Today we were up early in order to beat the heat. It is hot in Hanoi. We jump in a taxi and head to Hoan Kiem Lake to buy tickets for the Water Puppet show; we are lucky as they usually sell out very fast. After this we try and find the hidden cafe on Hang Gai. We were taken there by my sister a few years ago and it is a wonderful little Hanoi secret. Behind a tourist tat shop is a cramped passageway at the back of 11 Hang Gai leading to a small courtyard with a TV blaring away some Chinese soap opera. You think at first that you have intruded on a family home, then a girl takes your coffee order and motions you up some vertiginous stairs. This is Cafe Pho Co and it is a bit like a car crash between an M.C. Escher painting, ancient Vietnamese house and Boho coffee shop. We climb some stairs, and then a spiral staircase and then another flight of stairs past amateur oil paintings, African tribal statues, Bonsai plants and other odd ephemera to reach our table. The view of the lake is great, the surroundings are plain odd, but the coffee tastes like it’s been strained through a tramp’s underpants, proving that you can never have it all.
After this surreal experience we then find the Ho Chi Minh museum for more oddness. The first set of galleries is the usual hagiography to the founder of Communism in Vietnam. Uplifting quotes from leaders of the Party and photo ops with other Russian and Chinese luminaries are all well and good, but we are heading for the giant statue on the next floor. Ho Chi Minh looks like a giant golden grandfatherly robot and we bask in the air conditioning of the room.
The whole of the next floor is an exercise in weird representations of Ho’s life. There is a giant orchid pierced with American bombs and guns, a metal and mirror maze depicting western decadence and a pyramid showing what looks like Jesus breaking some massive chain links. Half of it is a bit broken and wonky, making it odder still. There is a brick floor making a chimney in the middle of a room, draped in a crimson big top tent with random artifacts that represent other communist countries. Harry gets freaked out by the mirrored room showing explosions of nuclear bomb montages offset by Kennedy and Nixon grinning in an evil way, all to epilepsy inducing flash lights. “It’s like the bad guys in Dr Who.” he comments.
The whole bizarre tableaus are blown away by the final display which shows the episode from Ho’s life where he hid out in a cave in the jungles of Vietnam formulating the road to revolutionary freedom. The cave is actually a representation of Uncle Ho’s brain and is complete with knobbly neural pathways, little camp fires and communist tracts. It is really difficult to work out who on earth would come up with something like this. “Are we really in his brain?” asks Maisie after we try our best to describe Communism to an 8 year old child.
Much less odd is the Thang Long Water Puppet show which is a series of stories depicting Vietnamese life, from farming and festivals, to the legend of Hoan Kiem Lake (which means ‘lost sword’). Marcelle has seen this three times and feels that she could be an understudy puppeteer. This is fortunate as an unusually large New Zealand guy sits directly in front of her. It was a hit for the children and Harry befriended a retired Australian teacher, whom he incessantly chatted to throughout the performance. That’ll teach her for talking to a strange ginger haired boy.
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