I might have implied, in yesterday’s post, that an early morning was afoot.
At 4.15am they started the awful (and loud) music on the train, and we all awoke with a bit of a jolt. Fortunately, as always, Tuan had the transport organised and we got straight into a large taxi and went straight through the dark empty streets to our hotel. But without all the shops open, people selling any type of thing on the footpath, and the thousands of motorcycles, we hardly recognised the street we were in until we were pulling up at the hotel.
In what would be the luggage room until we could all check in, Alice lay straight down on the bed and went back to sleep, while I contemplated what to do between now (5am) and the time when cafes and such would start opening. A couple of failed attempts to sleep later, I went down to a cafe near the hotel and had a reviving caffeinated beverage, while Alice stayed asleep the whole way through. We were set up to go for a walk with Tuan over toward Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum at 8am, but she had been sick with a cold for a day or two and slept until 7.53am.
We got some assorted bread-type things from the nearby bakery and went on a deliciously roundabout tour of the multiple streets in the Old Quarter. Although they used to be named according to what they sold, and although many of the streets don’t now sell whatever they are named after, most of the streets do still have shops selling the same things. For instance, hardware stores. One street had about four blocks of shops which were all hardware stores on both sides of the road. None of the shops would have been wider than 3m however, or deeper than 3m, so they can’t all fit the same sorts of things you might buy in Bunnings. Just the same, it was a bit weird.
You can go many ways through the Old Quarter but you tend to end up somewhere along the main diagonal road when you come out the other side; Dien Bien Phu street. Actually it’s not a street; there’s a different Vietnamese word for it but I forget what it was. Turn right and walk along Dien Bien Phu and you arrive at the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. At this time of year the mausoleum, in accordance with rumours, is not open, because Ho Chi Minh is not there. His waxen corpse is in Russia being restored by the same technology they use to keep Lenin looking creepy and half-dead. There is another rumour that the contract has been secretly handed over to Madame Tussaud’s, but that is neither here nor there.
Of course if we had known Ho was in Russia we would have visited him when we were there; instead we are left with no way to complete our Worldwide set of Real Actual Dead People Stuffed with Plastic on Public Display. But you can’t have everything.
We still had a good time walking around and looking at the big shiny mausoleum, which is startlingly similar to Lenin’s, except that it has three levels of roof, just like your average Vietnamese pagoda. Which you will be able to observe in the pictures (having reference of course to our pictures from Moscow).
A short debate ensued over whether we should pay to go into the Ho Chi Minh theme park enclosing the house where he lived, the cars that he drove, the gardens he walked in, and probably some pictures of his concubines as well; or, perhaps, we could instead go to see the One Pillar Pagoda, both of which were not very far from the Mausoleum. The One Pillar Pagoda won, but it is kind of small. It’s literally a pagoda built on one pillar, sitting above it’s own little lake which is about 10m by 10m. It’s a nice little ornamental thing; we read that the original pagoda was slightly larger but the French took the time to destroy it on their way out in the 50’s. So the Vietnamese had to build their own smaller replica.
Then we walked back to the hotel, by which time the day was just starting to get really hot, and there were enough rooms available, and Alice promptly went back to sleep. We hid in the hotel room the rest of the day and I took the opportunity to do a test run of the video call which we had planned for Simon and Bronwen’s wedding, while Alice slept and then after that slept some more.
On our previous ramblings through Hanoi we had spotted a restaurant marked Vegetarian, and that seemed a good option for dinner; indeed it was. Alice couldn’t taste much of what she ate except for those things having a lot of garlic in them, so she ate most of those. Halfway through dinner the lights and power went off for some reason, so the giggling staff bought out little lanterns for the table.
‘Tomorrow’, we said to ourselves when we went to bed, ‘we won’t have to get up at four in the morning and should be able to do better than this. Who knows, we may even leave the hotel room.’
Greg
