Sunday in/around Hanoi

This morning we left the city to visit Bat Trang, a village famous for its ceramics. We heard about the long history of ceramics in this village - and how they now must buy clay instead of just pulling it from the river’s edge - because of too much erosion. We visited two homes and learned about both the local ceramics industry and the land reform of 1953. I hadn’t realized in how many ways Vietnam followed experiences of the Chinese revolution. At the second home we got our hands dirty: we had 10 minutes to make something using small manual wheels. The proprietor awarded me a clay bracelet for being the best artisan in our group 😉. Returning to Hanoi, after another good lunch (ending with one of our few desserts), Jane and I each had a whole body massage (about $20, including tip - about 70 minutes, good/not great), while Mary enjoyed a foot massage. Then we took off for an add-on adventure: riding scooters (or Soviet jeeps) with local guides. We scooted around much of the city - which is actually beginning to look and feel familiar - from high end neighborhoods to poorer working class ones. We went into one multi-family building and saw a small kitchen and bathroom that are now shared by two families but used to be shared among 20! Aside from experiencing being in the middle of the street traffic, another highlight of the scooter adventure was going to the “train street,” where you sit inches (literally!) from where the train going from Hanoi to Saigon (and vice versa) passes by! It’s a local “thing”. For the driving, I was glad to have a mask as the exhaust is pretty intense; the driving part wasn’t scary. I’m sure it helped that we had already been in the city for several days and have gotten accustomed to the street scene - in fact we didn’t see any accidents, nor dented vehicles over our 5 days in Hanoi.Read more