HANOI, Vietnam – Hop-on sans-off bus sightseeing city tour gives a thorough, if micro, vista of the culture and history of the capital and by extrapolation, of the entire nation.
Starting and ending at Hoan Kiem Lake, the focal point of the city’s social life, where stands Turtle Tower in the middle of the lake and vermillion wooden Huc Bridge at the northern end connecting the lakeshore to Ngoc Son Temple, rich in both folklore and historical significance.
The majestic St. Joseph’s Cathedral, once dubbed the Notre Dame of the Orient, and the Cu Bac Church (Church of Our Lady of the Martyrs) represent enduring Catholic presence in the country where the overwhelming majority is Buddhist.
French colonial elegance still highly palpable in the châteaus along tree-lined boulevards and avenues even if repurposed into restaurants, government offices, and diplomatic missions.
Belle epoque lives on in the Hanoi Opera House.
The heroes memorialized in monuments – Le Thai To, first ruler of the Ly Dynasty who set his capital in Hanoi; V. I. Lenin whose thoughts on revolutionary praxis and socialism make the very bible of the socialist cause; the Ho Chi Min Mausoleum, where lies the father of the republic (alas, but a passing glimpse of it from afar). Uncle Ho, here and there though, along the route.
The symbols of the struggle for freedom popping out of verdant parks – The Flag Tower, The Imperial Citadel of Thang Long, Hoa Lo Prison Relic, the Museum of Vietnamese Women – all testimonies to the fervent nationalism of the Vietnamese people.
Then, the wealth of cultural heritage in one small loop – Taoism’s Quan Thanh Temple; Tran Quoc Pagoda, the oldest Buddhist temple in Hanoi; One Pillar Pagoda, and The Temple of Literature dedicated to Confucius.
A matter of course, if not the natural order, for French architecture to house haute couture and choses très chères, read: Prada, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Berluti, Tiffany & Company, Balmain, Emporio Armani, Valentino, Guerlain, to cite only the ones that were sighted. Joie de vivre!
Alas, a contradiction – dialectical, most definitively – in a socialist state awash with, indeed, luxuriating in capitalist decadence decades ago decried, denounced damned as counter-revolutionary: in the words of Marx himself as “commodity fetishism.” Alack, Marx is long dead – in the spirit, as in the flesh much earlier.
Marxists, though, do not weep. They go into exegeses. In this Hanoi instance, see the broad display of historical materialism in the evolution of this nation, albeit in the microcosm of the capital – from the Ly dynasty to French colonization, the victory at Dien Bien Phu, Ho and the democratic republic, the civil war, US involvement, the Fall of Saigon, reunification, market economy, to ASEAN’s fourth largest economy in terms of GDP. We can go into full-on dialectics here.
Wow, what hath an hour bus tour of Hanoi wrought.
