new movie/general thoughts

this should be Kathkalai dancers in Cochin/Kochi

 

http://s27.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=05KMHPO6926G82G32ER5BQISBN

 

and here's a low res movie of the atmosphere around the Indo-Pak border flag ceremony on India day:

 

http://s27.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=335W6TP0JRZPZ1ZV7EQ7JID0BW

 

A few general thoughts on Hanoi and miscellaneous stuff I meant to write but haven't yet (everything of tourist interest is closed on Mondays here, which is why I've been updating all day)

 

Hanoi is probably the best preserved colonial city I've seen yet.  Very pleasant.  Not intensely exciting, but almost no damage from the wartime air raids or anything like that.  Central Hanoi is smallish and eminently walkable, if you don't mind dodging thousands of motorcycles (which I can do in my sleep after 4 months in Asia) , though you will seldom see any Vietnamese walking anywhere rather than riding other than poor laborers.  As a consequence, it's pretty much impossible to walk down the street without some guy saying "Hello! Moto-bike!" to try to ferry you along every 10 seconds.  Mildly annoying but they're not that persistent.  The motorcyclization of Hanoi is as complete as I've seen anywhere in Asia.  Even the great east Asian proletarian mode of transport, the bicycle, is a vanishing sight.  Even the hookers now try to take you for a ride via moto, no kidding.

 

Oh, and I should say that the currency here is the most confusing yet. Due to a bout of hyper-inflation towards the end of Viet-socialism in the late 80's, the Vietnamese Dong is currently going at about 16,000 per US$. Which pretty much makes it hard to make an ATM withdrawal without the vaguely disconcerting scenario of becoming a cash millionaire on the spot, and makes for some complicated long division when pricing.

One thing about Asia generally which has totally annoyed me is that whenever I order food remotely spicy, the waitstaff always expresses a scornful "oohh, very hot, spicy!", as if I'm Johnny Bull from Liverpool who takes two lumps of sugar with his tea and will break out in hives if I taste any bit of capsacin.  And then I'm often served something that's greatly toned down.  For god's sake, where do these guys think the chili came from? Hint: not from this hemisphere.  When their ancestors were eating bland lentils, mine were pounding out chili powder, and drying jalapenos and stuff even worse.  I suppose I can't blame them, as there's approximately zero latin americans traveling the circuit in my experience, but....

 

Unrelated item: last week I was talking with Peter, my Ibon tribesman/jungle guide in Mulu out in Borneo.  Sarawak, where he's from, did not open up to tourists, and hence become remotely developed, till the late 80's, so he grew up killing his own food.  Talking with him about the way things were before and the way things are now, he expressed a great preference for the pre-development Sarawak.  "Things were better before", was exactly what he said if I recall correctly.  But, when asked him about his family and such, he wanted all of his kids to go to school and get an education and then get a job in an office.  I've found this type of  somewhat contradictory view to be pretty universal in all of developing Asia, from the steppes of Mongolia to the Tibetan plateau to the Malabar coast to the deserts of Xinjiang and here in the jungles of Borneo - things were better before, but they want their kids to become westernized.  At first glance you would say that it's the "you can't beat em, join em" effect but I'm not so sure if that's all it is.  While the Borneo rainforest is shrinking at a dizzying pace, it's not impossible to live the old lifestyle, as we encountered a number of spear wielding hunter gatherer types.  In the same vein, most Tibetans, while they hate the Chinese, care just as much about having a TV set or a good vehicle as they do about attaining nirvana.  So I don't know if progress really corrupts people in the way that its often portrayed, I mean there is something universally attractive about it, which is the point I am half-assedly making.