned economy. I think that’s a point for the visitors. Also a point, I think, for their stronger commitment to their social safety net. Their system has holes, but so does ours.

Vietnam is noted for its corruption. Thank goodness that never happens in the US. Tie.

Vietnam has single-party rule and the US has multiple parties. But do we? Really? Sure, right now there’s a bigger gap between the Anarchist Party and the Institutionalist Party than we normally enjoy, but over the last almost 100 years they’ve oscillated mildly around an agreed upon middle. If it’s not an actual tie, it’s another 51-49 win for the US.

That scoreboard just isn’t the smackdown we’ve been promised in the Manichean struggle of Light over Dark. It’s just another system, another way of solving problems, the political manifestation of a difference in values.

At the end of the day, while I actually prefer Vietnam’s values over ours, I’m not sure I’d want to live under Vietnam’s system. But I also don’t want to live under ours, as currently configured. The benefits of free speech, a free press, and the right to assemble and protest may seem a little abstract these days, but they’re also the tools we’ll use to put out democracy’s dumpster fire. So I’m kind of attached to them.

I also wouldn’t care to live under a monarchy or a theocracy. But we’ve spent time in both, and they each have something to offer, to teach us about how different approaches can lead to solutions that seem out of our reach. It’s not like demonizing the other has gotten us anywhere useful. Perhaps it’s time to listen instead.

All Things Ho

The story of Communism in Vietnam is the story of Ho Chi Minh. Unlike Castro, who was pushed to Communism by American fuckery, Ho was dyed in the wool. The precursor to the current CPV (Communist Party of Vietnam) was Uncle Ho’s Indochinese Communist Party, which he founded in 1930. A unified Vietnam with a Communist structure was his lifelong dream. He died in 1969, just a few years short of that dream being realized when Sài Gòn fell and the Americans fled in 1975.

Ho is still a revered figure here, for his tenacity in ousting the Japanese, French, and Americans, but also for his humble lifestyle and his teachings. More Ataturk than Pol Pot. No one refers to Uncle Stalin. Unless Stalin was their actual uncle.

I’m not an apologist for brutality. In Vietnam’s case, both North and South engaged in repression, assassination, and ruthlessness. Ho’s struggle was both a revolution and a traditional war. Eggs were broken, and I’m not arguing that the tasty omelet made it all worthwhile. Today, Vietnam is notable for both repression and corruption, not exactly a Denver Omelet of governance.

But the founder of this state is beloved. Maybe nostalgically, as an avatar of a morally simpler time, when independence was an inarguably worthwhile goal that hadn’t yet metastasized into a self-perpetuating regime. Still, it’s pretty tough to walk through a revolution without atrocities clinging to your pants, so you have to give Uncle Ho credit where it’s due. He’s a legit father-of-our-country hero to the Vietnamese people.

Visiting With Uncle

All unbeknownst, we happen to be in Vietnam during the Reunification Day celebration. And not just any Reunification Day, but the 50th anniversary. Sài Gòn fell on 30 April, 1975. They celebrate, as would I, the anniversary of us running away. On top of that, the very next day, 1 May, is International Worker’s Day. We were expecting they’d pull out all the stops for a multi-day holiday. Posters all over the city strongly suggested a shindig.

Which happened. In Ho Chi Minh City. That’s where all the military parades and spectacles took place.

Hà Nội, not so much. A fifteen minute fireworks show on 27 April, and a list of all the cool cultural exhibitions in the city, none of which were staged especially for the holiday. We felt a little gypped, Hà Nội being the capital and all. Admittedly, it’s the celebration of Ho Chi Minh City/Sài Gòn falling, but that was kind of the North’s handiwork.

This was as close as we got to a parade. Which is nothing to sniff at. I just think it would have been enhanced with a phalanx of tanks and soldiers. So sue me.

It was especially disappointing after working so hard to get to Cuba for International Worker’s Day in 2023 only to have the parade cancelled due to gas shortages. Whatever. We were in Ho’s home town, and we’d make the most of it. His mausoleum, the Ho Chi Minh Museum, and the restored stilt house that he lived in are all located together in a lovely park. If there weren’t going to be parades, we’d pay our respects in person.

