Introduction
I went to Hanoi last April to find out whether I was up to learning Vietnamese in addition to Korean. I hired a guide named Nguyen Tan, who for about $300 drove me all over town and gave me five hours of personal tutoring in Viet ever day for a week.
* You know that dish, pho? It's breakfast in Vietnam. It's also unpronounceable. You're going to have to trust me when I say you're not pronouncing it correctly, because it takes about a year for non-Vietnamese to learn how to make that sound.
* When I arrived at my hotel, they told me I would have to relocated to another hotel, because the electricity was off in the building. The lights and computer in the lobby seemed to work fine, however, and guests kept entering and exiting the building. They said I could come back in a day. The next day I called and was told, "the guest in your room is still sick and can't leave. Please wait another day."
* Two Australians I met told me that when they came up from Saigon, they were followed by two gangsters who tried to force them to stay in a hotel they hadn't booked. The gangsters even stopped taxi drivers and redirected the taxis to their hotel. As we were talking about this, our taxi passed a man on the street, and the Aussies pointed and shouted, "That's him! That's the fucker who was stalking us!" It was the manager of my hotel.
* Tan took me to a temple where a friend of his worked as an artist. The head monk spoke in very simple Vietnamese to me and showed me around, and was a very kind and pleasant man. Then a young man who was with my guide started holding his fists up to me. Tan said he had mentioned that I had studied martial arts, and the guy wanted to fight me in the temple yard, Street Fighter-style. I used body language to show him that my preferred martial art was bashing things with my forehead, and the guy chilled out.
* When I was walking around on my own, I stopped at a street stall to get something to eat - banh mi, a hot roasted Vietnamese sandwich. The woman made one for me and handed it to me with a big smile. The meat was still bleeding and pink. I smiled and motioned for a bag so I could eat "take out," but she kept motioning for me to eat it in front of her. Try it, she signaled. I couldn't explain that eating it might kill me, or make me poop uncontrollably.
* Tan was trying to think of things for us to do, so he suggested we go to "B-52 lake." It wasn't in any guidebook, he said, it was just this small pond he passed once and saw a bomber hulk rusting in. So we got on his scooter, wove through a maze of alleys, asked a bunch of people for directions, and finally arrived at a tiny lake surrounded by apartment buildings. Sure enough, the wheel wells of a B-52 bomber were still poking out of the water. The Vietnamese shot it down during the war, and the thing crashed right in the neighborhood. Nobody ever cleaned it up.
* I took a day trip to Halong Bay, the famous place where round mountains poke up out of the water. Our tour group got on the boat and went to one island, which the guide explained used to be populated by a horde of monkeys. Where did they go, one woman asked.
"They all swam away to another island," he said.
* Ho Chi Minh's house was built on stilts and has only two rooms: a bedroom and an office. His staff worked underneath, so he would write orders on a piece of paper, fold it up into a paper airplane, and float it down to them.
