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3 January 2009
christmas isn’t traditionally an important holiday, but the commercial aspects are gaining popularity among young people (how trendy). christmas lights everywhere, kitschy decorations… best of all: you can order a santa to come to your house (by motorbike, of course) to personally deliver presents for your kids (with the price varying on the quality of present you want). amusing to see several vietnamese (and hence, skinny) santas zooming by on honda waves on the evening of dec 24.
21 November 2008
100cc honda wave alpha. I’m renting it from VIP Bikes, which is run by an NGO (Blue Dragon) that focuses on disadvantaged youth. VIP Bikes trains street kids how to do motorbike repairs on the bikes they rent out (included in my contract is a monthly service). hence a shiny new bike and supporting a good cause–for 950,000 VND per month. and my helmet is from Protec, a company owned by a road safety NGO called Asia Injury Prevention Foundation (sales from Protec are supposed to fund AIPF). what can I say? Hanoi is full of do-gooder NGOs. 14 November 2008
 it's all for show I like how bike repair dudes put a manual bike pump on the side of the road to advertise their services–though such a pump is never actually used. this guy, for example, clearly had a line coming from an electric compressor somewhere. tube patch + re-inflation: 5000 dong. 9 November 2008
this is our house: the white one with the red brick balcony on the 3rd storey. in hanoi it is not unusual to have very narrow houses, but built tall (used to be that taxes were paid by the width of the front)–in our case, we have 5 floors, with 2 rooms on each.
as to the bikes–I just rented a new one! it’s the bright yellow one, of course. more on that later.
1 November 2008
it’s been raining for the past 2 days, apparently the worst since 1984. and by murphy’s law, I of course live on what seems (to me) the worst-hit part of the city. this video is from early in the day, when I first tried to get to work: it only got worse later. nowhere to stand without being submerged, and all the shops busy trying to sweep water out of their businesses. those who had given up just stood around watching the chaos. I’m amazed at the number of people who still insisted on driving their completely submerged motorbikes, only to be stranded minutes later. (I did make it to work in the afternoon, but when I made it back in the evening, there was a taxi floating down the street, with drunken on-lookers laughing)  it's better to walk this would all be a bit more tolerable if weren’t for the fact that we now have no running water in the house. not such a great thing after wading in, well, everything you can imagine is on the streets of hanoi (ahem, I saw a big rat float by my house this morning). |
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