As it happens, the grounds are really beautiful, which is a good thing, as both the mausoleum and museum were closed. The museum because we went on a Monday and we’re stupid. The mausoleum is also closed on Mondays, but we asked, and it wasn’t going to be open Tuesday, either. We’d read that Uncle is shipped to Russia for a couple of months every year to have his oil changed and tires rotated before going back on display, and that’s what we think was going on.

At least Uncle’s residence, the stilt house, was open. We would not leave empty handed.

The residence is gorgeous. Beautiful hardwood construction, open and airy and light, with the pond right beside it. I’d live in that house in a heartbeat.

The grounds also included the Presidential Palace. I’m not sure if that was also closed on Monday or if it’s just not open to the public, but it was off limits while we were there. There are gardens, all ridiculously well manicured, food stalls, and souvenir shops dotted about. We saw this in one of the gift shops, which briefly inspired in us a desire to be grandparents. I think it’s gone now. But seriously. How could you not crave a small creature to wear one of these?

The other highlight was a series of cartoons explaining the concept of karma. This one was labeled #4, and we saw another labeled #1, so we’re guessing that there were two other pentaptychs (look it up) that we missed. Here’s a full set for you. We’ll start with positive karma.

Here’s the vastly more entertaining negative karma.

I hope you enjoyed that. Vote for your favorites in the comments.

And that’s everything you need to know about both Communism and Buddhism. You are entirely welcome.

The second unexpected pleasure was checking in to our Vietjet Air flight. We’re always very careful about checking baggage restrictions for each airline we fly, because they vary so dramatically. In this case we were given a generous allotment of 30kg for one checked bag each, but our combined carry-on and personal item could weigh no more than 7kg each, which is nothing. Each of our carry-on bags, empty, is 3.5kg.

The only way we could figure to get our combined carry-on weight to 14kg was to cram full one of the bags we usually carry on and check it. According to the airline’s website, the extra bag would be about $19. I tried to add that third bag online but it wouldn’t work, so we’d have to negotiate that at check-in.

After getting the third bag weighed and checked, the agent shows me a calculator displaying 59. Which is outrageous, as it was $19 on the website. After some back and forth, I figure out that 59 is the combined weight of all three of our bags, and because we have a total allotment of 60kg between us, all good, thank you very much, everything is free.

Can you even imagine a Western airline reaching that conclusion? In your dreams. What a lovely introduction to Vietnam.

And, of course, they never weighed our carry-on.

The Old Quarter: Hanoi Rocks

We’re staying right in The Old Quarter of Hà Nội, and it’s pretty much the reason we came to Hà Nội at all. Much like the Medina in Marrakech, to which it bears more than a passing resemblance, The Old Quarter is a centuries-old commercial center, with plenty of callbacks to its historic past.

The area has been a commercial and arts center since the 11th century, with its current footprint dating to the 15th century. It’s also known as 36 Old Streets, although today there’s about 70 total streets in the jam-packed square kilometer that makes up the district. The 36 Streets refer to the 36 historic guilds responsible for individual arts, each relegated to a specific street. Echoes of those old guilds still reverberate in the shops that occupy the Old Quarter today.

These are just some of the streets where the modern mix of shops calls back to the historic guilds. Hàng Bạc Street: silver; Hàng Mã: religious goods and festival decorations; Hàng Gai: silk; Lãn Ông: traditional medicines; Hàng Thùng: bucket and barrel makers; Hàng Tre: bamboo; Hàng Đào: clothing; Hàng Đường: sweets… There is a Pudding Street. And, clearly, a god.

We are staying on Hàng Chiếu, the Street of Mats, historically known for the concentration of reed weavers. There are still plenty of shops specializing in mats and woven totes. Our doorway is literally flanked with vibrant reed weaving. Dorothy is in heaven. She has a particular fondness for totes made of woven reed or plastic, so she can satisfy that craving entirely within inches of our door.

We have six weeks in Hà Nội, with plenty of day and overnight trips planned to take advantage of the North’s ridiculous natural beauty and vibrant culture. But we won’t be neglecting the Old Quarter, and hope to report fully on as many of its 36 streets as we can.

This greeted us from the cab on our way in from the airport. I have been unable to find any information about it. Perhaps because it’s unexceptional? It was still a pretty cool welcome from Hà Nội.

Our Apartment

Let’s settle on quirky. Quirky is good.

It’s actually fine. But it does have a couple of notable quirks. The first is the entrance.

The next endearing quirk is in the apartment itself, the kitchen specifically.

