Friday, December 24, 2010

Merry Christmas. Hanoi.





Merry Christmas! Christmas Morning, Hanoi

    You’d think those wouldn’t go together.  Christmas Morning.  Hanoi.  But here I am in the middle of it.  I’m alone.  The sky has gone from high and clear and fresh and moist to heavy and the wind’s come up.  Howling actually.  I know that, just out of site from my perch on the bed with the computer, that the palm fronds are thrashing, just like they did outside my third floor window in Hassell Hall, my first semester at HDA in 1968.  They’re mesmerizing but I no more associate them with Christmas now than I did then.  We New Englander and Rocky Mountain types forget that most of the Christendom, by far most, celebrates Christmas as snow-free and generally green.  If they celebrate it at all.
    But right now–in Hanoi–from my bed I see a grey, lowering sky.  I’m listening to the wind barreling.  Hunkered down in my bed I’m cosy.  I’m also listening to Christmas music.  (If you’ve not heard Sarah McLachlan’s Christmas album from two or three years ago, rush out and by it–it’s the best Christmas music in twenty years–listen to “Song for a Winter’s Night.”) I can see my six-foot cone-shaped object glittering silver and blue in the living room (I’ve always had a live tree, but this year beggars in a 90% Buddhist country can’t be choosers and I got my (Xmas Decoration, “Giam Gia!”) from the leprous, emaciated male-model Santa mannequin with the cotton candy beard taped on.  I could swear he winked.
    So, with the wind and now the rain tapping the windows, and the pinion incense burning in the room, and my cup of Ca Phe Sua (Java from Java) it feels like Christmas. Could just as well be a snowstorm outside with this grey light and cool draft.

    Last night two students and their families and I gathered for a fine, hot Indian meal at Tandoor (I had my favorite Goa Fish Curry) in the Old District and I wandered for an hour through the crowds for the Midnight Mass.  On the East side of Ho Hoan Kiem (the beautiful lake in the middle of the downtown) was a massive sound stage filling the choked streets with lights and performers and fender-to-fender, front-wheel-to-tail-pipe motorbikes loaded with families and couples.  On the West side of the lake and a block back sits the Cathedral of Saint Joseph, of the arch-diocese of Hanoi: a very Christmas-oriented church.  Many of the roughly 5% of the population of the Red River Delta who are Roman Catholic Christians gathered in, and around, the Gothic-Revival Cathedral, the Place and the surrounding glittering streets and alleys of this handsome, golden French Colonial neighborhood to celebrate. The evening ended with lights off on the sound stage and doors closed in the Cathedral. And streets intimately shared by hundreds of thousands of people heading out of the center.  Miraculously I found a cab and made it home shortly after midnight. And slept deeply and joyfully.

    I can see into the future, but only twelve hours.  Looking good.  Have a  fine fresh, lively, green spirit-blown, Christmas.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Very Brief Update on Thanksgiving

If I don't write something today, I will have missed the whole, eventful month of November.  So this entry is about lost opportunities.  Not opportunities to do, just opportunities to blog.  With a little luck I'll be able to catch you up over the next few weeks on what's been going on.

The short version is that I've traveled in the mountains--Sa Pa and Lao Cai on the China border--and the sea--Ha Long Bay, which lives up to it's reputation--and all over the Red River Delta to small towns and villages specializing in wood carving and lacquer and embroidery.  I've meditated on the difficulties of learning this beautiful language.  I've thought about food.

And I've struggled with the aftermath of pink eye which has made it hard to read at night and by artificial light and the slow abating of dysentery which has had me re-thinking food.

It's all led up to Thanksgiving which we, SYA, celebrated as a community with a traditional US meal of turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, and apple and pumpkin pies that we made at a cooking party in my apartment with two toaster ovens (the pies, that is--the meal was in the upper room of the stylish Baci Cafe).  The upshot was a wonderful meal that our Vietnamese guests found very strange and sometimes distasteful.  As we occasionally find the food, some of the food, here.

