in Hanoi

Hello all. Welcome to my first post from Vietnam. We finally arrived in our hotel in Hanoi at around 11 pm VN time on the 16th. Which, by my count, means our total trip from Norfolk to Hanoi took about 30 hours. The worst part was a 13 hour flight from DFW to Tokyo, but it had it's moments. We flew a northern arc up over the Bering Sea. You could actually see the coasts of Russia and Alaska out the starboard window at one point. That gave a moment of transcendent awe, thinking about the humans who dared that passage on foot hundreds of centuries ago.

The layover in Tokyo was five hours, but I slept for most of it, so that passed quite quickly. By the time we left Tokyo, evening was coming on. I was sitting on port side, and because of the relative positions of the airport and the city, didn't get to see Tokyo from the air, but I did see Mt. Fuji a few minutes later in the late dusk. A few hours later, we were flying straight over Shanghai at night with a clear sky between us and the ground. That was an incredible and slightly scary sight. We were cruising at about 36k feet, but the lights still seemed to stretch to the horizon. The density of that mass of humanity is astonishing. Then, I noticed another thing about China that I already knew intellectually but only in the abstract; I'm speaking of the radical difference between the booming cities and the countryside. When we were away from the cities and flying over the south of China, there were almost no visible lights at all. I could see landforms and some large structures (including an imposing dam), so it wasn't that clouds were obscuring the ground. Rather, there simply aren't many sizeable electric lights (street lamps, etc.) out in the country. Cities like Shanghai may be booming, rapidly modernizing wonders, but I suspect that the people in the country still live in conditions that most of us would consider almost entirely undeveloped.

Hanoi itself is outrageously frenetic. Everywhere you look there are hundreds of motor scooters...and they're all driving insanely...without helmets. What's more, there is virtually no traffic control. No stop or yeild signs, no lights, nothing. It's all just every man for himself. I say "every man," but I've seen families of three a few times. Paradoxically, the only way for a pedestrian to safely walk across a street is to just start walking through. If you stop, look, and wait, you'll never get through, and all the scooters will think they don't have to pay attention to you because you're looking. However, if, like a madman, you just walk without looking or stopping, they all swirve around you.

There's plenty more to tell about Hanoi, but jetlag is a bummer, and right now my body thinks it's 5 am. Time to take a nap. I'll try to figure out how to add photos to this thing sometime soon.

Stu