Rustico

I'm back in the good ol' Transit Lounge in Taipei, Taiwan's international airport.  This is the conversation between me and an airport employee who was waiting for me when I got off the flight.
"Mary?"
"Yeeeessss?"
"You are flying to LAX?"
"Yeeeesssss?"
"Please follow me."
"Okayyyy."
I was getting nervous, but apparently the fog here has been pretty bad the last couple days and they're trying to put me on an earlier flight, so I'd leave in three hours instead of eight.  That's perfectly fine with me.  I was going to attempt to venture out into the city, but transportation was proving a serious problem, and I wouldn't have had but a couple hours of daylight anyway.  I was up till 2:30am packing and blogging and doing a million last-minute things.  Waking up at eight this morning was surprisingly easy.  As I said in yesterday's post, I wasn't really ready to leave and slept restlessly as a result.


But my last day in Vietnam, though somewhat rustic, was a really great way to spend what little time I had left.  Kyle and I started off bright and early with a Friends of Vietnam Heritage excursion to an incense village, Doc La, southeast of Hanoi.  Though not particularly well-organized, it was neat to see (and smell and inhale) incense sticks being made by the thousands, both by machine and by hand.  Ninety percent of the village is involved in making incense, mostly for Buddhist and ancestor worship but also for use in Catholic churches.

Un-incensed sticks drying in these beautiful "bouquets."

This is just from one shop, presumably made just the day before.

Preparing cinnamon to put into the incense mixture that covers the sticks.

Women covering the sticks by hand. It was crazy dusty, and you just know working in this industry can't be good for their health. The process in shown in the video below.

Carrying the now-covered sticks out to dry.

Incense goop that goes in the machine in the video below and squirts out incense-covered sticks.

This town also makes the spiral, conical incense. It's just more spiral than cone at this stage.

This guy is screen-printing little plastic bags to hold the incense sticks.

This lady, from whom we bought, is speedily wrapping handfuls of incense in paper.

This village is apparently doing well for itself, because it's pagoda is surprisingly new, large and decorated.

We went with Aussie Sue and Aussie David. All of us enjoyed the trip, but were underwhelmed by the organization. Still, we definitely managed to enjoy ourselves, if only by complaining about the conditions. ;)

My last STUPAS!

Our next stop of the day was the Hanoi Museum, opened in October 2010 as part of Hanoi's 1000 Year Anniversary celebrations.  The building's pretty cool: an upside down pyramid made of glass.  Inside was another story.  Kyle, Roman, Aussie Sue and Aussie David could all tell, without any archaeology or museum experience, that this place was desperately lacking in presentation, security and overall visitor experience.  I was going crazy in a there-are-so-many-things-so-very-wrong-my-head-is-about-to-explode kind of way.  Extension cords all over the floor partially covered in just enough tape to keep people from tripping; exposed wires; elevator music being pumped through speakers on the first floor and wafting up the next three; misspelled descriptions; a general lack of signage to indicate the theme of the area into which you were walking; ripped display case backgrounds; large objects haphazardly displayed on the ground with no case, cording and stanchions, or guards who yell at people who touch them (though I was sorely tempted to do their job for them, Amy-style).  Kyle and I kept playing guess-the-theme-of-this-series-of-apparently-randomly-put-together-set-of-cases.  It was torturous.  I was in literal physical and mental pain for the two hours we toured the facility.  I accumulated some visual evidence to support my case.

Looks great from outside, right?

These canoes had a sign in Vietnamese saying "Do not touch." that even I could decipher. I watched at least half a dozen people touch them, each time wanting to slap their hands away and yell "Don't touch wooden objects, asshat!" because the guard just stood there and watched them do it. :(

Wow. Thanks for counting the objects for us. Also, thanks for not bothering to tell us what the objects are or where they were found. It's not like we come to museums to learn things. You really understand your demographic.

What a sophisticated security precaution. US museums could learn a thing or two.

Hey! I've never seen a "cloeection" before! Cool!

I'm so glad they left this pink styrofoam pedestal visible for visitors to see. It really helps you visualize the object in its original atmosphere.