And, by the way, it turns out Hollandaise Sauce is really good on mashed potatoes.  Just so you know. We forgot the gravy.

Maybe I've re jump-started myself.  Maybe I'll keep up with this.  Lord knows I have plenty of news.  I'll try to tell these stories as stories.

But you need to know I'm very thankful.  Deeply.  Broadly.  To have the privilege of being in Viet Nam, to be the guest of these wonderful people, to be the colleagues of Vuong, Lisa, Ted, Amy, Lan, Phuc, Thuy, and Giang.  To be the teachers of these privileged but not entitled students.  To eat this fabulous food.  To see this astonishing country at something like a leisurely pace.  For my children and grandson.  For my partner who's already visited once and is coming in a few weeks despite getting sick the first time.  For email. For friends like Susan and Karen and Sujan.  For Skype.

Even for Facebook.

From Hanoi with love.

Monday, October 18, 2010

Some Images from the Wordpress Posts





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Backposts from Wordpress (September)

AND YOUR SATURDAY post, 9/6
          Saturday while I waited for Ted and Lisa to arrive and snatch me into their cab, I watched two women in mollusk hats and pajamas go at an abandoned box spring with knives.  They attacked with the efficiency of a butcher on a duck.  They sliced off the top in a matter of seconds, and rolled it up.  They removed the stuffing into a neat pile, then they carefully filleted the metal springs and sorted out the wood.  One woman finished rolling up the fabric and the second rode off on her bicycle with the metal spring frame rolled into a tight, full-sized mattress-width bundle about the diameter of a sleeping bag on the back of her rusty bike.  About twenty minutes later we passed her in our cab, north towards Ho Tay, on our way to Cho Buoi (I remember it by thinking Chore Boy, which is a mispronunciation but an effective mnemonic)(Cho means market).
          We arrived at the market a few minutes early, in time to do a quick reconnaissance before Thay Vuong got there.  I’d thought he said there were plants upstairs so, after a quick run through the downstairs which has a big variety of things but not much foodstuffs, we went upstairs where very eager cubicle ladies grabbed my arm–and one my ass (they had to be very eager)–to point to knit shirts with collars which I don’t like.  They weren’t deterred by my silk Hawaiian shirt–they were determined to improve my taste but I was having none of it.  While Thay Ted tried on what I think are counterfeit Chaco sandals (he’s at least six four and, well, let’s just say that you don’t see a lot of shoes in Hanoi in just-his-size) I went to the two upper floors.  The second floor was mostly clothing save for the woman with the vat of writhing, snapping, four inch (I have to start thinking in centimeters) crayfish.  They were translucent and angry but they stayed in the vat because, I can only assume, that they knew that waiting to be cooked was better than waiting for the wrath of this serious-faced businesswoman.
          At Chore Boy market (which is a redundancy as “cho” means “market,” but I can’t resist) the ground floor is a great variety of basic market fare.  The second floor is a maze of cagey cubicles with inexpensive clothing.  The third floor (in Vietnam there is not compulsion to a Western sense of order and that kind of colonial claptrap) were large floors of upscale furniture.  And of course, up a network of criss-crossing stairs worthy of Piranesi, on the top floor are...squatters.  Some clearly employed with the constant demolition and reconstruction that goes on  many top floors.  Workmen live at the site (saves on the commute) and a few other squatters (they aren’t homeless–this is their home) camp up there with privacy tarps and a suburban view above the traffic of the streets and market.

