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."

Chance Encounters

One of my last two hopes for finding a decent source of reading material was dashed yesterday when I sought out the National Library on Ba Trieu street. Nobody was any help whatsoever—people working in the building right next door had never heard of the place. In any case, this library seems to be closed indefinitely. It's currently surrounded by a rusty, dented construction barricade. Looking for more information, I stopped a Western-looking passerby, who spoke a little English, but even better, spoke fluent French and was, in fact, French! Jean-Noel, who landed in Hanoi about the same day I did, came here to teach psychology and psychoanalysis at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities. We exchanged email addresses and will try to meet for coffee at some point. I'm hoping Jean-Noel will be able to provide a link for me into the community of French expats in Hanoi.

My one remaining hope for English non-fiction books, by the way, is the Goethe Institute, which is reported to have, in addition to German books, a few English ones. I'll go there soon, but I seriously doubt I'm going to find what I'm looking for. Maybe I'll pop over to Hong Kong and see what they've got to read. Please don't tell me I'm going to have to go all the way to Australia to fix my reading habit.

If you're a Hanoi café that wants to keep me coming back, do this: slice up a whole avocado and a whole mango on a large plate of fresh lettuce, pile slices of grilled chicken breast on top, drizzle with a creamy, orange-juice-based dressing, add a 20-ounce mug of cold, delicious red ale and sell me the works for less than $6. I don't intend this blog to become a restaurant review site—I'm just saying Moca Café has got it figured out.

Moca Café is in a warren—called the Old Quarter—of narrow twisting streets west of Hoan Kiem Lake, a neighborhood that, like mine, is a hodgepodge of air-conditioned glass and chrome places that look like Starbucks, slightly homier places with neon signs and bilingual menus, way downscale but respectable Viet shops and restaurants, and grungy third-world soup kitchens and sweatshops. On average, though, the Old Quarter is visibly more prosperous than other Hanoi neighborhoods because it's ground zero for Hanoi tourism, with a high density of souvenir shops, karaoke bars, and backpacker hotels.

I wandered into this area looking for any of the landmarks whose names I had jotted down from the Lonely Planet guidebook—St. Joseph's cathedral, The Jazz Club, a French hangout called La Salsa, Pepperoni's (a pizza joint), plus of course, the Half Man Half Noodle bar. Even without a map, ten minutes of wandering brought me to every place on my list except the last one. Before I could find the Noodle, I ran into Helen from DCV. (The teachers refer to their school as DCV—short for Dai Co Viet street—to distinguish it from other Language Link locations.)

Helen and I talked on the street for a minute or two but we kept getting interrupted by an annoyingly persistent xe om driver who wouldn't take khong (no) for an answer. To get away from him we adjourned to the nearest air-conditioned coffee shop for glasses of chilled juice and a leisurely discussion of American politics and Kiwi (i.e., New Zealand) rugby. Helen refers to her country as En Zed (NZ).

Little Gordon has a much bigger (5-inch) brother—or maybe it's his grandfather, what do I know about these things?—living on the terrace. Here's how I contribute to Gordon Heavyfoot's well-being: At night I keep the frosted window closed and the room light on so that insects land on the glass where they can be snapped up and munched. All evening long I can see Gordon Heavyfoot's white belly through the glass, creeping up and down in a most crocodilean fashion, occasionally stopping to munch a bug.