We met our guide, Hung, at 5:30 this morning, after getting to our rooms at midnight last night. It was not quite sunrise. We were to ride bikes to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum for the 6am daily flag-raising ceremony.
Let’s just say it was more “hmm, interesting”, rather than a must-do, though all the Vietnamese seemed to treat it with great respect. We’re beginning to appreciate that the Vietnamese view the creation of a unified country with quite different eyes than we Americans. This will be an interesting perspective to observe over the next couple of weeks. We have detected no anti-American sentiment here in northern Vietnam so far.
But we got to see Hanoi wake up. The streets were largely empty at 6 o’clock.
Thousands of people were out, young and old, alone or in groups doing modern aerobics led by an instructor or tai chi. Hung tells us that 5:30 am exercise on the streets or in the many tree-lined parks is the norm, and it seemed so.
There was an informal, open-air street market Hung said would be gone by 7am, where individuals were selling used clothing, vegetables and seafood.
And of course we saw some interesting sights.
Other observations: we have yet to see any overweight Vietnamese; the city is much cleaner than many big cities we’ve visited around the world; Hung tells us 70% of the population of the country works on farms; it appears that the Vietnamese form of Communism is more like that in China, with a great deal of capitalism in evidence, unlike Cuba; it is much easier to be a traveler here (so far) than in countries like Morocco, Cuba and Tanzania where we felt stressed by the non-stop persistence of locals approaching us aggressively to sell us goods or services we did not want, or simply beg for money. We have yet to see homeless people or beggars here, though income levels are quite low.
