Monday, July 7, 2014

Daily Walks Pay Off In Hanoi

Despite the heat and humidity in Hanoi this week, I haven't been dissuaded from taking long daily walks in the city, sometimes for as long as three to five miles.  It's the best way to get oriented in a new place, to get the lay of the land, and it's the best way to absorb what the various neighborhoods and their streets have to offer.

Over the past few days I have taken this golden opportunity to photograph two or three central city neighborhoods on my rounds.

My hotel is in the Old Quarter which is a great place to start.  On this link you can find a typical walking tour marked on a map of the Old Quarter:

http://www.vietnamonline.com/destination/hanoi/old-quarter-walking-tour.html

In this vibrant, colorful neighborhood, which is the old city center, are hundreds of hotels, hostels, restaurants, coffee shops, noodle stands, bakeries, convenience stores, mom and pop stores, clothing stores, shoe stores, hardware stores, souvenir shops, cellphone shops, electronics shops, authorized Apple retailers, other computer retailers, a nightly night bazaar of several blocks length, a traditonal "wet" market, a beautiful park and lake, and a few notable cultural attractions.

The Old Quarter has almost no traffic lights, so car and motorbike traffic make their way through intersections in a fascinating ballet of weaving and waving.  Drivers here drive much slower than their counterparts in other countries, so this surreal system seems to work without too much disaster.

Just to the southeast of the Old Quarter is the French Quarter, which at first glance appears to be more of the same, but soon you notice that the streets are wider, the tree-lined boulevards are more glamorous, the French architecture is better-preserved, and the new buildings are taller and bigger.  There are also many more traffic lights.

Here you find supermarkets, luxury brand stores, independent boutique shops, a higher class of hotels and restaurants, and brand-name Western fast food outlets such as KFC and Burger King.  And yet sometimes there is less than meets the eye:  a closer look inside a "supermarket" revealed a post-communist example of a western concept that has yet to find its strengths here.  The shelves were filled, true, but compared to the big box stores of Thailand, this supermarket seemed like something straight out of 1989 East Germany.

Just to the west/northwest of the Old Quarter is the capital city's newer administrative center.  Here the boulevards are even wider, with yet more trees, and bigger parks line large sections of the area.  Several five-way intersections abound, managed by traffic light or roundabout, and here you can see traffic police at work.

This is a neighborhood of big city squares, large government buildings, several foreign embassies including Thailand, Poland, Romania, and Canada, and big monuments to important historical figures such as a statue of Vladimir Illych Lenin (quite possibly one of the last in the world!), and here too is the gigantic Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum.

The latter two landmarks have a way, I noticed as I was taking photos, of making this usually bright and colorful city appear almost Stalinist grey and drab.  And yet I was impressed by their size and the huge spaces surrounding them where families gather late in the afternoon, together with their children and friends, for sports such as badminton and football, jogging, biking, skateboarding, and tai chi.

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