15 April 2011
Hanoi, Vietnam
Which came first: the chicken or the egg? Today it was definitely the egg, precariously balanced on the back of a motor scooter putting down the shoulder of the main highway into Hanoi. A whole bunch of eggs, actually. Eggs piled on the back of that scooter higher than the Christmas loot on the Grinch’s sled. And following that scooter of eggs? A similar balance of chickens. Whole chickens of the still clucking kind, squashed together in wooden crates, off to destinations this Westerner doesn’t know and definitely can’t pronounce. It didn’t take much farther down the highway before the Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast plate was completed, what with that bike-load of pigs we just passed. Welcome to Vietnam.
So far? A scene that is hard to put into words when “sensory overload” is the only thing that comes to mind, spinning around and around and around again. In the 45 minute drive from the airport to the Old Quarter, what passed outside the car window appeared to me, in its simplest terms, a land and city of contrasts. The traffic seems chaotic and yet it flows along freely, not giving way to the stop-and-go movements of a city strapped drown by traffic lights and lane markers and one way streets but instead moving in an unexpected harmonious progression toward that shared common goal of getting from Point A to Point B, regardless of which point you came from or which one you’re aiming for, it really doesn’t matter and most certainly doesn’t require you to drive in a straight line. The “beep beep” of our driver, that I first took as a “Hey friend, it’s me”, turned out to be an actual “beep beep” as in a “Hey friend, get over, I’m passing” and yet it still wasn’t angry or irritable or road-rage-inducing. In fact, sometimes it wasn’t much of anything at all, not anything that was heeded, that is. But did that matter to our driver? Nope, just a quick tap of the brakes or turn to the left and whoa, there we go, we didn’t mash that old guy on the scooter after all.
I saw many things today on our arrival in Vietnam. I saw bicycles loaded not just with eggs and chickens and pigs but also melons and flowers and beer kegs and grandmas and I swear that last one had a full-size refrigerator strapped onto the back. I saw one-person scooters carrying three as we all weaved behind a shiny Rolls Royce carrying, well, I don’t know, but obviously not Gina nor I nor those three on the scooter. I saw dilapidated buildings slumping next to meticulously restored colonials. I saw a grey, foggy dayscape punctuated by colorful wash hanging out to dry. I saw Puget Sound Energy’s worst nightmare draped from every pole.
I also ate a few things today. Yummy, healthy things, wrapped in delicate rice paper and served with cold beer, the kind that comes in a can but tastes like a bottle and costs less than a US postage stamp. Gina may have very well found her food nirvana, her land of milk and honey, the place on this planet where the amount of food she can consume will never surpass the amount of money in her wallet.
And Neighbour Cynthia, you’ll be proud and pleased to hear that we also crossed a few streets today. Sure, we picked the quieter ones where most of the scooters were flowing in only one direction and sure, we started by following an old woman down the street, thinking we were safe in her wake, but hey, we are bona fide P-platers here, starting from scratch and planning to work our way up toward a two-way street … tomorrow.