Xe om (say um)

It's not yet 8:00 AM but already I can feel the heat of the day burning through the frosted glass of my closed windows and the heavy green curtains which serve to cut the morning glare. Since I arrived, temperatures have oscillated predictably between 80F every night and 90F every day, but the sky has been mostly overcast. Yesterday the sun burst through the clouds with a brutal reminder that Vietnam is not that far from the equator. Hanoi, in fact, is a little closer to the equator than Calcutta.

I've been walking a lot. Maybe too much—my right ankle complains every night when I go to bed and I start each day with a limp which disappears around mid-morning. But I've enjoyed poking around the city on foot, observing the overwhelming tide of life that surges out into the street here every day and peering into places that defy Western logic—shadowy caves of gutted buildings in which you can glimpse pots boiling, laundry hung to dry, and young men washing their feet with a hose, or a puzzling place of business with no front wall, just a cashier station on the left, a small glass cabinet displaying 10 or 12 cosmetic products on the right and a roomy interior containing on the left two coffee tables apparently set for tea, each wedged between two expensive leather sofas, and on the right a row of filthy motorbikes blocking the wide, curved, crumbling rococo staircase leading up to the second floor.

I'm in an anguish of frustration at not being able to capture what I'm talking about with my camera. I've snapped some nice pictures of trees, balconies, traffic, but what I'm dying to do is get some close ups of the people and the spaces they inhabit. My western sensibilities keep blocking me from intruding on their privacy all the while I see them conducting their lives unselfconsciously in public as if privacy were a non-issue. Anybody want to lay some advice on me here? I know my Swiss friend Mireille would get some sensational pictures. She's a person for whom strangers gladly exchange their privacy for a little attention. Unlike me, she doesn't look like a CIA agent.

The one English (almost) phrase every Hanoian seems to know is "Hello, motobi'..?" If you're a Westerner you can't walk ten feet without hearing it. Every Vietnamese man with a motorbike is, at least potentially, a 'xe om' or taxi driver. Think about it. If the poverty line in the city is 12 million dong a year, one merely has to earn 33,000 dong a day to stay out of poverty. A ten minute ride costs about 20,000 dong, so if a man can find two good customers a day he can make a living.

There are several xe oms on every block in Hanoi, and since it doesn't cost anything to ask, you can expect to get asked by every single driver you walk past. Some of them are damnably persistent. One wanted to shake my hand. Because it seemed rude to refuse, I shook his hand and then he didn't want to let go. I have to say this for the Vietnamese, though. Something like that could have turned ugly in some countries, but even this "Klingon" shared an amiableness that seems almost universal here. I'm sure there are some bad men in a town this size, but so far I haven't seen a single argument, rude gesture, or threatening look. Equanimity rules here.

News item: a man found 56 unexploded bombs this week on a river bank in a suburb of Hanoi near Long Bien Bridge. These, of course, are left over from the Vietnam War (known to the Vietnamese as "the American War"). How they could have remained undiscovered for 35 years in such a crowded area is a mystery.