Touchdown

I expected the 12-hour flight from SF to Taiwan to be a night from hell, but it proved otherwise. I mentioned my broken ribs to a flight attendant who saw me struggling to lift my laptop case into the overhead compartment and in return she mentioned—offered—an empty row of three seats next to the mid-cabin lavatory. I raised the two middle armrests, gathered up all three complimentary pillow and blanket sets, and fashioned myself a cushy chaise longue on which to stretch my legs and elevate my feet while keeping my torso in a mostly upright position. I made it through the 12-hour flight without Vicodin, without alarming my neighbors with pitiful whimpers and groans, without suffering a fatal blood clot, and without flopping about the cabin in a desperate search for relief from restless leg syndrome. In fact, I slept a great deal and arrived in Taipei rested and practically painfree.

The computer at the boarding gate at Taoyuan Airport in Taipei was printing out passenger lists and flight manifests on a tractor-feed dot matrix printer, but otherwise Taipei's airport looked like any big city airport—with fewer stores and restaurants, maybe, but more potted plants. There was even a shelf of potted plants in the "Man Toilet".

The three-hour hop from Taipei to Hanoi was uneventful. I sat next to a Hungarian couple and we were served dubious cuts of pork over gummy overcooked noodles garnished with a hardcooked brown egg—brown clear through except for a dark green yolk. We arrived at Hanoi in a warm drizzle that didn't obscure a flat green landscape brimming with lakes, ponds, and puddles. The temperature was around 80F, but the atmosphere was like your bathroom when somebody has just finished a hot shower.

Getting through Vietnamese customs took all of 30 seconds. A skinny boy wearing an army tunic glanced at my declaration (blank except for my name, address, and passport number), stamped my visa, and waved me through. No words were exchanged. The Hanoi airport is half the size of the Oakland airport. It has two baggage carousels. I had my luggage on the curb ten minutes after we landed.

Thanh met me as promised. He recognized me from my photo and I recognized him from his. I hadn't expected him to come to the airport in a cab, though. Because of my injured ribs, Thanh let me sit up front with the driver on the way back to town. I spent the 45-minute ride to the hotel painfully twisted in my seat so I could keep up a conversation with Thanh. As I expected, his spoken English was inferior to his written English and we both had quite a struggle communicating. Thanh is two years older than me, a physicist who lived and worked at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow. He now works as a scientific advisor in Hanoi.

Rain continued to fall as we rolled past flooded fields and across the muddy river into the city. The highway is grade level pretty much the entire way and, though four lanes wide, has no median—just a low cement barrier along certain stretches. Pedestrians meandered across the four lanes here and there. Traffic, moderately heavy, was maybe 55% autos and trucks, 40% motorbikes and motorscooters, and 5% bicycles. The autos were a mixture of European-style compacts, mid-size sedans, and SUVs. I'd say there were more SUVs than small cars, but that might characterize traffic to and from the international airport more than Hanoi traffic in general. I saw no tractor trailers. A majority of the motorbikes and motorscooters carried two people. There were lots of rain ponchos and it was common to see the driver wearing a large one, the front of the poncho draped over the front of the scooter and the back of it draped over the passenger who rode along, dry under the plastic but unable to see anything other than the driver's back. We passed several fresh accidents and neither Thanh nor the taxi driver even gave them a glance.

The traffic circulation in the center of Hanoi was exactly as advertised—chaotic, ill-advised, dangerous. You get the feeling, though, that in Hanoi the reckless drivers are not motivated, as they are elsewhere, by belligerance, road-rage, ego, showing off, etc., but rather by a desire to get where they're going in the shortest possible time even if it means risking their own life and the life of everyone in their path. Everybody uses their horn liberally. They honk whenever they pass someone, whenever they approach an intersection, whenever they're in an intersection, whenever somebody gets within three feet of them, whenever they get within three feet of somebody else or intend to. As a result, Hanoi sounds perpetually like a wedding couple being launched on their honeymoon by the best man and a dozen of his drunken friends.

The architecture in and around Hanoi is a charming blend of Asian and European. I saw mile after mile of freestanding four-, five-, and six-story houses, tall and narrow (12-15 feet wide), elegant, many with cantilevered balconies, covered terraces, or inner courtyards, and red tile roofs with Oriental spires and flourishes, all of it apparently unplanned development—new buildings strongly resembling older buildings in style, but no two exactly alike. We also passed block after block of cavernous sheds made of corrugated tin which looked for all the world like garages or machine shops, but in whose dim interiors could be seen dozens of cheap chairs ranged around large tables and as often as not the chairs were full of shadowy figures looking like a bingo crowd during a power blackout. I'd love to know what was going on in those sheds.

Hanoi is smaller, closer, more crowded feeling than I had anticipated, even after looking for hours at satellite images of it on Google Earth. Even the huge, elegant, expensive Metropole Hotel fronts a narrow, grimy, almost claustrophobic street. That goes for my hotel, too. The lobby is tiny, the elevator must surely have come from France, and the place has no air conditioning. Neither does the neighborhood bank, the neighborhood supermarket, or the neighborhood restaurant where Thanh and I had lunch. The lunch was good, by the way. We had sticky rice, grilled pork, grilled fish, steamed celery and salad greens, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes—as much as the two of us could eat—plus green tea and two 20-ounce bottles of beer for a total cost of about $7.00. No tipping is the custom here. Thanh says if I become a regular customer the restaurant will probably start giving me a discount.

My hotel room is about 15 feet square with a tile floor and a thirteen foot ceiling. Queen-size platform bed with a very firm mattress. Desk with chair and Internet jack. Large mirrored wardrobe. Mini-fridge. Cable TV with 57 channels. Two bedside tables and lamps. Telephone. Occasional table flanked by two easy chairs. Private bathroom. Toilet with bidet attachment (picture the spray hose on your kitchen sink). Four by eight foot covered balcony half filled with potted plants. A six-foot wide window and a glass door that open onto the balcony. The room is clean and pleasant and is costing me about $25 a day. As an experiment, you might try sending me a letter or care package c/o The World Hotel, 137 Mai Hac De, Hanoi, Vietnam. (Don't send anything valuable or vulnerable to humidity.) I've paid in advance through the end of August and will most probably stay here until the end of September.

Did I mention the absence of AC? I'd gladly trade my bidet attachment for some. My balcony looks out on some of those terraces and inner courtyards I mentioned. This evening as I sit at my computer looking at the full moon framed in my giant window I can see lines of laundry hung to dry and hear fighting cats and mothers scolding crying children. On the TV in the corner, Val Kilmer's face is speaking Vietnamese. It's not terribly hot but it's extremely humid. I can see I'm going to be taking lots of showers..

Thanh insisted I buy some groceries for my hotel room while we were near the supermarket. The Vietnamese are no more apt to eat peanut butter than the French are, but the store was well stocked with peanut butter and I bought some, along with two baguettes which proved tougher than shoe leather. Big deal. They were only 25 cents each, and I got a package of 10 coconut cookies for 40 cents. I wanted a plastic knife for the peanut butter, but all I could find was a package of twenty. I bought the pack when I realized it only cost 25 cents.

Tomorrow I'll visit my school (just around the corner) and try to find a bookstore that sells English language books.