While "random photos from around Asia" might not be the greatest blog title this is in essence what these are. I quite like the photo of the Beijing Bird's Nest Stadium and the tourist with the drone from Laos. Overall I think I am most happy with this set of photos. I guess with travel I saw new places so consequently the photos of those places are new. In Shanghai I often did just my daily life or saw the same things several times.
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I am a man who has a frequent problem with sunburn. Usually I prevent this by wearing a silly hat with a wide brim. My previous sun hat (a Panama hat I got in Puerto Rico) has been falling apart for some time now so I decided to switch to a new hat. Fortunately, hard plastic wide brimmed sun hats are a common in Vietnam and sign of your support for the global communist revolution in Laos. The Chinese though saw my new hat a bit differently. Instead of being a sign for my love of the united workers of the world losing their chains, my hat is a sign that my hypothetical wife is having hypothetical sex with other hypothetical men and was apparently quite funny to everyone in Changsha's airport. In Chinese 戴绿帽子, wearing a green hat, is a euphemism for a man's wife cheating on him. While this often doesn't come up it is this stigma around green hats is occasionally a problem for foreigners. Sometimes Boston Celtics, Notre Dame Fighting Irish, or weirdos who buy a hat because they saw a picture of Ho Chi Minh in the same hat will end up accidentally wearing a green hat in China, wondering why everyone thinks they are funny. I have also read stories online of foreign businessmen, and women, throwing Christmas parties in China or with Chinese getting in trouble because they tried to get everyone to wear green elf hats. I guess take my mistake as a lesson in what not to do in China or when throwing Christmas parties for Chinese. While it is not like sitting on my patio in Chiang Mai, enjoying the sunset in Luang Prabang, or drinking the unidentified fresh draft of Hanoi, it is nice to do beer and cookies back in my own room in Shanghai. The Thai had better cookies and the Lao had better bottled beer though (the Vietnamese beer was better on tap). Now that I am back in China and had some time to stew I now feel like it is time for a South East Asia (Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand in my case) retrospective. The first thing I would like to note is that Thailand, particularly Bangkok, is clearly more developed than ether Vietnam or Laos. While Vietnam is trying, and to a fair degree succeeding, in becoming a developed country Laos is simply not. Chiang Rai did feel more like Hanoi in terms of development, but both cities were clearly more developed than Luang Prabang. I would also like to note that I think Luang Prabang is Laos's "model city." The problems I heard about Laos, like starvation level poverty and corruption, are not visible in Luang Prabang; this dosn't mean that these aren't issues Laos faces, it is simply that the government has put there effort into saving face in Luang Prabang for the tourists. Hanoi and all the cities in Thailand felt like better representations of their respective countries than Luang Prabang did.
It is interesting to compare temples in the three countries, since I seemed to spent most of my time in Buddhist temples. Vietnam had temples but they seemed touristy. I did end up in one temple that was actually used by real Vietnamese Buddhists and many of the restaurants had little shrines but the Buddhism was not as visible. I think Luang Prabang gets tourists by marketing itself as a Buddhist temple city. The locals are apparently religious but all the temples did feel like they were set up to handle tourists. The Thai are a remarkable religious people. All of the temples, even the touristy ones, were all used by real Thai Buddhists and basically every public building had a spirt house that people would pray and make offerings to. Another interesting comparison is the attitudes toward their colonial past. Being colonized seems like it plays a big role in the Vietnamese national identity, at least historically. Vietnam is moving past that but it is still very evident in many of the historical sites in Vietnam and I would argue in some of modern Vietnamese foreign policy. While Vietnam and Laos had the same colonizers, the French, Laos seems way more accepting of the French then the Vietnamese. For instance, many young Lao can still speak French while most young Vietnamese can't. I believe that this is because Laos was granted more self government under French administration than Vietnam was. Thailand has a totally different colonial narrative. Thailand was never actually colonized and remained independent through the Age of Imperialism. In Thailand this is attributed to the wise leadership of the House