Unification Day

This weekend was rather hectic, since the city was celebrating the unification of Northern and Southern Viet Nam. Due to the fact that it was a long weekend, many Hanoians skipped out of town to do some traveling. It was wonderful to walk along on the semi-deserted streets... until they started filling up with people from the countryside. According to my friend Son, about 90% of the accumulating crowds were from nearby provinces, all coming into Ha Noi to celebrate and watch the fireworks. We started walking from my apartment with the intention of reaching the lake to see the fireworks, but were soon swallowed up in a massive mob filled with babies, children, motorbikes, and A LOT of pushing and shoving. Getting close to the lake was physically impossible, so we tried to head the other direction, but things started to get pretty hairy behind us as well. We ended up immobile until the fireworks ended and had to be really physical to actually get moving. Having celebrated Tet (Vietnamese New Year), and seeing the absurd crowds on the street, I had never expected that the streets could get any worse. Well, they did. It was so incredibly overwhelming to have 10 blocks packed with people and motorbikes. An hour later, we made it 3 blocks to the Bia Hoi corner, where we took a seat and played the "countryside or Hanoi" game. Obviously my Vietnamese friends were a lot better at picking out who was from the countryside, but I started to get the hang of it after 30 minutes or so. Apparently, people from the countryside try really hard to dress nicely, with the intention of impressing the "city folk". Along with clothing, the wide-eyed stares and meandering walk of a lost person became a dead giveaway. It was a nice change from our usual game of "guess where the foreigner is from" (I've gotten quite adept at this one as well...).
Before the madness of Unification Day, I was riding my bicycle home on a Thursday, incredibly excited for my upcoming four day weekend. I must preface this story with a little bit of information about the traffic police in Ha Noi. Two guys hang out on street corners with cream-colored helmets, uniforms, and batons (they look very similar to space troopers from Star Wars). When people drive by without helmets, or are driving "dangerously" (very ambiguous term since traffic laws are essentially non-existent), the cops bolt out into traffic waving batons and get people to pull over. SO- as I'm merrily pedaling towards my home, this young Vietnamese guy swerves around me at an incredible speed. Directly in front of me, a traffic cop runs into the road swinging his baton to get this absurd young guy to pull over. This little guy was having none of it, and sped up in an effort to lose the policeman. The cop, sensing this intention, whips out his baton and smacks the driver on the face. The guy's glasses broke off his face, and then his bike tipped sideways and he slid on the road, resulting in lost shoes, ripped pants, and some pretty serious damage to his bike. At this point I was so shocked that my jaw was almost touching my handlebars. I barely had time to avoid his bike on the street. As the young kid gets up, he has a major welt already forming on his head from the policeman's baton, but the cop was insanely angry and started yelling at him to move his bike and get his shoes out of the street.... like it was the motorbike driver's fault. This is one of the more absurd things I've seen in heavy traffic, and I am now even less inclined to purchase a motorbike. This "incident" was quite a start to my vacation...