          We met Thay Vuong pretty much on time at the corner of Duong Buoi and Duong Hoang Hoa which specializes, as many streets in Hanoi are wont to do.  Its particular specialty is plants–primarily houseplants.  It’s sub-specialties are plant pots, fish to have swim in the water around the roots in the pots,  and , especially, bonsai which you can get just started to what must be hundreds of years old and cost many more millions of dong than we can afford.  The hanging, carnivorous pitcher plants are particularly captivating, reminding me of my Auntie Florence Towns’s New England version that she potted from a swamp on Cranberry Island for her house in Holbrook.  Ted was there to get planting pots and potting soil and seedlings for his environmental science class.  Lisa and Vuong and I were there to browse.  But you really can’t browse without an adventure here, as we turned the corner into Banzai Street (as I think we’re coming to think of it) a very angry woman attacked another cowering woman with a meat cleaver.  Mrs. Cleaver was, apparently, a purveyor of side-walk food.  Mrs. Cower, well, we don’t know. She appeared to be trying to make peace, but, of course, Mrs. Cleaver had a, uh, cleaver.  Even Vuong couldn’t make sense of it.  Assorted men attempted to restrain and make peace as well.  We kept our distance and then moved on.  The tiny, crowded little shop fronts were stuffed with standing and hanging plants, usually with a merchant seated in the midst like a character from a Douanier Rousseau painting.  They would open up away from the street in the back to multi-leveled decks and yards with the more cherished plants like the bonsai Ficus, pine, banyan, and even cycad palm , which I would never have imagined you could adapt to bonsai.  Many plants–what I remember most clearly and with most desire was the lemon grass–simply lay roots free of soil (what’s the name for this?) in small bundles which you could then plant in the soil and potting of your liking.  It’s not the first place in Hanoi we’ve described to ourselves as Diagon-alley, but it’s one of my favorites, filled with plants, shaded by trees, and crowded with mopeds with multiple six foot plants and what had to be really valuable bonsai stacked and strapped to the back of the seat.  Many day to day actions in Hanoi are a delicate, sometimes bold, balance of practice, daring, skill, courage, and fatalism that I can barely begin to emulate.

          This was, of course, all before lunch.  In the afternoon we went on to pick up students who amazing converged in time and went off to furthest Southwest Hanoi to the puppet mongers house where we talked puppets, made nem, ate nem, and then went on to our box seats at the Hanoi Opera House to see the opening of the second annual Hanoi festival of puppeteering.  On the front steps we were welcomed by klieg lights, spotlights, and, accompanied by what sounded like Balkan dance music with Big Beat bass...you guessed it, Donald Duck and the Seven Dwarves who danced a what has to be the unique Donald-Duck-and-the-Seven-Dwarves Dance.  Not at all what you’d expect.  This was followed by a pair of very fast dragon dance teams that were wonderful in this, Thang Long, City of the Ascending Dragon.
Inside from our boxes we watched the opening ceremonies and the first two puppeteer performances.  These were a mysterious, semi-abstract performance heavy on set transformation, a combination of life-sized marionettes, LED lights and brilliant, fluorescing effects.  The second was epic rendition of The Ugly Duckling complete with–remember, this is Viet Nam–a kindly, jolly, bearded, skinny peasant codger and his hard-headed, gimlet-eyed, saggy-breasted wife-with-a-cleaver (I'm constantly astonished by these emerging themes) who was eager to slice and dice said duckling.  Duck got away and, in the presence of swans, abruptly transformed in a shower of glitter, to a swan who embraced his mother-swan-in-a-babushka.

          We, ten kids and five teachers, left the hall howling with children about 9:30 at intermission and climbed back into our van to deliver our kids, one-by-one to their host homes.  This process was complicated by our fatigue, incomplete addresses, the kids’ faulty memories of locations which at night were barely recognizable, and a driver who seemed not really to know this vast, complex city like the back of his hand.  He used his horn a lot, spent a lot of time in the on-coming lane (hardly unsual here), and stopped in the middle of intersections (more space) to get out and ask sketchy folk in the shadows for the directions.  The process seemed to take about fifteen minutes per kid delivery and I made it home about midnight.  I slept well, thank you.