I can hear you: “Well, that seems like a lovely kitchen. Adequate counter space, plenty of dishes, full size refrigerator, useful appliances. How nice.” “But, wait,” you continue. “On mature reflection, where the fuck is the sink?”

On the balcony, of course. You can be very, very silly sometimes. It’s why I love you.

The bathroom is probably more challenge than quirk. There isn’t a dedicated shower, it’s just the area between the sink and toilet. And that toilet is very close to the wall. I can sit on it properly with my stubby legs, but Dorothy’s more generous, less pliable gams force her to sit sideways.

Plus, we’re not supposed to flush toilet paper. We obviously had bidets all throughout our last leg, as we were exclusively in Muslim countries, but I have to confess I never used one. I was confused by the geometry. I was convinced that I would spray either up my back or front, rather than properly Down Below. You’ll be thrilled, I’m sure, to learn that I can bidet myself without getting the walls wet. And you’re welcome for that image.

The rest of the apartment truly is fine, even comfortable. There’s a switch for the hot water heater, so we have to wait about ten minutes before there’s hot water available, but we’ve had that before, in Chetumal. We get it. It’s expensive to keep hot water heated 24/7, and we’re happy to help keep our host’s business model in balance.

It’s a 3rd floor walkup, which here means that you climb two flights. Some places, like Cambodia, don’t count the ground floor as 1, so a 3rd floor walkup is three flights. We didn’t know until we got here whether we’d be walking up two flights or three.

Since Dorothy’s mishap in Cambodia, we’ve adopted a new stair protocol: I am always below her. In front of her going down, behind her going up. We refer to my role as Meat Cushion. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

There’s another critical component of our Airbnb lifestyle in addition to the apartment itself, and that is, of course, our hosts. We have had many, many excellent hosts. Hosts who have helped us solve local problems. Hosts (sadly, plural) who have taken us to the hospital. Hosts who have brought us delicious baked goods.

But An, our Hà Nội host, is working hard to top that list. She and her delightful daughter, An Binh (both their names mean Peace), came to our apartment for its first weekly cleaning and stayed to provide a home-cooked traditional Vietnamese dinner. There was some kind of shrimp cake with whole shrimps baked in, several fried things in tubes, filled with delicious I-don’t-know, little patties of rice noodles and greens to wrap them in, dipping sauce, a dessert of sweet soup and sticky rice, and fresh longan on the stem. And green tea that had been stored in a lotus flower and made fresh.

Home-cooked meal #2, we are told, will be a traditional Vietnamese hotpot. Or as An called it, a food sauna.

Somehow we mentioned going to the flower market, and without looking it up I recalled that it was called Quảng Bá. I said Kwahng Bah, and both An and An Binh looked at me and then each other. They finally figured out what I’d meant to say, and after recovering from a fairly alarming fit of laughter, An Binh took some time to try to teach Dorothy’s mouth how to make the vowel sound in Quảng.

Which brings us to learning Vietnamese, or trying to. As the above clip demonstrates, Vietnamese vowels are slippery, due to the tonal component. In American English we use tones to modify the meaning of a sentence. A rising tone indicates a question, a falling tone indicates that we’ve completed a thought, but it doesn’t go much farther than that. A changed vowel tone certainly doesn’t indicate a completely different word in English. Or Southern drawls would be unintelligible. More unintelligible.

In fact, regional dialects in the US are all about shifting vowel sounds. A d is pretty much a d everywhere, but the vowels go every which way. When we moved to Rhode Island I was shocked to discover that sauce was a multisyllabic word. Suh-wass. But it still meant sauce.

Put another way, English has 19 different vowel sounds. Vietnamese has twenty-one vowel sounds (twelve basic vowels and nine diphthongs) and six distinct tones that modify the vowels and completely alter both the sound and the meaning of a word. Ma means ghost. Mà means but. Má means mother. Mả means tomb. Mã means code. And mạ means rice seedling. Unsurprisingly, it’s hard to get an accurate count, but most folks agree that Vietnamese has over 100 vowel sounds.

Even less of a surprise, not only can’t we make the sounds of those tonal vowels, as Dorothy proves above, we can’t even hear them. We’ve lived our whole lives only needing to hear and know 19 vowel sounds, and now we’re swimming in over 100? After Cambodia, who’s Khmer alphabet is completely alien, we thought Vietnamese might have an easier uptake since we share an alphabet. But do we? Really? Not when a, à, á, ả, ã, and ạ are all different letters.

