Last days in Hanoi

Since we have been in Hanoi, there have not been many official activities for the delegation. Yesterday, Sandra and I met our friend in Hanoi, Hiep Pham, for a day's outing. We traveled via city bus to Bat Trang, a village near Hanoi that is famous for its ceramics. Open-air ceramics shops are clustered around a small square. The shops are filled with beautiful ceramics and, increasingly, porcelain, produced for export to other areas of Vietnam and abroad. We browsed for a couple of hours, enjoying the quiet and the cool morning temperatures. Pham helped us negotiate prices for the items we bought. It's usually the case that there is a price for Vietnamese and a price for foreigners. In this instance, it hardly mattered. An exquisite teacup was $.40 for Vietnamese and $.75 for foreigners. Still, we were happy to have Pham save us a few dong, which we then happily spent on a delightful lunch! Pham is great at ordering super vegetarian meals for us, even in non-vegetarian restaurants. We joked that, after a few more days with us, he'd be a vegetarian himself.

The bus ride was really enjoyable. Vietnamese people are quite friendly and are always eager to practice their English, even if it goes no farther than, “Where you from?” and “How old are you?” (We've decided these must be the first two questions that they learn in English class. I suppose no one has told them that, in most places in the English-speaking world, “How old are you?” is not the best opening line with strangers.) We chatted with a couple of students on the bus. One older woman, wearing a distinctive brown hat, eyed us a little warily during the ride out to Bat Trang. On the way back, she boarded the bus with a young man, did a double-take and then gave us the biggest smile. It was sweet to reconnect with her, even though our only relationship was exchanging glances on a bus.

That evening, we went to the Old Quarter to meet Pham for dinner. We arrived early, so we strolled up and down the streets. It's a dizzying bazaar of tiny shops spilling out onto the narrow sidewalks. The sidewalks are for everything but walking. There are displays of merchandise, small outdoor restaurant operations with tiny tables surrounded by Vietnamese having bowls of soup, hundreds—no, thousands—of motorcycles arrayed in lines. All crowded onto already narrow sidewalks.

The streets were traditionally organized around specific trades, and to a large extent, like stores still cluster together. Last night, we wandered around the street devoted to supplies for temples and home altars. The early evening darkness made it very dramatic—the red banners and lights, the gold altar acoutrements, the bright statues.

Today was Sandra's last day in Vietnam, so we planned our agenda around what she most wanted to do. We took a taxi to the largest market in Hanoi and browsed around. Then she suggested going to the Museum of Ethnology, which is very well known. We took a long (and over-priced) taxi ride there and spent several hours going through the museum. There was a special performance of the water puppets in an outdoor pool. Having already seen then in an indoor theatre in Hanoi, it was fun to see them in a more natural setting.

The museum has a large collection of buildings representative of the lifestyles of the many indigenous peoples of Vietnam. This was a side of the country that we missed on our big-city tour, so it was really enjoyable and educational for us.

Tonight, I enjoyed what will probably be my final temple meal. We returned to the Bo De Temple, where we ate yesterday, for a lovely meal. The temple has an orphanage that is home to 40 children, and many of them were running around this evening.

It isn't clear to most of us what the next few weeks in Hanoi will bring for Thay and the monastic and lay delegation. It seems, although no one has told us so, that officials here are not as enthusiastic about this visit as those in other areas of the country. Tomorrow, Thay is giving a Dharma talk at a temple about an hour outside the city, and it is likely that that is where the weekend ceremonies for the deceased will take place. The forthcoming celebrations of the reunification of the country and of May 1st will be an interesting juxtaposition to the Dharma that Thay is bringing to the Vietnamese people.

Tomorrow evening, I leave for Kuala Lumpur to visit my friend, Ivy Wong, and her family for a few days. It will be sad to leave my delegation friends, but our practice teaches us that we really are never separated from each other, so we will try to follow that practice as we say goodbye to each other.

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