THE BRONZE AGE (But I Get Ahead of Myself) - post 9-12-10
          Five Thirty seemed early to be heading out the door.  I rode on a Xe Om (Taxi Motorbike–the Twenty First century’s answer to the rickshaw) to be sure to be on time for the bus.  I, for about the same cost as a cab, arrived on time at school with an eye full of grit and a bad attitude.  I think it was the fourth time in my life I’d been on a motorbike of any sort--this one is somewhere between a Moped and a Harley.  Though more towards the Moped side of the spectrum, it  was enough still to scare me sensible on Hanoi’s mean streets.  It was just as well that my first trial XeOm-ing was less than zooming and well before rush hour.
Our goal was the casting of a bronze bell at a Buddhist temple, the Chua Linh Pagoda, (also a redundancy, “chua” means pagoda--which doesn’t mean a odd-storied hexagonal tower as it does everywher else in Asia) southwest of Hanoi where the red river delta bursts up into fountains of limestone karst.  According to everyone we talked with, and everyone there, this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience.  Bells don’t wear out very frequently, when you stop to think about it.  For that matter, here, they’re not rung all that hard, nor so often.  They don’t announce victory.  They call to prayer.  We arrived to a serious party.  Shaved-headed monks and nuns in coarse brown mingled with brothers in saffron robes, followers in brown ao-dais and suits.  Some groups fo women wore deep purple.  Everyone else wore brilliant colors.  And of course we were surrounded by the ever present vibrating red of laquer and gold and the ever-present fragrance of sandalwood joss sticks and cones burning in glazed pots of ash and sand.  The monks and nuns chanted in rhythms that the young abbot kept on a red barrel-drum and a head-sized wooden drum shaped like a European cow bell.
          Reverence inside the temple echoed the chanting out front and all the while bellowing workmen in rubber flip flops piled metal objects on tops of what looked like burning barrels fanned by bellows.  The materials ranged from copper wire and pipe to aluminum tubing, silver and gold jewelry donated by visitors on their way into the temple, and what looked like heaps of random scavenged metal building materials.  The emphasis was on copper, though, and the fire gleamed green and orange as it heated up and the metal heaped on top slowly melted down into the barrels which were made of, it turned out ceramic and stone.  All the while workmen shoveled slag off the top with slowly melting shovels, in a process tightly rung by beautiful old women, children with shaved heads, smoking village men, curious teen-agers.  All came together, huddled in  the humid  air around the fiery furnaces.
While tiny women in ao dais served tea ten times as strong as Red Bull.
While local men served Smirnoff vodka and rice wine.
While friendly women stared at us, amused and curious at our tall women and taller men, and insisted we eat basketsfull of soy products shaped into counterfeit meat products in the shade behind the temple by a well full of turtles.  It was delicious.  It was convivial.  It was chaotic.  And the increasingly joyful men insisted on sharing shots of home made rice spirit.  The only thing that saved me was the caffeine in the pale green tea.  This was definitely not sherry hour at the Church of the Advent.
          This was the first time so far that I’ve noticed in Viet Nam any effort at all to disguise the sources of food.  After amazingly delicious heaps of soy chicken legs (the bone was a stock of lemongrass) and soy ribs (the fat was tofu) I wandered around to the front to watch the men in plastic flip flops with the cigarettes hanging out of their mouths tamp the last metal into the large mold and carry the molten bronze to two smaller clay bell frames  and pour the half ton of metal into spouts at the top from a frame of bamboo.  Don’t tell OSHA, but miraculously everything turned out OK.  The bells will be removed from the molds and polished for the first trial peel next Saturday.  I’ll let you know.  The whole scene could have taken place in the bronze age.  Which, of course, it sort of was.  There was clay, bamboo, green fire, recycled jewelry.  There was an automotive framework and electric bellows.  But the purpose was to be neither bronze age or twentieth century, not to recycle, but to cycle what was available.

           As the bells cooled, we moved on to Chu Thai/Long, the home town of water-puppetry, my first karst towers and, the next day down the Song Hong for a bike ride through diked and irrigated farms, water buffalo, and a pottery village (the villages specialize like the streets in Hanoi...but I get ahead of myself.