Here’s a good one. Cảm ơn means thank you. Câm mồm means shut up. The biggest difference is the intonation on that last vowel. Rising and it means thank you. Falling, as I’ve been pronouncing it, and you’ll be heard to say shut up.

At the end of the day, it’s still pretty much like everywhere else we’ve been. Their English is better than our Whatever, and that’s how we get by. But we did way better with Turkish and the Arabic dialects in Morocco and Tunisia, so our utter failure with Khmer and Vietnamese is a little disheartening. Here’s to butchering Indonesian on our next leg.

Mercados

For convenience, this may be the best shopping location we’ve ever had. Obviously we’re at Ground Zero for handicrafts, but we are, more importantly, hard by the largest traditional market in Hà Nội, Chợ Đồng Xuân, the Đồng Xuân Market. The Đồng Xuân offers three floors of shopping, with the first floor given over to wholesale and retail vendors of all stripes, from fresh meats to hard goods. Hats, cosmetics, sunglasses, backpacks, souvenirs, handbags, bras…

We had seen pictures and we’d noticed that the upper floors seemed to have quite a bit of fabric. What we hadn’t realized is that half the second floor was textiles, with the other half and the third floor given over to ready made. We wound up a three minute walk from one of the largest textile bazaars in Vietnam. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.

Which won’t keep us from going to Hom Market, the largest textile market in the city. It’s only a mile and a half from us, and will probably be a full-day field trip of its own.

We also visited the mall on our first full day here, which isn’t in the neighborhood. While we love the traditional markets, it’s hard for Dorothy to cook without the stuff available in a hypermarché, and the nearest mall was so blessed. Plus, while we’re not enamored of mall culture, it’s always interesting to see its vernacular expression. The Lotte Mall West Lake did not disappoint.

For starters, it’s pretty fucking big. Even by mall standards. Five stories, with more focus on children and experience than I expect from a mall. Not that there isn’t shopping and eating. There’s the full complement of upscale retail, from Polo and Lagerfeld to Hermès and Chanel. There’s restaurants, from food court to fine dining. As expected.

But there’s also Kidzania, where you can drop Der Kinder off by the hour. And a metric buttload of DIY crafting shops, where you can make jewelry or ceramics or embroidery. I’m sure you could enjoy it as an adult, if you like that kind of thing, but the target was definitely children. Also plenty of arcades and toy stores, nicely splitting the difference between mall and playground.

Oh. And an aquarium. Because, sure. And an outdoor park on the fifth floor.

The Neighborhood

I’m going to do a whole post on the 36 Streets from a handicrafts perspective, but the Old Quarter reminds us most of Mexico City, both in the ridiculous density and the retail specialization. For example, our apartment in CDMX was in the lighting district, but the clustering there was a naturally occurring phenomenon that happened over time. Here, the effect was very much intentional, with the Guilds being assigned to specific streets. It was believed that both merchants and shoppers would benefit from the close proximity, and thus it was decreed.

But don’t worry. I’m not going to make you wait until the 36 Streets post before sharing some of the photos. That would be mean. And you know how fundamentally kind of heart I am. Here’s a little amuse-bouche, compliments of the chef.

Part of the Old Quarter’s density comes from the fact that there are effectively no sidewalks. The sidewalks are either used as extended retail spaces for restaurants and shops or as parking lots for the hordes of scooters, which soak up whatever square footage has been left uncolonized. Pedestrians are left to share the road with scooters, cars, rickshaws, and commercial vehicles. It’s like a game of Frogger where you only get one life.

Even though they ban the tuktuks ubiquitous in Cambodia due to their diesel spew, the vehicular density has contributed to the designation, just a few months ago, of Hà Nội as the most polluted city in the world. Who says communism can’t deliver wins for the People?

What’s this? A picture of blue sky? What’s the big deal? The big deal is that this was the first blue sky we’d seen in Hanoi, and it took four full weeks to show up. We were stunned, but still had the presence of mind to capture it before it disappeared.

You could save a lot of money here if you smoked. I can’t imagine anything less necessary. The pollution fills the pulmonary niche of a burning cigarette’s chemical compounds, and if you miss the nicotine kick you can just cross the street. Zero reason to spend on cigs here.

