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.