IT'S NOT ALL TRANSCENDENTAL LACQUER AND GOLD

Here are five more reviews I wrote for the New Hanoian--a fine website for new arrivals in this part of the world-- yesterday and today:

The Garden (an upscale shopping mall over near where Ted and Lisa live:
          Months since the last review and not much has changed. Star Fitness on the fourth floor opened and is the star. The Japanese restaurant in the fourth floor food court is still the best bet for good food at a reasonable price.
          I'm baffled how they stay open. The mall is generally empty. Like a ghost town empty. (Which has its own haunted charm, I guess.) Employees gaze expectantly into the void. There's probably at most a 75% occupancy. The specialties are weighted to high priced watches and jewelry on the first floor, and as you move up clothing and sporting clothing, and furniture along with the requisite massaging chair store with the panicked looking guy strapped in for the ride while five or six sales people lean waaaaaay into his personal space. The book store no long has many English titles that I could find. I blithely strolled into the Levi's store where the uncomfortable-looking employees showed me their largest fat jeans. 32 waist. It's been a while, unfortunately.
          Perhaps the most disturbing news is that last week end the curtain advertising the cineplex opening soon came down to reveal an acre of rubble and went back up the next day to advertise a gaming center. Also opening soon.
          On the bright side, I like the paper-art/lanterns illuminating the central five story court. The little Big C is well-stocked, never crowded and pretty friendly and redolent of Durian from the moment you enter, reminding you of where you are. In front of the little Big C there are American-style donuts with great names like Barbarian and Snowling.
          But the zealous guards kept shooing us away from the fountain. I must have looked like I was about to toss impulse-purchased unnecessary plastic objects in. They clearly don't have enough to do.

Star Fitness (my health club, adjacent to The Garden Shopping Mall)

          Star Fitness is my one guilty pleasure in Hanoi. The only one I'll be writing about here. It's owned, I believe, by a Westerner and seems pitched for Westerners. Having said that, I and my friend and colleague have always been the sole Westerners there. If there's been anyone else at all, they've been very fit local people, and often much fitter than, well, I'll say me. They're an excellent example.
          Star Fitness opened about a month ago. It's expensive, but in the same range as the other fitness centers I've scoped out in town. I got a year's membership--the best deal and the easiest to understand with no joining fee.
          The place is the nicest place of this kind I've ever been to. I've used mostly university and community centers except for a five year stint at a Bally's back a while. This is hands down the most luxurious, cleanest, friendliest of this kind of place I've ever been to. The staff speaks English--in some cases fluently enough to make fun of my very casual approach to fitness.
          The showers, with their horizontal courses of narrow, colored glass tile, frosted glass doors, and the rain shower heads are, well, way cool.
          I've used all the facilities now except for the classes: pool, cardio, weight machines, free weights, showers, spa, cold plunge. All are incredibly clean, beautifully designed, very high quality.
Of course the place has only been open for a month, but if anything the almost frenetic cleaning and friendliness are my only issues. Both are so persistent as to verge on the intrusive.
          The pool is NOT Olympic sized but it feels more than half that size to me. I've generally had it to myself and had no trouble swimming laps though I'm getting a lot of practice on my kick turns. I'd like to see the water a little clearer, but it seems perfectly clean. And it's awfully nice to have teak lounges on which to read in the sun four stories above the traffic in a Roman peristyle--if you get there before noon when the sun sets behind The Manor. Before noon the pool is almost always empty, save me. Late afternoons can get a little populated with kids from the Manor, next door, which also uses the pool. But it's never been crowded and the Kindle hasn't gotten splashed once. It also has an infinity edge that drains into the elevator lobby of the apartment building. Kind of too bad as a lost opportunity to have the pool open into the vista that is My Dinh.

