Walking in Hanoi

Tom here.

I just got out of a great cinematic experience. I saw Casablanca in Hanoi overdubbed 80% in Vietnamese, 20% you could hear the English and with English subtitles. "Here's looking at you kid" never sounded like this before! It was also interesting watching a pro french film in a former colony.

The streets are so alive here. It is sweat through your underware hot, so everyone hangs out on the relatively cool streets. They play a board games (mah jong?), slice raw pork, or just sit with a straw conical hat in a heat pummled stupor.

It is amazing how many mopeds are in this city. All traffic rules are mearly suggestions. Traffic lights, center lines down the street, even one way traffic flows are merely suggestions. It is taoism in action. A beeping flow that seems to work. The one rule is once you start to cross the street, don't stop and don't change direction suddenly. A lunging sea of 70 mopeds flows around you as if you were a granite rock in the middle of a stream. It makes the heart race.

I am reading a biography about Pol Pot, the Cambodian mastermind behind the Khmer Rouge genocide known as the Killing Fields. Apparently Pol Pot was a bit of a putz growing up. Not so bright. And he came to a place where he expedited the murder of 1.5 million of his countrymen (a staggering one out of 7 people.) How is that possible? It has really got me thinking about Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos. How power plays have been going on for centuries both between these countries but also when foreign powers come to exert and extract. We saw lots of people without legs hobbling about, begging at temples. the legacy of land mines continues to haunt Cambodia.

Walking down the street here in Hanoi, you see the bold yellow star in the red flag. This is a communist country. We lost the war. And yet they don't seem to care when I say, "I am from America." Just don't care. I walked by the infamous Hanoi Hilton today.

Still in waiting mode on the baby. Maybe we get her wednesday....maybe not. Loosey goosey seems to be the name of the game.

Now I will eat my spring rolls and fried milk cake.