No sign. Don't know if they were putting these together or if they fell down.

What a pretty vase...unsuccessfully hiding some exposed wires...

"Hey! This thing looks cool! I wonder what it does?" I'm still wondering what it does. :/

I almost ran into the pot on the left because 1. I was looking at the giant palanquin next to it and B. It never occurred to me that there would be precious objects just placed on the floor with no security measures.

This English is not English.

What a cool soil sample...sharing a case with a dead fly...

This broke my heart. This bronze drum has bronze disease causing the bronze to corrode. It will eventually be completely eaten away. This drum was sitting in the open air with no humidity-controlled case. :(

The really tragic part is that the museum had a beautiful and extensive collection that, if displayed in an atmosphere that resembled anything close to decent, would have made for a great experience and a wonderful representation of national pride.  Kyle told me to think of the museum as Vietnam's healthcare system, and then I would have an understanding of how he feels about work everyday.  Poor guy.

Pot found at a shipwreck with coral still attached.

Also from a shipwreck with shell attached.

Lime pots. They hold the lime used in betel nut quids.

Remember the one linga left in situ at Angkor? This is a Cham (southern Vietnamese) version with its base that represents the lady equivalent of the linga's phallic shape.

The bottom object looks like some sort of Romulan torture device.

Kyle and some sort of gigantic musical instrument.

The palanquin that drew my attention away from the pots I should have known would be littering the gallery floor.

We finally left the museum and had dinner at the BEST SEAFOOD restaurant west of the International Date Line.  Grilled clams and prawns, blue crab and clam porridge...I asked Roman why we hadn't been eating there every single night since my arrival!  It was messy and we ate on preschool-sized plastic stools in semi-darkness on the edge of Truc Bach Lake, but it was quite possibly the best meal I had in Vietnam and definitely the day's highlight.  I don't know if that was because it was my last night and I was trying to savor every final sensation and experience.  We ended with a trip back to the best creme karamel place in Hanoi for chilled coconuts (they add gelatin to the coconut milk and chill the entire fruit) and, well, creme karamel.  It was (pardon the pun) a perfectly sweet ending to a trip that added unfathomably to my life.

Final YUMS!!!

Promenade

Lonely Planet's guide to Vietnam includes a one-page walking tour of the Old Quarter, located near Hoan Kiem Lake.  They suggest leaving yourself at least two hours (I fit it into two and half on Wednesday, but only because I was already familiar with about a third of it and didn't feel the need to linger.) to complete the three and a half km (over two miles) walk.  It starts at Ngoc Son Temple on the lake, so I skated by the first couple stops over to Hang Be Street, where I'd perused the long line of shops on Monday looking for things I couldn't live without.

Man, I wish I'd found this map earlier.

My first big stop was Memorial House, No 87 Ma May Street, which entertained many a foreign businessman back in the day.  It was a Chinese merchant's house built at the end of the nineteenth century, and has since undergone renovations to preserve its historical integrity.  Architecturally, it was pretty cool, but its filled with more items for sale than historical artifacts.  It was like having the museum gift shop inside the museum, taking up more room than the exhibits.  Still, for twenty five cents, Memorial House was well worth a stop.

Antique toilet. No joke--I'm going to continue to keep this a potty-humor-free zone.

Well.

Nice little open-air atrium.

I want one so badly now!!!

Silk embroidery station. I picked up a couple whilst shopping Monday. They could be for you!

Next stop was Bach Ma Temple, built in the ninth century.  It's said that the king who established Hanoi as the capital of Vietnam in 1010, Ly Thai To, would pray here while trying to erect the citadel walls.  They kept collapsing, and Bach Ma (White Horse), the spirit of ancient Hanoi, heard his prayers and posed as a workman, helping Ly Thai To finish his building project.  It sits right on bustling Hang Buom Street, traffic rushing past, as well as into and out of, the pagoda.

Prayer-burner that's apparently out of order.

Bach Ma.