Family Medical Practice (I take the Red Eye):
          I woke up Tuesday morning with my eyes swollen shut and you don't want to know any further details. I took a cab to Family Practice, filled out the requisite forms, declined to see the ophthalmologist who would be in twelve hours later, saw the doctor (who didn't introduce himself but I could tell by the stethoscope), got asked the right questions, got two prescriptions, paid my 75$ bill, got driven home by a cab they summoned--he shuddered, looked quickly away when he saw my eyes and tried, I think, not to breathe. I was back in my door by 9AM. Try that in the States.
          My eyes are getting better, thank you. And, yes, I've stayed in.
          I'd been there once before with a student who had an intestinal ailment. In three hours they had her on two hours of IV, tested, diagnosed, medicated (all correctly judging by the outcome) and out the door for a few hundred dollars. I'm thinking they're fast, efficient, reasonably accurate, reasonably friendly (in a cool, businesslike sort of way) and communicate with foreigners in friendly English and Hebrew and French that I've witnessed.

Uma (Furniture and Housewares):
          Newman's right--this is Hanoikea. Smaller, friendlier, less crowded. And, thank God, with fewer kits that you have to put together yourself. Uma is not quite as proportionately inexpensive as Ikea is in the states. The prices are reasonable, but reasonably high if you've tried any store-front to store-front shopping. Their gear is bright, cheery, vaguely downscale Williams-Sonoma-ish with unusual, for Hanoi, products (candles) and colors (primary other than red and yellow) and patterns (the eye-hurting someone talked about--though I and my friends think of it as more "festive"). The store meanders through about six new store fronts so seems bigger than it is since there's only one entrance at one end.
          I like the staff ("I remember you. You're the old bald one" notwithstanding). They haven't tried to cheat me and they always start phoning a cab when I begin checking out.

So:Da (Light Fare Restaurant)
          So Da is hard to find and out of the way but worth the trip to My Dinh. As it happens my friends and colleagues live two block over, so we go fairly regularly and have found it dependable, cheerful, and nourishing.
          It's worth noting that this is a sandwich restaurant. They make panini-esque sandwiches that are tasty  but not huge. They make (or procure) VERY GOOD, moist and black, chocolate cake served with coffee. The portions are satisfying if you don't have a huge appetite. The food is geared for people who aren't from Asia by an owner who's spent time in the West.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

10-10-10: Hanoi at One Thousand

          This has been a magnificent week:  frustrating, exhilarating, exhausting, energizing...FUN.  Today is the end of the ten day celebration of Hanoi's thousandth birthday.  Founded in 1010 (western calendar), the city is called  both Hanoi (the city inside [the bend in] the river, the Red River) and Thang Long (city of the rising or ascending dragon).  There's no shortage of rivers, water, or dragons in every form, everywhere.  I've only participated in a fraction of the celebration activities as I was ill in the earlier part of the week, gave (GAVE) the SAT to students towards the end, and had to work in the middle.  But I did go to the Kite Festival at My Dinh Square on Wednesday morning, hiked the Millennium Parade on Friday evening, and walked in the Parade this morning, about five kilometers, and then hiked the rest of the way home, another five kilometers.  This evening my friend and colleague, Amy, and I are going to watch the fireworks finale over My Dinh International Stadium from the sixteenth floor balcony of Ted and Lisa (more friends/colleagues).

          There were to have been multiple fireworks displays in multiple venue--including over Hoan Kiem Lake by the old district, one of my favorite places--but the whole supply shipment from China exploded when we left the kite festival Wednesday morning.  There was no cause and effect there.  Just sequence.  You could feel the blast and see the mushroom cloud all over the city.
          The parades (complete dress rehearsal and massive crowds on Thursday night AND the 10-10-10 Millennium Parade today) were long, with lots of waiting, but a blast.  I met hundreds of expats from Laos, Thailand, Chile, Australia, Ireland, even Belarus.  And I think I shook the hands or high-fived  with ten thousand enthusiastic, welcoming Vietnamese.  My hand is still tingling.  And I still have chills, despite the humidity, after marching by Ho Chi Minh's Mausoleum where, on one side, were stands crowded with the military and political leaders of Viet Nam and, on the other, were a vast marching band and hundreds of massive traditional, thunderous, Trang Sam drums.  There are advantages to living in a relatively compact, moderate sized (if you can call four million people moderate) capital city.

