Many of the streets in the old town have names starting with “Hang”, which means trade, followed by the word for whatever sort of shops are there — or used to be, once upon a time. Businesses still are clustered into types along these streets, so that there’s a street of metalworkers, a street of silk shops, and so on.

Street in the old quarter:

Memorial House is a Chinese merchant’s dwelling restored as a museum. The two-storey dwelling is built around a courtyard with wooden shutters opening onto it from the upper rooms:

The interior was filled partly with the furnishings of a comfortable home in the late 19th century –

– and partly with exhibits and art, collectibles and knick-knacks for sale. I especially liked these tin toys made by artisans from Khuong Ha village, including working steamships that run on burning oil — just like your train, Dad, if you’re reading this:

A pile of mid-autumn Moon Festival lanterns lying at the back of the front room:

“Don’t miss the small entry,” says LP, “to House 102, which includes a fully functioning temple where most people would have a lounge room.” The book omits to elaborate that House 102 has a fully batshit temple inside. This is the entrance (well signposted for the foreign tourist):

Entering Den Hang Back, we pass a laundry where a woman is washing in a sink. The look she gives us seems rather hostile, but on the other hand, she doesn’t drive us out. All the same, there’s no sign of a temple, so we retreat, only to be encouraged to go back in by a definitely smiling woman outside. Making it to the interior this time, we find ourselves in an informal sort of restaurant. Some jovial men offer us tea, but we decline, having had some at the merchant house. Several people in the restaurant point up a white iron spiral stair, so up we go…

…finding, at the top of the stairs, this:

and this:

the red horse again:

a shrine to Satan?

and, to the right, the temple proper, in a small, tall room. The photographs in no way do justice to the supersaturated, shiny, over-the-twinkly-topness of this coral-reef-like tabernacle to foreign gods:

I, at least, felt that had this been the religion into which I was born and raised, I might well have grown up devout.  I wonder sometimes whether Anglicans who convert to Catholicism don’t succumb to popery at least partly because of the bling factor.

Our senses are not sufficiently overwhelmed, however, to make them numb to the colour of Counterfeit Street, where shops sell ghost money for funerals, and other religious and festive paraphernalia:

This shop reminded me of a book I read as a child, about a girl and an old man who sold coloured paper lanterns. The girl couldn’t afford to buy a lantern, but eventually the man gave her a seed, which, when she planted it, grew a lantern tree:

Amongst all the “Hang” streets, there’s a Hang Manh. We don’t see a hanged man, but do see this tragic bear in a street of toy shops:

We find lunch in a row of street-food stalls up an alley. We have something with chicken and tomato — very tasty and very cheap. The young man next to us treats us to a great display of Chinese-style hawking and spitting under the table while we eat.

What lacks — to our minds — we notice here, are 7-11s. It’s hard to find a cold drink. People are selling bottles of this and that, but unrefrigerated. The most interesting identifiable food we see is weasel coffee: the beans are fed to weasels, and only roasted after they’ve made the journey through the weasel’s interior. Why a weasel, I have no idea. Perhaps simply because they’re cheap.

Leaving a shopping mall, I see an advertisement for a spa offering “Paraffin elbow treatment and finger waxing.” Sometimes I feel like an alien in this world.

We had decided to go to Hanoi for a bit of quiet time. Stu needed to leave Thailand to renew his visa, and a friend had impressed me with descriptions of Hanoi’s old-world Frenchified elegance. I purchased a Lonely Planet, noted the part about bringing earplugs to insulate against the traffic noise, but didn’t imagine little old Hanoi could be as noisy as mighty Bangkok. I should have. When even LP advises earplugs, and takes pains to assure you that not every Vietnamese is trying to rip you off, you had better be on notice that you’re not heading for a stress-free vacation.

We take Air Asia because they’re cheap. Aircon too cold, no blankets. No free drinking water — but the kind steward brings me a cup of hot water, which both quenches my thirst and warmed me up.

At our hotel, the Nam Hai in the old quarter, we have a room decorated in Chinese style overlooking the street. I did bring the earplugs, and I’m glad. Hanoi is one of those cities where motorists — mostly motorcyclists here — honk their horns all the time, like a flock of migrating geese. Whatever the other faults of Bangkok traffic, Thai drivers are a quiet bunch, generally applying the horn only for good reason. I don’t know how a culture of perpetual honking develops, but I never want to take another holiday in a place thus afflicted — my nerves, dears, my delicate nerves; hold the chaise lounge under my nose and lay me down upon the smelling salts.

The bed is as hard as a tombstone. This is probably a Vietnamese thing. Thai beds tend towards the stony, too. But the pillows are soft. The shower is one of those whizz-bang computerised models that plays music and puffs ozone. I have fun pushing the buttons. The horns blast away until eleven and start up again at five.

