AND SO our last day in Southeast Asia is almost over. Tomorrow we go to Hong Kong and from there into mainland China, Russia, Scandinavia, Germany, France and then home, back to the UK.
The day came and went for me without too much to mark it out, but Mrs S is mourning our departure, sad to be leaving the culture, the climate, the people and the places.
Seeing our three little Shines rolling around in the Hanoi Metropole’s pool today, I knew exactly what she meant. Things will be very different back home after eight years in Southeast Asia. Not worse by any means, just different.
Fun in the sun
We kicked the day off with a hearty breakfast at the Metropole, Kitty ensuring all the major food groups were ticked off with her feast of pancakes, bread, eggs and hot chocolate.
Only chips were missing from her current list of culinary favourites yummy breakfast.
From there we hired a taxi to take us on a round trip to Bát Tràng ceramics village, a spot around 30 kilometres outside Hanoi.
Once we’d left the left the leafy boulevards behind at the city limits, and crossed the Red River, it was a very different Vietnam we encountered — poorer and scruffier.
Bát Tràng was an experience. We’d been led to believe it was a kind of Vietnamese Emma Bridgewater affair, offering pottery painting, demonstrations, kids classes and the like.
I have to say that in the event, there seemed to be a certain degree of alarm when we let ourselves into the ceramics warehouse, walked up four flights of stairs into a workshop and asked to be allowed to join in.
Fire up the kiln, the experts are here…
Two women were painting intricate ivy shapes on platters while a man was at a potter’s wheel adding painted rings round the lips of some cups.
There was smiling, and nodding, and shrugging and more smiling, but not much comprehension from either side. In the end the children sat with the women working on the ivy designs and started painting some pots.
After half an hour of so, some European tourists came in to observe, but rather tellingly nobody else attempted to join in…
The exertion of our pottery painting meant a rest by the pool was a necessity come lunchtime. Mrs S took Kitty off for a nap leaving me with the boys poolside, taking in the soap opera-esque characters at play.
I could tell you about the long-haired Salvador Dali lookalike, the Frenchman in dazzlingly orange shorts who preened and inspected himself incessantly; or purple-haired Sonia from Canberra who’s kids are 11 and 15 and who enjoys New Zealand fruit wines. Or Darren from the U.S. who couldn’t be bothered to talk to his sad-eyed daughter and the pair sat staring at their own electronic devices instead. Darren’s wife showed up after a short while but they didn’t talk to each other either. I could tell about all these things but it might not be very interesting, and it might be a little weird.
Dali-man, orange-man, sulky-man, purple woman, look-at-me woman…
Kitty and Mrs S came down after an hour and a half and rescued me from this modern morality play, and we elected to pursue our new hobby of causing cruelty to geriatrics by once again paying some old men to cycle our western carcasses around — this time around Hanoi’s Old Town. (previous shameful displays)
Even though Ben fell asleep on my lap almost at once, that was testament to his swimming antics not the legitimacy of the tour, for Hanoi’s Old Town really is a remarkable place for a number of reasons, not least its curious array of specialist shops.
In fact, the make-up of the twisty streets in the old centre is the precise opposite of the theory behind supermarkets. There are entire streets dedicated to the selling of specific products. And I’m not talking cars, or industrial lighting — that’s not so unusual, I guess.
But zips? Yes, central Hanoi has a road dedicated to zips and zip sellers hawk red zips, green zips, yellow zips and purple zips.
Hanoi Old Town by cyclo
***
OF THE WORLD’S great mysteries, I guess the correct spelling of the word kagool barely rates a mention. Regardless, though, it is something that has bothered me over the years, and I have swung from ‘K’ to ‘C’ to ‘K’ to ‘C’ and back again, adding and dropping rogue Us and Es along the way.
Initially I decided Kagool was cool, and Cagoule plain weird. Worse still was Pack-a-Mac which sounded like something you’d eat at break-time rather than don against the elements.
Ask a dozen people of the correct spelling – cagoule, cagoul, kagoule or kagool – and you’d probably get, well, maybe four answers.
ANYWAY… my point is, it is a bit of a mystery. But it turns out that the greater mystery is, however, how come AT LEAST 95 percent of the world’s kagool/cagoule supply has ended up in Vietnam…
It doesn’t strike me as a place crying out for the kagool any more than any other Asian city, yet everywhere you turn women are wearing them. And they are not just any common-of-garden cagoule — they are flowery cagoules with arms tailored to fit an Orang-utan… these things really are all over the place, their sleeves and hoods flapping in the wind as scooters weave to their destinations.
Kagools, Cagouls, Kagoules, Cagoules… they are EVERYWHERE
She isn’t wearing a kagool… but I’ll bet she’s reading about them…
WOODLANDS TO WATERLOO 