          One of the things that's been rough this week is transportation.  Compact as the core of the city is, and though I walked home from downtown (for this first time) this morning, it's not easy to get across the city on foot.  The distances are a little too great from where I live here.  But the more pressing problem this week was the traffic.  Everybody wanted to go everywhere.  Every taxi I saw was full.  Every bus, jam-packed, sailed by every stop at which I waited.  And there were moments when crossing the street alternated the nervous crab walk of moving through the quickly moving tangle of motorbikes and cement trucks, buses and cars, and coming to a complete standstill in the middle of a major intersection.  More than once I found myself hemmed in by motorbikes.  Once a young woman ran into my leg with the perpetual "OY!" and smile.  When she saw my advanced age, she amended to "Ong, OY!"  It's always nice to be shown respect when someone hits you with a motorbike.   "Ong" means something like "grandfather."  Accurate, but limited.






         I found the utlimate short cut to work Friday morning, cutting through alleys.  I'll write about that in the next couple of days.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Beer=Bia

These are two reviews I posted on The New Hanoian two of beer halls near my house.

White House Bia Hoi

This place is pretty great. Not exceptional for Bia Hoi and the food is moderately priced to expensive. But the salads are very good. And this is one of the most congenial Bia Hoi places I've been to.

To start with, the place is, architecturally speaking, just so...white. It's not an architectural masterpiece, but it's of architectural interest with random Modernist white walls, big windows, and towers and portals worthy of Corbusier complete with grand staircases that go...up. It's just not what you'd expect.

The staff speaks no English and the menu makes no concessions. It's encyclopedic. Page after page of multiple entries for each animal source including the usual sidewalk suspects but things like multiple da dieu recipes, too. And much, much more. The staff is very friendly and tries to urge the most expensive thing on the menu. In fact they did bring the most expensive thing on the menu--stomach sized at around 300,000 VND but we rejected it. I still don't know what it was: big, brown, like a loaf of peasant rye or some disturbing animal product or by-product, cracked across the top, filled with who knows what. We didn't order it so we sent it back to their disappointment.

Our first successful ordering strategy was to wander from table to table with our waiter, toasting the table and pointing to what we wanted. It worked really well there (it doesn't always). I've eaten there several times now with western and Vietnamese friends and have never had a bad meal and always had good beer or vodka. And I've met a lot of interesting people from the universities nearby or the rua across the street, all thoroughly lubricated and friendly.

The green banana and papaya salad is, truly, excellent.

Cientos

The two previous reviews are accurate as far as they go. It's just that they're reviewing this place as though it were a Bia Hoi or a restaurant. And in my recent experience, people who criticize people in Cau Giay because they're too lazy to go out of their own neighborhood just don't want to leave Hoan Kiem. It's nice to stay in your neighborhood sometimes.

The food is OK. Not great, not bad. The beer is OK. Not great, and, I would argue, not bad. It's moderately expensive.

But imagine yourself in a parallel universe where somehow a 1920s Czechoslovakian spa with it's carry-Bozart Architecture manque is superimposed on a Munich Biergarten and injected into a Vietnamese karaoke hall with all the space they need.

What you get is a massive stage with glittering curtains and backdrop worthy of Star Wars (maybe just Star Trek), volume that can carry across the cosmos, moderately to quite talented singers in gender appropriate ao dais and lounge-lizard uniforms competing with pre-recorded music. All for the exclusive entertainment of the twenty patrons bellowing across their tables and competing with the pre-recorded music. With hectares of empty tables in between them for privacy.

It's really kind of fun. And you can have a very private conversation in between the very short sets. And it's a hell of a lot cheaper than Beaulieu or the Press Club, and, to be fair, on par with prices at a big Bia Hoi. WITH Doric Columns AND atmosphere worthy of Fellini.

Early on, when I was too exhausted to leave my neighborhood for dinner, four of us went there for dinner and menu pointed. We got French Fries, boiled potatoes, and a potato salad made with two parts mayonnaise to one part potatoes to one part cucumber. It was actually really good all mixed together, if a little starchy.