At breakfast, the waitress says to me, “There’s a beautiful smell coming off your body. Are you wearing French perfume?” Well, I can’t imagine what the beautiful smell would be. My French perfume ran out weeks ago, but perhaps some of it lingers on my shirt. I suggest that it might be the hotel’s shampoo. “Can I smell your hair?”she asks. Sure, I say, why not? (As long as you do it quietly…) No, she says, it isn’t the shampoo. I am mysteriously fragrant. I tell her that I won’t smell so good by the end of a day walking around; right now Hanoi is several degrees celsius hotter than Bangkok.

Out we go to walk and sweat. Crossing roads is a challenge; basically, you have to play Frogger, which you also have to do in BKK, except that Thai drivers do more or less obey traffic lights and pay some sort of cursory attention to pedestrian crossings. In Hanoi — at least in the old city — it’s more of a free for all. We are assured that motorcyclists will try not to hit us. Yeah, right. Brakes and steering are for other people. Who needs them when you have a HORN? We see fellow roundeye tourists standing on street corners looking bewildered and defeated. With our basic training from Thailand, we manage ok, having only one close call with a motorbike.

We wander down streets lined with shops selling silk garments, knick knacks, antiques and paintings. The art galleries are interesting. There are a lot of them and there’s more of an international influence here than in Thailand. Some specialise in copies of well-known pictures; others sell original art. We go into one, but, as an employee shadows us silently at a distance of a few inches, we don’t stay very long. I am waiting for Frenchified graciousness to leap out at me waving a plate of madeleines and a copy of Chateaubriand’s memoirs. In vain. The architecture is interesting, though; Vietnamese houses are tall and narrow, often one room wide and three or four storeys high, ornate, and the ones here have both Asian and European influences — the effect is an interesting higgledy-piggledy collage.

We make our way to Hoan Kiem lake. On the way we pass a lovely banyan tree:

and after navigating a complex intersection arrive at the pretty lake. The building on the island is the Ngoc Son temple, dedicated to three religions, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism:

The lake’s name mean’s “Lake of the Returned Sword” or “Lake of the Restored Sword”. Legend has it that emperor Le Loi, who had been given a magic sword called Heaven’s Will by the Golden Turtle God, which brought him victory in his revolt against the Chinese Ming Dynasty, handed it back to the god here. Critically endangered giant soft-shell turtles are said to live in the lake. A dead one is preserved in a room next to the temple.

Joss sticks burning outside the temple:

Pikes inside:

While we were there a priestess (Taoist?) was conducting a ceremony, chanting from a book and beating a small drum:

Offerings on the altar included beer:

This green guy took my fancy:

As did this red horse:

I am not sure whether the horse is the mount of the King of Hell — the green guy was also on that side of the temple, so it would make sense if that was the side of the goblins and ghoulies — the red horse, possessing extraordinary endurance, of revered Chinese general Quan Cong, or some other red horse of note. I’m still trying to find out. This is the sort of thing you miss when you don’t have a tour guide.

Still on the liquid diet (no, not that kind of liquid diet). Feeling hungry and lightheaded. Seeing things. Such as goblin knights on our bathroom wall. Can you see them too?

This one…

is actually a kind of centaur goblin, playing Goblin Polo Hockey (a very serious sport):

And this one…

is a goblin Jedi ™ out cruisin’ in his goblin landspeeder ™, which has some kind of reptile head mounted sideways on the front (possibly it functions as the horn):

Edit: Christ, now I can see a half-goat, half-wolf beast in the upper one, but only the thumbnail.

Had my tooth out today. As wisdom tooth extractions go, I guess this one was a doddle. Big injection, sheet over my face, wrenching but no pain, and it was done. Took 20 mins and cost 1000 baht ($30), plus 100 baht for painkillers I haven’t had to use yet. I can talk, my face isn’t swollen, and there’s hardly any blood. Looking at my tooth, I feel a bit sad. It was part of me for 20 years. Stu said he felt the same when he had his out. Compared to his two — still in their ziploc bag on his desk — mine is small with neat and tidy roots. His have splayed roots which make them look as if they might get up and walk in the night. Mine at least has a decorative silver filling. Too bad it isn’t gold — as he said, we could have melted it and sold the metal.

My only problem now is that I’m hungry. Technically I’m allowed to eat, but chewing on one side is awkward, and my mouth just feels odd.  I stocked up on yoghurt, rice porridge, cream and the like this morning — was tempted by the bright blue jelly pudding, but resisted — and Stu is making me a banana shake. I thought I was going to be able to milk this episode for sympathy for several days, but since I’m really fine, bang goes that idea.

