This is summer in Hanoi
Posted: April 24, 2012 Filed under: Hanoi, Reflections, The Cart, weather | Tags: Hanoi, heat, hot, summer, weather 2 Comments »
I can end the day with a cold shower but I can’t start with one.
So, this morning, having slept with the air con on most of night, I turned on the heater and enjoyed the warm water. Except that half way through the lights went out – and with it went the fan and the air con.
We’d just bought a rechargeable fan for such an eventuality but it wasn’t worth bothering with this morning. Instead I dried off in unhindered heat and dashed from the house sweating. I cooled off a little on the motorbike trip to work and surprised myself when I got there to find my rush had meant me arriving before quarter past eight.
The power cut was well timed. Today feels like the first proper day of summer. The first day that the weather has genuinely pushed past the upper twenties and solidly into the thirties. As I type this at twenty past six, the thermometer says it’s still 32 degrees.
I’ve become increasingly afraid of the Hanoi summer but I’m not sure why. When I first lived here it didn’t stop me doing anything. In fact life was so fast moving I hardly noticed either its arrival or passing until temperatures hit extremes. But each year I’ve talked myself up about the looming Hanoi summer and the need to escape it.
But I’ve enjoyed today. That dash to work, the blue sky – I even surprised myself by going out in the midday heat for lunch (okay so I went to The Cart instead of getting them to deliver – my wife requires a good excuse before she’ll accept me eating anywhere else). My usual latte was replaced an iced espresso, I called in again on Loan on the way home and had a particularly girly iced jasmine tea with honey and ginger.
Last weekend we packed away all our winter clothes – first leaving them to dry on the roof as they still felt damp. Summer shirts were put in the wash to rid them of the mildewy layer they’d acquired over the summer. My wardrobe looks sparse now.
Already I’m fretting that I need to do some exercise before the heat leaves me unable to put one foot in front of the other without sweating profusely.
This is summer in Hanoi.
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How long can Vietnam keep this up?
Posted: April 9, 2012 Filed under: change, environment, family, Hanoi, News, Reflections | Tags: development, environment, family, growth, Hanoi, pollution 2 Comments »Most of my columns for the Word Magazine can be found online – including this most recent one, a tribute to my colleagues at the British Council.
But a couple have only previously appeared in print. This is one of them…
***
Judging from newsreel footage, back when “all this was bicycles”, Hanoi wasn’t just quiet it was pretty slow moving too.
Not at all surprising when you figure that heat occasionally nudges 40 degrees in the summer. Vietnam doesn’t seem like it was meant to be fast.
But scooters replaced pushbikes and now cars replace scooters. Air con means people can work faster, harder and longer.
Those cars are now blocking streets. To deal with this we’ll soon get more car parks, wider streets and fly overs. Alongside these will be trams and increased public transport. Hanoi is expanding – it needs more housing, more shops.
Hanoi is to become a city made of cities.
My Vietnamese parents in law used to live in the countryside. They now live in the city. They didn’t have to move to achieve this.
Still, for the those with a nostalgia for “their countryside” there are wildlife restaurants. While the kids increasingly pay lip service to green causes, many affluent oldies are still paying top dollar for civet and pangolin. In 2010 Vietnam’s last Javan rhino was shot. No one really believes Vietnam’s tigers and elephants can survive.
Since the end of the American war Vietnam’s population has doubled.
Over the past decade, Vietnam’s carbon dioxide emissions have grown by 136%. That’s faster than any other country on the planet. Over the same period Vietnam’s oil use grew by 82% – beaten only by increases from China and Qatar.
But that’s nothing compared to Vietnam’s electricity use – up a massive 227%.
Meanwhile having hauled themselves out of poverty through sheer hard work, Vietnamese ambition doesn’t show any signs of slowing. Those who had it hard don’t want their kids to suffer like they did. If that means youngsters studying seven days a week then so be it.
Kids won’t go hungry but they will face different kinds of pressures. Simply making it to University isn’t enough. It has to be a foreign University. In the right country.
Meanwhile stats show that by the time kids hit their teens their largest outgoing is paying off debt.
That is something they have to get used to. With Hanoi’s housing bubble not yet burst, real estate loans went up by almost a quarter between 2009 and 2010.
Borrow more. Buy more land. Or dollars. Or even gold.
And if you’ve spent all that money on land, you’re going to want to make the best of it. No point having a three storey house when you could have five. Knock it down, borrow more money and build it up again bigger than ever. Five stories this time. Have your builders work through the weekend to get it done as soon as possible. Make them start early and finish late.
If you find yourself richer in 10 years time, do this again.
Little wonder then that Vietnam has a dust issues – up to 20 or 30 times the recommended limit near building sites. A mere half that on busy city crossroads.
Back to the family – mum and dad both have to go out to work now in order to meet increasing financial commitments. Grandparents are needed to take kids to school.
The golden generation that won wars and survived food shortages are now needed to babysit and do school runs. Mums and dads get back late. Stuck at work then stuck in traffic.
It’s a ride, exhilarating but exhausting, and let’s not forget that these are the good times.
But surely it can’t go on like this.
***
You can download the most recent version of The Word here.
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Three blogs and a flyover
Posted: April 2, 2012 Filed under: Blogs and Bloggers, change, Reflections | Tags: blogging, blogs, change, growth 1 Comment »
Back then, back when blogging was the only social media, well give or take Friends Reunited, the social bit was the links and the comments.
