Hanoi: built around lakes

Close to our hotel was the Hoan Kiem Lake, about which there is a legend, of course, connected with the founding of Hanoi as the ancient capital of Vietnam.  We walked around the lake a couple of times, by day and by night.
Once you make it across the street to the promenade around the lake, you find refuge from the noise and crowding.  Lots of people use the park around the lake for execise, but we didn't feel crowded.
Actually, because the sidewalks in the city are clogged with parked motorscooters and makeshift restaurants set up every afternoon and serving food till late at night, it's difficult to walk freely around the old part of Hanoi, where our hotel was, so people need the lakeside promenade just to stretch their legs.














Next to the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum was his residence, which was on a small pond.  For an Israeli, the abundance or water even in the capital city was unexpected - something that I'm sure the Vietnamese take entirely for granted, though they clearly appreciate it, which is why the designers of the Temple of Literature included pools in the landscaping.

Reviewing our Trip to Viet Nam: pictures and words

I soon gave up trying to keep the blog as we traveled.  It took too much time.  So I ended up with a notebook full of scrawled impressions and nearly a thousand pictures.  I've been working on the pictures, erasing a lot of them and sorting the rest out.  I intend to keep posting them here in the blog.
 We arrived at Hanoi at night, and when I woke in the morning I took a few pictures from our hotel window - the random view of a city that a tourist has.  My impression was of a very crowded city (an impression that was confirmed time and time again), but I could see that the people put flower pots wherever they could on their balconies and terraces, trying to bring some nature to their urban environment, living as well as possible under trying circumstances.

 Left to our own devices, we would have skipped the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, but we could tell it was vital to our guide, a great admirer of Ho Chi Minh.  The line of tourists waiting to see the embalmed national hero was long but fast moving.  As we learned, you weren't permitted to stop and look at the body.  Stern soldiers in immaculate uniforms stood all along the way, making certain that we were silent, that we removed our hats, that we kept our hands to the sides of our bodies, and that we kept to single file.  If you had told me in the late 1960s, when I was an American student, doing whatever I could to avoid being sent to Vietnam, that one day I would be paying homage to the man leading the struggle against us, I would have been incredulous.

 From the sublime to the ridiculous, while we were in the Temple of Literature in Hanoi, a venerable Confucian educational institution, we looked out over the wall as a balloon salesman was walking by.  The streets of Vietnam are full of people trying to sell things.
Another rather ordinary sight was a pair of heavy gas cylinders loaded onto a pedal cab.  This was on the street in Hue.  Over and over we were reminded that many Vietnamese people, of course in the rice-growing villages we saw, but in the cities as well, are living close to subsistence.  Maybe they can afford cooking gas, but they can't afford to pay a trucker to deliver it to their home.