(Me: I saw marshmallow in a can at the supermarket. It was squirty marshmallow. You could squirt it out of the can…
Stu: Maybe it was just an erotic dream.)

Because what every vampire hunter needs is…curlicues. I drew this one in the hotel room and the airport and coloured it at home. The brown colour reminds me of my grandmother’s arrangements of dried flowers, so…dedicated to her.

I’m going through a dual obsession with bulls and Vampire Hunter D. I liked this calmly grazing fellow, photographed by Anne-Marie from Australia. I copied him in pen, though I made him all black without attempting to reproduce his white markings. I didn’t capture the texture of his coat — and got mightily confused where it was growing in a different direction than the one I wanted to put the pen strokes to show the contour of his shape — but I’m still pleased with this. The lower picture is digitally coloured.

Came back from Hanoi late last night, and found that my grandmother had passed away while we were there. I had half-expected it, as she had gone downhill very much in the last few weeks. She was just three months shy of her 100th birthday. I saw her in April and we shared a very long hug; she was so frail then that I — and she, too, no doubt — had to suspect that we were saying goodbye. I loved her very much and am sorry she’s no longer here, but she had a peaceful end, which we are all very grateful for.

It is quite something to think of all the changes and upheavals that she lived through and witnessed — almost the entire 20th century. Never against modernisation — it was a hard life, as she said, before washing machines — she was nonetheless distressed by environmental rapine and the destruction of both natural and urban beauty. She was a keen and knowledgeable gardener; I wish I could have downloaded all that she knew about plants and their cultivation onto a memory chip, so that, when wanting the name of a flower or tree, its native habitats, preferred positions and flowering seasons, to add specificity to some piece of writing, I could call on her expertise.

She had an artistic bent, which she expressed in her garden, clothes and home; refinement without stiffness was her preferred register of existence and vulgarity was anathema to her. To use a very old-fashioned word, she was a gentlewoman. I hope I can keep her virtues in mind and become more like her in those ways in which her character always impressed me, so far as I can — her graciousness, kindness and patience in most of her dealings with other people, particularly (let’s face it, I’m not going to be able to lose my vulgarity even if I wanted to). I am already like her in being whimsical, vague and absent-minded, so at least that’s a start.

A ghost:
I phoned Mum this morning, and at the end of our conversation she said, “She’s with Papa now. Definitely. I know it.” My mother isn’t given to empty platitudes, but she is given to occasionally seeing things that other people do not, so I asked her what she meant. Two months ago, she said, she walked into the living room and saw my late grandfather sitting on the couch. Then she told me that her brother had seen him just two weeks ago, and that the ghost spoke to him, saying, “Don’t cry when your mother dies.”

I remember that when my other grandmother died, early in the morning, before I knew she was dead, on the otherwise clean and empty floor was an advertisement page from a magazine. It was a Telecom ad, showing an elderly woman on the phone, with the slogan, “It’s Grandma.”

I still only hope for, rather than believe in, life after death; but I find these strange occurrences reinforce the hope. Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but since the morning after she died, without knowing she was gone, I have been drawing a lot, sometimes with the sense that the pencil is moving by itself — and flowers and foliage keep working their way into the pictures.

I will go down to Chinatown this morning, since my grandmother was from Bendigo  and had an affinity for things Chinese (as did her father, though his affinity was perhaps more strictly for fan-tan), and burn some incense at one of the Taoist temples. And then have a quiet day, and keep drawing.

A shameless attempt to copy Amano. Watercolour. The first one is au naturel, the second darkened by ‘puter. I’m wondering if I should try to get the dark tones on the paper and do more with the face, which is just pencilled, or leave kinda well enough alone. Might do another sketch to have as a spare in case of a visit from Mr Cockup.

Off to Hanoi tonight with a wisdom tooth that needs pulling and a shoulder that is pulled — I did that somehow on the motorbike taxi yesterday. Yes, just sitting there. I have no idea. It’s getting better but atm I can’t lift anything much heavier than a coffee cup — incentive to travel light if ever there was.

For the childless by choice:

While researching the Kinnaree, a half-bird, half-woman figure often found decorating Thai temples, and looking for the name of the male version (Kinnara), I found — thank you Wiki — that they are celestial musicians and archetypal lovers, their character described thus in the Mahabarata:

“We are everlasting lover and beloved. We never separate. We are eternally husband and wife; never do we become mother and father. No offspring is seen in our lap. We are lover and beloved ever-embracing. In between us we do not permit any third creature demanding affection. Our life is a life of perpetual pleasure.”

Kinnaree/Kinnara pairs