Today’s best photo is an excuse to cram 8 days of observations about Hanoi into one post. This is me boarding the overnight train to Hue.

I could have spent the whole month in Hanoi. It’s a beautiful city of lakes and trees and rivers. It’s a thousand years old and futuristic like Bladerunner. The architecture is a delicious goulash reflecting all the cultural currents that have washed through here. It gives me that vaguely familiar Montreal rush.

But what struck me most has been the living. That’s a word I’m using to cover the people, the culture, the norms I’m seeing here. I write this all knowing that a few of my friends are deeply connected to this place, and they will remind me that it’s absurd for an anglophone foreigner to write like he has understood any of what he’s seen. But darn it – there are some things about this place that just WORK.

The traffic is chaos, but such glorious efficient chaos! There are no traffic rules save one: don’t hurt anyone. You can go anywhere you want, just do it slowly and make eye contact with everyone. The city effectively moves at 25 km/h but it’s always moving; cyclists and motos own the road and I saw no road rage at all.

Kids are free range by default. If they get in trouble a stranger will help them, and gently discipline them as needed 🙂

So much of what we expect to be governed by rules simply isn’t. Forget zoning or building code or liability. Workplace health and safety or food service permits are nowhere to be found. And while that’s kinda obvious, what it’s teaching me is how thoroughly my life is governed. As in subject to a bunch of rules – many of which, I’ll admit, contribute to my own sense of security. It makes me want to re-read Foucault on biopolitics or something. In the place of this governing I saw people just taking care of each other. They drive like they want everyone to get home to their families. They watch out for kids in public. They don’t build to code but they don’t want to kill anyone either.

This ethic of care – or perhaps it’s trust – reminds me strongly of the more DIY projects I’ve been a part of over time, like Campbell Bay Music Festival or Camas Books. It’s about putting your trust in people to care rather than trusting in the rules to keep you safe. And it’s tempting to think that this is what the whole socialist country thing is about – Uncle Ho managed to get 89 million people to love thine neighbours. And I’m quite ready to believe that if we all rejected some of the governing in our lives and just acted like we care about each other, we’d all be better off – thank you Hanoi for the shining beacon of inspiration!

But this afternoon someone told me a story about the secret police and I remembered how little I know and how little I’ll ever see of this place.