of Chakri (the family of the current Thai monarch). The depictions of The House of Chakri, in particular the late Thai King HM Bhumibol Adulyadej, and Ho Chi Minh were remarkably similar. Both are show as wise leaders who are above criticism and are loved by all. Their images can be seen around, although I saw way more of HM Bhumibol Adulyadej and even the current King HM Maha Vajiralongkorn, who is far less popular than his father, in Thailand than I did Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Still, Ho Chi Minh is still on all the money and he is sitting in a glass box in Hanoi (while Bhumibol Adulyadej was also sitting in a glass box when I was in Bangkok the government had plans to cremate him soon). The reverence for Ho Chi Minh extended to Laos, who's current governement was put in place by Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communists during the Vietnam War. Ho Chi Minh seemed to pop up more randomly in Luang Prabang than he did in Hanoi actually. The relationship between Laos and Vietnam andros and Thailand is kind of odd. All three are ASEAN member states so Lao, Vietnamese, and Thai citizens can all easily travel to and work in any ASEAN member state. This seems to mean that Vietnamese and Lao citizens go to Thailand to work and not the other way around. Furthermore, while the Lao language is actually closely related to Thai (and are actually mutually intelligible) and Thailand (still called Siam thrn) even ruled over parts of Laos for a time, Laos is still closer to Vietnam. While I could go on, this post has to end somewhere and that might as well be here. If I end up feeling like I have more to say I will do a part two. Last night I went to see a Water Puppet show at the Lotus Water Puppet Theater in Hanoi. While the show was clearly meant for foreigners, they had English language narration explaining the Vietnamese songs, it was still fun and an interesting way to spend the night. It should be noted though that the narrator had a bad case of Engrish and was actually kind of hard to understand. The puppets, with the music, had a surprisingly large emotional range. While some puppets did the usual slap-stick puppet comedy thing, the phoenixes were able to tell a simple love story, the turtle was able to tell the sword story from day one, and the unicorns were able to be playful all while actually beaning painted hunks of wood in a shallow pool. The pool itself was used for simple special effects. If I was a young Vietnamese kid 100 years ago I would have been very impressed by the show. The whole show felt somewhat out of time, like little Vietnamese kids at some point in a history use to watch the same show and experience the same feelings. Overall I enjoyed the water puppet show.
Even though I was trying to get away from the communism I couldn’t help thinking of Milan Kundera’s The Joke (a book about the problems of communism) when Jaroslav talks about reviving traditional Moravian folk music. In the beginning of the novel he talks about righting new folk music about the joys and greatness of communism. By the end of the book, Jaroslav realizes how much of an oxymoron “new folk music” actually is. The book concludes that folk culture is folk culture because it is made over generations organically so is always old; any attempts to make new folk culture will fall flat because it can’t be created organically, some entity, in The Joke’s case the party, created it. While the theater is preserving water puppetry, water puppetry is not an evolving art form so no new water puppet shows will be created. Random Stuff on a Random Day in Hanoi
So I really didn’t have a theme today for why I did what I did, it all was just kind of around and sounded cool so that is what I did. I decided I wanted a lighter day since I have a water puppet show scheduled for later today so I just did two big things: the Military Museum and the Fine Art Museum of Vietnam. I liked the Military Museum but I generally like military museums so that is not a helpful statement. What I can say is that if I was French and I visited the Military Museum I would be pretty bummed. Most of the large artifacts were American made war trophies used ether by American or French forces. The only French made weapons in the place were small arms while the Vietnamese proudly displayed American planes, tanks, bombs, and guns they captured, they even displayed a pile of scrap from shot down American aircraft. It is nice to know that your military’s stuff is so valuable that even 50 years later even the literal junk gets displayed proudly to show the overwhelming odds a people fought against. The Military Museum also had weapons used by Communist Vietnamese forces: the regular NVA, VC, and various other Communist militia forces. They even had the first Communist tank that rolled into Saigon and a MIG fighter that shot down several American