To a certain extent that’s all moved to platforms like Twitter, Facebook and the rest. Most of the interaction now takes place away from the blogs themselves. Does that alter their whole point? A post was written with the comment box beneath it in mind. If the comment box is obsolete does that change the content of the blog?
But links, links are still good. Links are what makes it all go round. Links continue to power Google so we can find all this stuff.
So alongside the extensive blogroll on the right and alongside Vietnam Blogs. Here’s my three most-readable from Vietnam. Two from Hanoi and one from Ho Chi Minh City:
First off Debbie J Clare, sporadic but worth waiting for. Written beautifully.
Secondly, Antidote to Burnout, this is a long standing favourite who I hope we can persuade to blog more. The niche, architecture, specifically modern architecture, works particularly well because as expats we tend to be more impressed by tradition and history. I recall kids at KOTO telling me off for only taking pictures of things they considered old fashioned – ie bicycles, conical hats etc. That said, check out this for a little bit of Old Saigon.
Finally, aimed at the tourist, rather than the expat I do like the Travelfish Hanoi Blog. Again, like the two above it’s written with little comment, neither cooing glee nor tired cynicism. But if you’re thinking of visiting or coming to stay then it’s just about the best introduction I can imagine. Mercifully it avoids CNN GO’s increasingly irritating list format.
I particularly like Travelfish’s Hanoi People section and in particular the interview of Ian Paynton, (he of Oi Gioi Oi fame), particularly his description of last time he left the country when he “thought about Hanoi every day for two years.”
That was me once. Ian is currently working back in the UK and you’d bet on him coming back, not least because he’s become a little bit famous during his absence. No doubt he’s missing Hanoi all over again.
Before he went I had a brief online chat with him while he was chasing me for my Word column. I reminded him that leaving doesn’t mean you can’t come back. Something I am now reminding myself of as I start to cast the net wider as I look for new employment.
And the flyover, the flyover is just a flyover. Snapped on my way to my inlaws on Saturday night. In the West of the city the growth remains incredible. My current employers (I’m working my notice) just opened an English class there aiming to enrol 50 students, now they’re approaching three times that number. I read (a little too gleefully, or is just me?) reports of slowdowns yet the pace of it all seems as frantic as ever (“ These days, Hanoians do not have much to celebrate…”)
To me though, this is how it always was, only more so.
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The Alley
Posted: April 1, 2012 Filed under: Hanoi, ho tay, nghi tam, Reflections | Tags: alley, Hanoi, ho tay, house, houses, nghi tam, spring, tay ho, weddings 2 Comments »
Like a lot of people living in Nghi Tam we don’t have a lake view.
Our home is positioned down a back alley, with a left, a right and another left meaning it’s cut off from most of the noise and all of the breeze.
In our L-shaped cul de sac there’s us, another foreign renter and two homes side by side holding two related Vietnamese families. They are the landlords.
Nothing much goes wrong that they won’t fix immediately. We’re aware that our rent might well be higher if we hadn’t settled so well. My wife counts the landlady as a friend. In the past if we’ve mentioned buying something for the house the landlady has offered to pay.
It’s mercifully quiet, or at least it is by Hanoi standards. We’re still woken up by a rooster on a six second snooze loop. It means the last couple of hours of sleep are troubled. There’s actually two birds, one on the roof and one on the ground floor – effectively covering all basis. There’s no place to hide nor sleep.
The other frequent noise is the teenage son who sings. Really loudly. Constantly. Usually Vietnamese ballads but occasionally, for some reason, Whitney Houston.
I’m saving all my love for yoooo-oooooooooooooh
The last couple of weekends have seen a family wedding. Tables lined the alley and a tarpaulin covered it in case of rain. My motorbike was usually the wrong side of the celebrations. Either I couldn’t leave or return. So I’d normally pass the tables on foot – hallo-ing kids lined up to greet the foreigner.
There was the “do” for the wedding, before that there was the an hoi. Then there was a do for the people who couldn’t make the do. And another for those that couldn’t make that one. Relatives chatted into the evening and were up with the rooster chatting loudly again and ready to depart. The alleyway echoes.
We were invited to the Friday wedding event and my wife attended in my absence with Thuy from the corner shop. I was at work.
In pretty much every sense we live very comfortably here. But soon it will get warm and our air conditioner exhausts will collectively fill the back alley with heat.
Soon I’ll be sweating before I find my way down the alleys to the lake front.
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The Cyclo Diaries
Posted: March 17, 2012 Filed under: koto, Movies, Reflections, Stories, transport, travel | Tags: cyclo, extreme charity, Hanoi, ho chi minh city 1 Comment »
Filmed in 2005, this has been a long time coming but it’s a great watch – at an hour in length it’s worth downloading in advance and sitting down in the evening with a glass of something to take it in.
In short it’s the tale of two Australian tour guides who decide to try and ride a cyclo from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City. The two guys in question are Adam and Marty, and they did the trip to raise money for KOTO, where I happened to be working at the time.
At the time the future of KOTO hung in the balance, we desperately needed new premises for the restaurant and there were quite a few times we didn’t think we’d make it. For the cyclo-ing and the financial assistance Adam and Marty were superheroes to the KOTO kids.
For my part I organised the send off. I also kept their trip blog updated from base camp. Then, when they were close to the end I caught up with them in Mui Ne, and dashed ahead of them to Ho Chi Minh City. A reception had been organised at a school and I turned up on their doorstep, with a banner I somehow had managed to get made locally, and we waited for the guys to show up.
A great day. Great film. Great guys. Lovely to finally see it.
