Please don't dynamite the books

When I mentioned to Kevin, an Englishman who works at Language Link, that I was writing a blog, he said a perceptive thing: "Ah, yes, good idea. It's those first impressions that are the most valuable." It's taken me some time to see what he meant: as the days go by, Hanoi has begun to look less and less exotic, i.e., more and more normal. Disparate features—conical bamboo hats and ATMs, bicycle taxis and escalators, pig's feet boiling in a pot outside a Givenchy salon, are starting to blend and average themselves out in my mind. I can see now that eventually the odd, extravagant details will become mere embellishments on a pattern not that different from the one underlying any large city anywhere in the world. Even novelty has an expiration date.

In the meantime, though, let me share a few more of the weird, wacky things I'm seeing with my beginner eyes:

A moment ago, while returning from a run around Ho Bay Mau, I was privileged to witness a prize-worthy display of daring and totally irresponsible recklessness on a "motobi". I had paused a moment to allow a man to emerge from an alley with a wooden case of bottled beer (36 bottles). The man posed the case on the seat behind a motorbike driver. It was a narrow seat, the case heavy, its perch precarious. The heavy beerload tilted to one side and I instinctively stepped forward to catch it, but the driver reached back with one hand and managed to steady it. Meanwhile, the first man had gone back for a second case, which he now stacked on top of the first. Still reaching back with one hand to steady the wobbly stack of beer, the driver gunned his motor and putt-putted off into a heavy flow of swarming, honking vehicles.

When I returned from my run on Wednesday, I passed what I thought at first was another ten-foot wide hotel, but a large sign announced it to be a campus of the University of New South Wales. (That would be an Aussie school.) I couldn't resist stopping in for a minute to drip on their floor and inquire whether they had a library at all. As I expected, there were no Aussies about, but I was given the address of a rumored library on Pho Trang Thi (Trang Thi Street). I went there yesterday and discovered…hurrah!…the relocated National Library.

You'd think that a National Library, relocated, would be relocated into a brand new building, but this five-story building was at least fifty years old and may have been at one time a public secondary school. The first floor was given over to an open reception area and card catalogs. The second floor appeared to be special collections and reading rooms. The third floor had a large, nicely appointed Korean Room with a few hundred books, presumably in Korean, plus several rooms apparently not in use. The fourth and fifth floors had student study areas—dozens of tables and about 18 computer work stations—but no more than a few hundred shelved books. I went up and down the stairs several times, exploring each hallway in search of the main book stacks. There didn't appear to be any more books in the joint than the thousand or so books distributed throughout the reading and study areas. I did locate one reading room—the Friendship Room—which appeared to be devoted to foreign language publications. It was closed, but I could see a few shelves of books through the window. Library rules posted on a sign by the door included this disquieting admonition: "Personal bags, printed materials, explosives should not be taken into the reading room."