jets. Be warned though, the Military Museum does expect you to be at least somewhat familiar with Vietnamese history, for example the Museum spends a lot of time discussing the Battle of Dien Bien Phu without really telling you why the Battle of Dien Bien Phu was important (it was the last battle of the First Indochina war and a victory for the Vietnamese over French forces FYI). After so much Communism I kind of wanted to do something different so I went to the Fine Art Museum of Vietnam later that day. This did not help get me away from Uncle Ho and the ideas of Marx though. Had to first walk by the North Korean embassy in Hanoi which, while somewhat nondescript, was obviously the North Korean embassy because of the bulletin board with framed photos of Kim Jong-Un in it. The Museum itself was also very communistic. Only the first floor was devoted to art from before the rise of the Vietnamese Communist Party. The rest of the art was heavily influenced by communist ideas. Much of it was about the workers, the peasants, Ho Chi Minh, and the Communist military forces. Still, they had a nice collection of early Vietnamese Buddhist statuary and a fine collection of Vietnamese lacquer painting. Two of the museums other three exhibits, a special exhibit on ASIAN printing, a pottery exhibit, and the exhibit on Vietnamese folk art, were also beneficial to the Communist Party. While the pottery and the folk art exhibits were kind of weak the ASIAN printing exhibit had some cool works. I just wish the museum actually explained things a bit more, I have very little context for any of the works. Finally I took a short walk to Hanoi’s Opera House. It was a cool building I guess. It was also next to the actual Hanoi Hilton Hotel something I always wondered if they had. Note: I plan on doing a small update ether late today or early tomorrow on the Water Puppet show and dinner. Today I decided to do the Vietnam War, or the Resistance War Against America tour around Hanoi. First thing in the morning I decided to pay Uncle Ho himself a visit since like Kim, or Kim, or Mao, or Lenin Ho Chi Minh is still in a glass coffin. Photos were ban in the mausoleum so I was unable to take any pictures. I would describe the experience as almost pseudo-religious. You walk passed many nicely uniformed PAVN troops before being allowed into the mausoleum itself, there you are lead through several passageways with gradually dimming lights, finally you are brought into the room where Ho Chi Minh himself lays permanently in state, you shuffle past the body as you make your way back out into the light. Uncle Ho doesn’t look bad for a dead man, he is a bit waxy though. Afterword I went to the Ho Chi Minh Museum located on the same site. I don’t know how much I learned about Ho Chi Minh or the struggle for Vietnamese independence against the French then the Japanese then the French again than the Americans but it was a trip. The whole museum is several massive modern art pieces with some random stuff from Ho Chi Minh scattered about. While some of it is kind of weird, like a set of crystalware the czechoslovakian Government gave Ho, to the cool, like the actual pens used to end American involvement in the Vietnam war. It is the kind of place that would either be, in proper 1970s fashion, great or terrible place drop acid in.
After a lunch of chicken with mushrooms over rice, I went to the Hanoi Hilton, officially called the Hoa Lo Prison. The prison was actually built by the French colonial government in what was then French Indochina to house Vietnamese political prisoners. The museum spends most of the time focused on this period in Hao Lo’s history discussing at length the atrocities of the French imperialist regime in what is now Vietnam. The small section dedicated to American POWs unsurprisingly tells a different story of the Vietnamese Communists. The Vietnamese are depicted as being extremely charitable and gracious hosts to the American pilots who were illegally and aggressively invading Vietnam. In comparsion to what the French gave the Vietnamese, the clothing the Vietnamese claim they gave the Americans, while simple, looked acceptable. The American POWs were shown studying Communist thought, making art, and playing sports while being well cared for by Vietnamese doctors and guards. They also had trophies form the captured American piolets, like a flight suit that allegedly belonged to Sen. John McCain of Arizona before his capture. I finished my day with what is called an egg coffee, a Hanoi specialty. It tastes kind of like what would happen if Starbucks made creme brulee. It wasn’t bad but I couldn’t see drinking them often. |
AuthorI am a junior at Juniata College spending a year studying abroad at East China Normal University. Please feel free to join my on my journey to China and beyond. Archives
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