White bread 'mericans

I just got off the phone with a friend who's from Shanghai. Now, he hasn't lived there since '91, so every time he goes home he gets sick too.

We 'mericans are wusses. At least, Dave, myself & my friend are. That said, some of my tests have come back & I'm not growing a 12 foot long tapeworm. More drama later on that front when there's something to say other than, "Erp!"

Here's more pictures of Ha Noi. They're the ones I thought most closely captured the cacaphony of life, of life lived with your front door as wide as a garage door & open to your neighbor's.

But we, as tourists, started from the top of Vietnam, literally & figuratively. Our trip began in Hanoi, the northernmost city, the capitol. We were on the 5th floor of our 6 story hotel - really quite tall for the district. The government is trying to preserve the Old Quarter, so the buildings are human scale. Then there was the fact of our relative wealth. But even as high up as we were, the sounds of life travelled.

It began at about 5am - a horn here, the sound of a motorbike there. Hanoi seems to get going about 6:30am. Milan, Rome - those are early rising cities - 5:30am; Paris - you couldn't find an open boulangerie before 7am, and forget about a cappuccino before 9am.

This is the view from our hotel's restaurant balcony. It's the best picture I've got which shows how narrow, but deep & tall the Vietnamese tube houses are. There's also a lot of use of covered balcony space to capture the breeze.



Hanoi has many tree-lined streets. The banyan trees can get huge.



I thought this picture below was good b/c it shows the height of the buildings. Shops open to the street on the first floor, first room. It also shows how hanging plants were used as sun screens across the front windows of the living area. These homes also have pretty deep balconies.



How dense the buildings are.


Color and sound. The 2nd red scooter in the back - the woman is wearing a face mask. The material seemed to be the same kind used for cloth diapers. In the north, these masks covered just the nose & mouth area & I thought it was to protect against the pollution. In the south, the mask became a head-dress, with a skirt which covered the decollatage & went around the back of the neck. I was later told that was to protect against the sun.



The older houses in Hanoi didn't have glass in the windows.


More shops & older tube houses. They also used hanging plants across the front of the windows to add shade & cut down the penetration of the sun.



Living with your neighbors & yes - that is a flower pot with flowers stuck into the branch of a banyon tree.


Old house & shop filled to the gills in the Old Quarter of Hanoi.






Take the quiet moment where it can be found:



One of the side streets in Hanoi. Private life is relative as it seems one is always being observed.

Also, note how clean the streets are. It was stunning really. As much as would be going on, the streets were cleaned each night & all throughout the day.