Day 29 - Not Worth Dying for

The little section of Hanoi we were in was actually quite interesting. It was a pretty old section of the city hence the streets were windy and came back in on themselves in weird and unexpected ways. Dave wanted to try some local beer that was mostly famous for being unbelievably cheap. We wandered around for a while until we found some section of the city that was known to sell it. We sat at a restaurant and had some lunch while Dave drank some of it. I noticed at this restaurant, and in fact at others as well, that once the main lunch period was over the kitchen staff and most of the waiters would come out and push a bunch of the tables together to have their own lunch. I know people who work in restaurants the US eat also but I've never seen them all eating together like that. As we left the restaurant and walked down the street by some amazing stroke of coincidence we saw the person who owned the used book shop we had visited in Hoi An. He was sitting with some other former customer he had recognized having a drink when we walked past. We sat down with him on the street corner bar having some drinks for a while. He told us he had just come up for the day on some sort of legal matter. After sitting with him for a while we kept wandering around the city.

I saw some pretty odd things for sale my favorite though where these sort of funerary plaques that were designed to hold the picture of dead loved ones. The thing though is that they had all sort of stand in pictures and dates on them. The single best one had a picture of Britney Spears in it, along with several saints and a bunch of Vietnamese writing. After that we headed off to see Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. Ho Chi Minh had requested that his body be cremated so of course upon his death they had him preserved, though they apparently have to send his body to Russia for three months a year for maintenance, and built him an enormous mausoleum. I've never been quite sure why Communist countries like to have their leads dead bodies on display, especially when the leaders tend to request that they not do this. One person suggested to me that it might be because without a state religion the leader sort of take the place of a God as a symbol to be revered. The entrance to the mausoleum area was pretty far from the actual entrance to allow for about five security check points. Mostly it seemed they just wanted to make sure that you didn't have a camera. Just because Ho Chi Minh's body is a tourist attraction is no reason to acknowledge that it is a tourist attraction.

After that we walked in a double file line for a few hundred yards until we came to the entrance to the actual mausoleum. We had to wait there for a bit because it seemed some VIP was coming through, though no one important enough that I would recognize him. When we finally got in we walked through a couple of long hallways and up some stairs past stone faced guards until we came to the main room. The place was all actually quite cold and the room with his body was the coldest. The body was in a area separated off from the rest of the room by what I can best describe as a mote with a number of guards in it. There were also a few other guards in the room looking carefully over everyone as if some one was going to try to steal his body. People moved very quickly through the room so I probably was in there for less than two minutes. The body itself was just laid out in a sort of glass tomb. It essentially looked like wax. Now I have nothing to compare the body of a person dead for close to 50 years to so I don't know how good he should have looked. Honestly with the look I got he very well could have been manufactured by Madame Tussauds, but judging from some of the wax figures I saw at the tunnels they're not good enough at making wax figures to pull this off.

If it sounds like I'm treating this like an attraction at Disney World, it because I am. I suppose you could say something about honoring a leader or some such, but the whole place just has an otherworldly aura. No matter how serious you try to make it displaying the body of a person whose been dead for half a century is always going to be closer to haunted house than museum. It was just creepy. Hell, I even think wakes were they display the bodies are creepy and they haven't been dead nearly as long. Nearby there was the was an old French estate that had been taken over by the Communists and used as a sort of presidential house for a while. Ho Chi Minh himself though had lived in a small house nearby in what can only be described as a good PR move. We looked around the area, even seeing Ho Chi Minh's garage, with what I presumed were Ho Chi Minh's cars, but very little was explained in any language and we were a little to Ho Chi Minh'd out to go to the Ho Chi Minh museum, though I did get an ice cream that seemed strangely devoid of Ho Chi Minh's picture.

Later in the day we got some tickets to a water puppet show. Water puppets were a sort of puppetry that became popular in rice paddies. Basically they are puppets on long sticks that are supposed to act out various stories. The book was pretty big on it mentioning every place in the whole country you could go to see this, but saying that it was generally best in Hanoi. One thing we read on it talked about how the puppeteers tended to die very young since they would contract all sorts of water borne illnesses. After seeing the show I can simply say that it's an art form not worth dying for. The opening, partially captured on the video below wasn't bad, but the rest was just pretty damn bland. A puppet would come out then another one, they'd dance around for a bit and go away. Even when I knew, from the book, what story they were referencing it was dull. The music was basically uninspired and repetitive. The whole thing also seemed like it would have been much more interesting in if I could have seen the puppeteers at work since I was ofter wondering how exactly they got it to do this or that. Mostly it just seemed reminiscent of things I did with little plastic GI Joes when I was four. The running joke became that if Ken and Dave moved their train they might just be able to squeeze in another water puppet show.



P.S.
Sorry if the video doesn't work YouTube is still blocked in China because, well the Communist Party sees no reason to explain itself to the likes of you, but given that this could go on for a while I posted this anyways. Flickr's been working funny tonight, so who knows if the government is having one of its temper tantrums. Also this is not quite the end there's one more day and a wrap up coming.