But today the temp is around 17 degrees and rising (upper sixties) and for the first time in a couple months the gray smog contains moisture--like it actually is partly fog--and there's been a light rain, washing the dust off things and giving body to the air. It actually felt fresh, like an April (a nice April) in New England and the greens were green again. I walked out the back of my building--in itself unusual--they drop the grate between sunrise and sunset--and out my tree lined street to cross Nguyen Phong Sac--the big North/South street in my part of town. It's a divided boulevard with as many lanes in each direction as about twenty motorbikes can fit abreast, though it's rarely full and one of the less busy streets in Cao Giay, the university district where I live. (Cao Giay street is another story, a cross street that offers another, noisier route to school.)
I step out into traffic and, alert and steady, move towards the west side as the flow of motorbikes parts around me, sometimes honking with the cars who slow. I only stop for trucks and buses. They have louder horns and slower braking reflexes. On the other side I duck around the huge white White House Bia Hoi (beer hall), through a gas station with a hundred motorbikes lined up, and down a quiet alley.
I pass under a pergola of tangled, bunched power lines dripping with flowering vines and fruit reddening from green to carrot orange, past head-high blank, staring walls shielding the narrow (one room wide), three- four- five-story houses and covered with the stenciled phone numbers like license-plate numbers advertising anything from wall-repair to baby-sitting.
Some walls enclose strictly utilitarian space for a couple of motorbikes abreast. Others are exuberant with palms and bananas and dead-looking vines that trace the corner of a house to explode into blooms covering a fifth floor balcony. I pass by some homes tightly locked up while others have the front grates wide open and the family sitting in a combination garage-sitting-receiving room eating chao (rice porridge) or pho ga (chicken/rice-noodle soup) for breakfast on shared platform beds and watching the morning shows on TV.
Suddenly I emerge into an opening in the maze of alleys and shuffle into a hidden morning market without a name. It's the chief market for the neighborhood (I pass through another one hard by the university complex) and I pass women pulling carts of vegetables, noodles, chicken.
There are people specializing in seasonal fruit. Used clothing in heaps. Vegetables most of which I can't identify. Many of the women ride into town from the outskirts of the city in their conical hats and panniers bigger than the bicycle filled with produce. There are pails and pans and baskets of live fish.
Down the slight slope towards the greyish-purple creek that bounds the market on the south. Just above the creek are a group of butchers who slaughter chickens and other small animals in metal cones, cool and efficient, and later sweep the offal and feathers into the creek. Most speak only Vietnamese, but I chat in my quickly exhausted French some mornings when I'm not in a rush.
Moving on into other alleys I make my way west. I exchange smiles with the two girls who are always out on the side alley washing vegetables and meat and dishes and an occasional baby at the thin hydrant that rises out of the sidewalk by their pho stand. Then I stride out into the minor, more pedestrian street, Pham Van Truong. At the corner is what I like to think of as an urban spring. Clear water burbles up through a crack in the side walk and runs fifty meters or so down the gutter into a meter long hole (with a palm branch sticking up out of it to warn unwary cyclists and pedestrians). I pass the gate house guards of a large police station and carefully don't smile as one bounces as though he were playing Dance, Dance Revolution, a go go boy in a sentry box, to the (VERY LOUD) music from a women's clothing store diagonally across the street. I don't want him to notice that I notice. I don't want to embarrass him. But he adds a little bounce to my step.
I pass the end of the Cho Xanh (the green market which now is mainly inexpensive clothing and household stuff for students in the neighborhood) and duck into an alley on the right between a sandal store and a fruit vendor piled high with green oranges, chom chom (rambutan), green mangoes, carved tiny pineapples the size of softballs, dark green watermelons the size of pineapples, grapes, and whatever else is in season within a day's reach bicycle or moto bi. I cut through the alley through sandwich stands (selling scrambled egg on baguettes, or disturbingly colored sausages--also on baguettes) through a gate at what looks like the dead end of the alley.
I side step over the low grate that prevents motorbike-through-traffic and into the campus of the Dai Hocs, the national universities of Hanoi. I wind by a couple more big holes in the pavement or sidewalk, sometimes with palm, sometimes with a dead almond tree branch sticking up a few feet, and turn into my home stretch. I pass the School of Physical Education with it's row of mature royal palms. I've always been in love with royal palms since my high school days when, at Hampden DuBose Academy we had the furthest-north-royal palm in Florida on the sloping lawn between Ewell Hall, the grand girl's dorm, and Lake Margaret. Anyway. That one's long gone with a freeze that also killed the citrus orchards there. These are glorious, gray columns. On the other side of the street sixty or so people of all different ages and genders play volleyball on concrete. It's the new moon, so as I stroll pass the walled Chua Chua (I think it means the Holy Pagoda--"chua," with one tone, anyway, means pagoda in Viet Nam), the gates are opened wide and the courtyard in front of the pagoda are crowded with students buying incense joss sticks, Choco pies, Custa cakes, and fruit to
offer on the altar inside.
Running a little late, I pass by (though I want some joss sticks for home--only Buddha could like Choco pies and Custa cakes)and wind into the gate of the French Department. Phap. Built in the eighties by the French (Phap) it's kind of a Frank Lloyd Wright-manque fortress with deep, irregular rectangular pools filled with water during some of the year and magnificent lilies and lotus.
Now they're not filled with much but a few feet of jade-green (but not in a nice way) still (also not in a nice way) water which appears to be the consistency of tapioca. I step around the narrow edge of the pool towards my building. I can see the lights in the classrooms off the open mezzanine upstairs. I turn right and step into an alcove which is the only entrance to the building on this side--some of us have to turn sideways to get through, but it all depends on your build, turn left and wind up the stairs. At the top I try (usually a couple of times because it can't read my damp thumb pad) to open the gate with the fingerprint reader and unload into my chair and start up my computer in sunny jalousied office I share with the other faculty.
Class starts in half an hour. Graham Greene. And writing assignments.
This is the best writing you have done yet.
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