I ended the tour back by St. Joseph's cathedral, having worked up an appetite and thirst that I quenched with pizza and beer, tea and lemon cake, the latter at the it coffee shop, Joma.  How much fun to stumble into being hip.

This pizza was about as close to pizza as the tea on the Heart of Gold was to tea. :/

Now this is more like it. London Fog Latte and a lemon bar.

My appetite was alternately worked up and quashed on the streets between the pagoda and St. Joseph's.  Flowers and fresh produce are sold, but so are "fresh" and processed meat of every variety, frequently overpowering any visual and aromatic enjoyment of the latter.  Animals can be found at the huge Dong Xuan Market, with birds, kittens and bunnies wanting to go home with you.  The metallic chung of blacksmiths wafts through the streets, adding auditory stimuli to all the others.

Piglet. :/

In the lower left corner is pickled bamboo root. The woman is shaving the conically shaped root into thin slices.

'Shrooms!

Mats being sold on "Mat Street."

Opened jack fruit, much less imposing than when it's intact.

Hair-don't

Blacksmith.

Herbs on "Herb Street."

For dinner that night, we finally had hotpot--it's a similar concept to cha ca.  You're given a hot-pad on which is a large pot of broth (supersaturated with MSG) into which you add whatever goodies you like.  We got seafood hotpot, so we put in vegges, shrimp, clams, fish and noodles.  There were five of us, and still plenty of food left over.  It's a good meal to have when you're in the mood to socially huddle around a flame (albeit an electronic one).

Look at all that raw goodness.

Hotpot!

The highlight for the day occurred near the end of my walking tour, when I stepped off the Lonely Planet path and into a shop touting to sell ethnic minority handicrafts.  I wasn't super concerned with these items, but my eye had been caught by these funky little statuettes made of soldered bolts, spark plugs, and other small pieces of hardware.  They had some really cool alien-robot-looking guys, a dino-monster or two, and even planes and helicopters.  But I settled on a slick black motorcycle for my nine-year-old cousin, Jake.  I've been desperately trying to find him something besides a t-shirt from Cambodia, and think I hit the mother lode with this one.  It's been difficult, having never been a nine-year-old boy, to find a gift that's not dorky or lame or terribly generic.  But I think this chopper's pretty rad and a good representation of Vietnam without screaming "I'm a souvenir from Vietnam!"

Don't you wish you were Barbie- (or GI Joe-) sized so you could ride this like a badass?!

Thursday, something very exciting happened.  I picked up the dresses I commissioned!  She finished them way faster than expected, and only one quick alteration had to be made, so I brought them home almost a week early.  Roman and I are going to a "country wedding" (not quite sure yet what that entails), and I'm desperately hoping the weather's nice enough for me take my silk dress out for a spin. ;)

It's so shiny and iridescent!!!

That afternoon I volunteered again at the Ethnology Museum (way at the western end of the map above).  I've finally mastered the bus there and back and no longer have to tell the driver where I'm going so he can let me off at the right place.  The street names are all so foreign, it's hard to remember them and between that and the fact the bus windows are always dirty, it's easy to miss your stop.  I've been working on a catalog for a new museum in the Dak Lak province of Vietnam.  It includes pictures of all the objects in the exhibits (The Peoples, Culture, and Long-Standing History) with descriptions and informative sections on everything from everyday life to jewelry to ancient objects to (in great detail) the American War.  The ethnologist, Mrs. Thuong, speaks fluent French (she has a Ph.D. in that subject) and very little English.  She and two French women have translated the Vietnamese into French, while the latter have attempted to translate this into English.  I've been attempting to make sense of this copy of a copy, this fax of a fax, and to relocate all the thoughts that have been lost in translation.  They are very nice women, but some concepts have been difficult to put into proper English while appeasing the particular desires and nuances of the Vietnamese.  It's not the most thrilling or glamorous work, but they dearly need the help, and I'm happy to give it.  My name will even be published in the catalog for the world (or, you know, the handful of people who read such catalogs) to see.  That, and the free tea Mrs. Thuong insists on making every time I volunteer, is enough for me. :)