Walked around the Old Quarter this afternoon, but didn’t take the camera — just wanted to stroll about and stare at things. I did find a market I want to get some pictures of, though, if only to demonstrate to my students the, let us say, catholic range of Vietnamese foodstuffs. Lots of eels and crabs and fish and frogs and all manner of fowl as well and all of them alive in basins, tubs, and cages: this is a cook’s city.

There’s an English language bookshop just off Hang Bai in the French Quarter. There are a lot of art books and books of photographs of Hanoi and the usual range of English language instruction manuals for Vietnamese speakers and Vietnamese language manuals for English speakers, but the real value of the place is its extensive collection of (mostly) British classic texts from the 19th and early 20th century — Wordsworth editions of copyright-free texts on cheap paper that sell here for a couple of dollars — and since I increasingly find myself turning to the comforts of narrative, I feel grateful for the shelves full of Jane Austin, Thomas Hardy, Daniel Defoe, George Elliot, and many others, including Dostoevsky’s great novel, which I read when I was an undergraduate but have mostly forgotten since, except for Myshkin’s winning and sometimes infuriating innocence. I bought the book on my second day in town — I almost got Robinson Crusoe, which I read last time I was here — but settled on the more ambitious project of The Idiot. I’ve been reading a few pages each evening without hurry, enjoying the switchbacks and asides as the narrative gathers way.

My days in Hanoi over my first two weeks in town had been alternately busy and dull. Vietnamese literary institutions move at their own pace, as they do in most places, no doubt; but it had seemed to me that the Writers Association, for example, though they have a designated “expert in external relations,” was not terribly interested in making connections and setting up meetings. As an organization, they seemed turned distinctly inward, creating a situation in which the foreign writer is welcomed ceremonially to hear a speech about cooperation and friendship. And then dismissed. Or, if that’s too harsh a judgment, just benignly ignored. The building in which the Writers Association is housed is a late French colonial affair of four floors with a staircase up the middle leading onto little warrens of offices. One suspects that it has always housed bureaucrats.

The Idiot begins with a journey. Prince Myshkin is returning to Russia, but it is an odd sort of return. It is as if he is returning to a place he has never been. That is something like the way I have felt coming back to Hanoi after eight years. [To be continued]

Last night, though, I had a great dinner. There are three small restaurants on Dinh Tien Hoang Street, all owned by the same extended family as far as I can tell, and specializing in banh khoi and bun bo, two Hue specialties. The firsst is a cross between an omelet and a pancake and is filled with onions and bean sprouts and served with a peanut sauce and spicy herbs; the second is Hue’s version of pho, a beef noodle soup that here in Hue is quite spicy. I had banh khoi in one little restaurant, then went next door for bun bo, then took a cyclo back to the hotel.

After breakfast I came back and used Skype to call Carole. Amy was visiting in South Colton, so I got to talk to her too. In fact, I got to see both Caroel and Amy because Carole has a little video camera on her Mac. Skype is awesome — it’s completely amazing to be able to see and speak in real time literally half-way around the world. The first time I was in VN a little over a decade ago, I had to go to a special telephone “station” to make a very expensive international call. When I was talking to Amy and Carole, I mentioned the copies of famous paintings turned out by local craftspeople for the tourist trade, some of them astonishingly bad. There is also a kind of hyper-department-store genre as well, in which the paintings are generic rather than being based on models [Here's a slide show that includes some of the paintings and narrates my trip so far -- I'll be adding images as I go and I need to go back and put the Hong Kong airport images in, too.] One wonders what Plato, so afraid of copies, the copy always being inferior to the original, would have made of these paintings. They are certainly inferior by almost any standard, but interesting.

I’m going to try to blog regularly during the sabbatical, mostly as a form of self-discipline & self-reflection. I’m not oing to make any foolhardy commitments to post something every day, but that will be my goal, even if it’s just a squib or a report on local bird life or what I cooked for dinner. With luck, there will also be more substantial bits as well. Anyway, it’s cold & snowy this morning & I probably won’t go farther afield today than the post office (though Carole is heading off to work in a few minutes), so the weather is cooperating: no excuse but to get some real work done.