The Old Quarter’s vehicular density is matched by its population density. The last information I could find was from 2020, which pegged the Old Quarter’s square kilometer at 66,000 people. If the district’s population grew by as much as Hanoi’s overall (15%) since 2020, you’d get a 2024 population of about 76,000.

The current densest city on the planet is Manila, at 46,000 people/km². Even without estimating growth since 2020, The Old Quarter’s 66,000 people/km² would make it the densest city on the planet, if it were an entire city. Which is, unsurprisingly, exactly what it feels like here.

Like Siem Reap, the Old Quarter is also chockablock with spas. So much so that Southeast Asia’s entire economy seems to be based on spa services. Once we got outside the neighborhood things calmed down, but you can’t swing a cat in the Old Quarter without hitting hot stones. Which makes a horrible sound. I counted 16 spas on one short block, all offering foot massage, full body massage, waxing, nails… The works.

I’ve already reported on the local custom in salons, and you can be sure I’ll be covering local spa culture. The sacrifices I make for you all…

Hoàn Kiếm Lake

The Old Quarter also abuts Hoàn Kiếm Lake, which means Lake of the Returned Sword. As the story goes, Emperor Lê Lợi was boating on what was then known as Hồ Lục Thủy, Green Water Lake. When suddenly a Golden Turtle God breached the calm waters and asked the Emperor to return his magic sword, Heaven’s Will, as it had been appropriated by the Dragon King to help the Emperor defeat the Chinese Ming Dynasty.

After defeating the Chinese, the Emperor acceded to this very reasonable request and returned Heaven’s Will to the Golden Turtle God, renaming the lake in honor of this singular event. Today, there is a multi-media show presented on the lake multiple times per week, retelling the legend. Cheesy tourist WTF? Sure. But we’ll still do it.

The Man On The Street

Our first night out on the street was great. We were outside the city center in Siem Reap, in a comparatively bucolic setting, but we’re right in the thick of it here, which is swell. We got a little tired of swimming with every other fucking salmon at the same fucking time in the Medina of Marrakech, and the Old Quarter’s charms may start to similarly fade by the end of six weeks. But for now we’re loving the night markets and street food and finding something new around every corner.

The first thing we discovered, on our very first night out, was how to present as chumps. Which turned out to be primarily a math problem.

The exchange rate here is tricky. There are ~ 25,000 Vietnamese Dong to the dollar. At least it’s not a completely random number, like 17,000, which would be an unmitigated disaster. But it’s still a fair amount of math to wrap your head around. VND 1,000,000 is $40 USD. It makes the currency a little tricky, too, as a result of all the bonus zeros.

So we’re out wandering around and enjoying the warm evening when a nice woman comes up and offers us pastries from a rolling cart. Sure. A little bag is VND 120,000, almost $5 USD. I know we’re being overcharged, but whatever. We’re here to leave our cash. I pull out a 100k note and as I’m fumbling for bills that add up to the other 20,000, she reaches into my hand, plucks out a 500,000 note and hands me the change. By the time I figure out that she’s handed me only 80,000 in change (hey, it’s a lot of zeros to keep track of) she is literally nowhere to be seen.

So that’s about $17 USD for a bag stuffed full of pastry and lesson-learned. What’s galling about is that I knew that the street vendor change hustle was a thing, and I got stung anyway. Whatever. We’re here to leave our cash. And it’s not like we didn’t receive something valuable in return.

Cà Phê is a big deal here in general, but Kopi Luwak is its own thing. Although it’s primarily associated with Indonesia it’s also produced in Vietnam. It’s colloquially known as Weasel or Civet Coffee, and it’s the partially digested coffee berries that weasels poop out after they pick up a little onsite fermentation. They’re then filtered out of the scat and roasted like nothing was amiss.

I don’t drink coffee, but Dorothy, who will cheerfully ingest offal, will have nothing to do with it. Who knew she was such a delicate flower?

This warrants not getting buried in a slide show. It was part of a little food altar set up in a ramen shop.

Buildings

We always love exploring a new location’s vernacular architecture. Hanoi’s defining feature seems to be narrow. And not just the Old Quarter. The whole city is made up of narrow buildings, known as tube houses. The tube houses can be as narrow as two meters, as deep as 100 meters, and up to twelve stories tall. Going back to feudal times, property was taxed by its width, rather than its area, which was the driver behind the creation of the tube houses, whose origins date back to the 10th century. They are the method by which the Old Quarter’s density is possible.

The narrow alleys between them, like the entrance to our apartment, also contribute to the density, as they are the gateway to the interiors of the blocks. The units that face the street are the most valuable, as they feature windows, but they’re just the visible iceberg tip. I don’t think they cut through to the opposite street, they just burrow into the block’s interior.

One night, after the restaurant that uses the alley closed, I followed our alley back, but I gave up before I found its end. I tried again, during the daytime, for a better view, and was angrily shooed away by the restaurant staff. I’ve read that it’s not uncommon for a family to occupy the interior housing and run their business from the street front, and I suspect that’s what’s going on here. It would certainly explain how they were able to set up an outrigger kitchen right in the alley.

The tube houses are also a likely contributing factor to a quirk of the local retail landscape. There are no big box stores here. To be fair, an Ikea is coming, but that’s about it. Mexico City has Home Depots and Walmarts, Costcos and Sam’s Clubs, all of which peacefully coexist with smaller, traditional retail. Hanoi is noticeably a big box desert. Retail is all very small-scale and local. OK, there are a lot of Circle Ks here. Which is weird.

I’ve read that one of the inhibitors to big box stores is that the narrow buildings make it difficult to accrete enough real estate to shoulder a Walmart in. And that’s a more than plausible explanation. But I have to believe there’s more to it than that.

Vietnam is nominally communist, but primarily in the sense of one party rule by the Communist Party of Vietnam. The CPV plays a significant role in central economic planning, but lets a thousand flowers bloom when it comes to private enterprise. That doesn’t just sound like capitalism, it smells and tastes like capitalism. Private enterprise may be small-scale and local, but it’s also riotous and dense. Where a Western commercial street might have a dozen businesses, that same street in Hanoi might house fifty or more.

I think the absence of large-scale retail isn’t just the result of the limitations of the physical infrastructure, but is also driven by a profound preference by the state to avoid succumbing to the rampaging megafauna of Western capitalism. They tend to trample what’s inconveniently underfoot, and reasonable people can agree that they’re evil.

It will be interesting to see whether the incoming Ikea is a sport or a harbinger. My money is on sport.

Street Food

You don’t truly know a place until you know its street food. If that’s what it takes, we’ll rise to the occasion. For you, of course. We do all of this for you.

The Temple Of Literature

Just outside the Old Quarter, the Temple of Literature beckoned. Like Tunisia, which reveres Ibn Khaldun, the famed Arab polymath who, among other accomplishments, invented sociology in the 1300s, the Vietnamese have a genuine love of the arts and sciences.

What we weren’t expecting was how crowded it would be. There were buses parked in front disgorging tourists by the long ton, and even the site’s generous 13+ acres couldn’t absorb everyone comfortably.

Most places we’ve been there have been a couple of sites on The List. Marrakech had Le Jardin Secret and the YSL gardens. Istanbul had the Blue Mosque and the Hagia Sophia. Places that would be packed like a mosh pit no matter the time of day or day of the week because they were on literally every tourist’s itinerary. We just didn’t think the Temple of Literature would be one of those places in Hà Nội.

Adding to the tourist crowds were a ridiculous number of school groups. We think it must have been graduation day, because there were literally dozens of school groups and their teachers, all dressed formally and posing for group pictures. What better place to bring the little dears for end-of-year pictures than the Palace of Deep Thoughts. “Look, kids. They built this whole building just for thinking!”

It’s obviously been rebuilt and restored multiple times over the centuries, but the original temple, on the current site, was built in 1070. It has always been a temple to learning, as Vietnam’s first national university, the Imperial Academy, was hosted in the temple from 1076 to 1779. Take that, Harvard.

What I love most about it is that all of the various courtyards and gates have inspirational names. There’s the Courtyard of Great Success. The Star of Literature Pavilion. There’s the Gate of Great Synthesis. The Gate of the Crystallization of Letters and the Gate of the Magnificence of Letters. A pool called the Well of Heavenly Brilliance. There are slogans carved throughout, such as “The country is peaceful and prosperous thanks to respecting culture,” and “Just as the Khuê constellation shines in the sky, the humanities shine everywhere.”

If you think I’m making sport of this, you’re wrong. That undertone isn’t snark, it’s jealousy. This is a real place that has those statements as shared values. What the fuck is wrong with us? I’m not sure we actually have any truly shared values in the US anymore, but if we did we wouldn’t be wasting our breath on extolling learning and the humanities. That stuff is for pointy-headed losers. Fuck Don’t Tread On Me. Our flag should read Hand That Over, Bitch.

Not that we have anything to learn from Commies.

I am referring to the Barber Spa, where the services on offer go well beyond the haircut. They may include full massage, or mani-pedis, or facials, or earwax removal. A common design trope seems to be cute young women in high-hemline uniforms. In my ceaseless efforts to examine the soft, luxurious underbelly of Big Spa and trace the reach of its global tentacles, for you, dear reader, I have once again leapt into the breach.

You’re welcome.

I found 30Shine, a massive chain with nearly 200 locations all throughout Vietnam. I couldn’t make an appointment online, as they required a local phone number, so I made the 25 minute walk of a warm spring evening to the nearest shop. Thankfully, no appointment required. Also, no English. What little communication occurred was via Google Translate.

I had checked their website in advance, so I knew I wanted the Cutting & Washing Combo 2, with a side order of Remove Soft Earwax. Here are all of the steps in Remove Soft Earwax, which is where I started. The text has been mixmastered by Safari’s inline translation, as 30Shine doesn’t have an English version of their website.

This was, más o menos, what transpired, although not in precisely the order displayed above. My technician started right in on the earwax. The last time I went to an ENT he did the earwax thing, and when I asked him how to maintain it on my own he said not to, that I should just see him once a year and he’d take care of it. “Leave it to the trained professionals,” was the message. That seemed like pretty sound advice. It’s hard to dispute the notion that I am unqualified to shove sharp instruments into my ears.

Well, Shine30 offered earwax removal for money, so that made them trained professionals by definition. Right? What could possibly go wrong? Truthfully, I was more nervous than getting a tattoo, even the one with the bamboo stick. A tattoo mistake can be covered over, fixed, or even ignored. An earwax mishap could leave me deaf. No guts, no glory. And no clean ears. Excelsior!

My technician dove right in, and really took her time. I flinched a few times, but mostly from nerves. She was fine. And the process was almost pleasurable, like finally scratching an itch you couldn’t reach. But at the end of the day it seemed more a medical than spa procedure.

When she was done she displayed to me, I think so that I could share her revulsion, what she’d removed. It seemed like… a lot. I don’t really have any metrics here, but it looked like there was enough material to have sculpted a plausible, miniature Taj Mahal. If the unit of measure was Taj Mahal, she removed one Taj Mahal from my ears.

In my defense, which is weak, I blame the hearing aids. I think they block the exits and interfere with the natural earwax migration process, which usually occurs in the spring.

Once that was done we moved on to the other Service Process steps. She started by turning on the robotic massage chair I hadn’t realized I was strapped into. I was grateful that she’d waited until after the earwax adventure. Jostling would have been bad.

I’m pretty sure the machine was built for longer people. One of the rollers was, I thought, meant to hit the bottom of my spine. Instead, it seemed determined to make a new home in my butt. Then again, I fit right in, stature-wise, with the local population, so hard to say. One man’s bug is another man’s feature. Not sure yet where that experience fell on the spectrum for me.

I can’t say for a fact that I received the Relaxing Peacock Hairy Eyes. I did get the mask, so there might have been a peacock involved. Most of the rest of the time was spent on the steps from the Cutting & Washing Combo 2 Service Process. I think they just munged the two processes together.

I’m confident that my air conditioning hole was opened, and I know for certain that I enjoyed the Waterfall squeet. How could you not? The rest of my time upstairs, before the actual cut, was spent on various forms of massage. I got the Neck, shoulder and nape massage, the Face wash & Face massage, the Head acupressure massage, the Ear washing & Ear massage, and the Pulling the towel to stretch the muscles & punch the back. There was also quite a bit of shampooing involved, although that seemed more like soap-enabled head massage than actual shampooing. Still, neck up, I was clean.

Here’s my adorable earwax spelunker.

Downstairs to the haircut, which was comparatively straightforward. I entered the following into Google Translate: “There’s not a lot to work with. Do whatever you want.” And he did, to excellent effect.

I’d do the earwax thing regularly, but I’m not sure our next stop, Indonesia, offers similar services. And I don’t think it’s a weekly maintenance requirement. Still, not just clean ears and a good haircut, but a lovely experience all around. About a full hour of service was provided for a final bill of VND 288,000, or roughly $11 USD.