Ladies' dance troupe

In Hanoi you keep bumping into TV crews. Vietnamese TV is very local and, by global standards, anodyne. These women were no doubt performing for some cultural program with an emphasis on the importance of including older people in the loop. I'm not sure whether they're dancing, or doing some kind of exercises with fans - either way, this kind of synchronized callisthenics is very much promoted in the official culture. One of the nice things about it, is the way that such programs are not reserved for professional performances - the masses are participants as much as merely consumers of entertainment.


The backdrop is the Botanical Garden, a rather lovely patch of green. It used to have a small zoo. The cages are still there, but the animals were moved during the war in case the Americans bombed Ho Chi Minh's nearby house and the tiger escaped. There is also a very small hill or mound, on which, nearly a thousand years ago, the emperor stood and, surveying the surrounding plain, declared the site for his capital of Thang Long. Nowadays you can't survey anything from the top of that hill except the trees and nearby houses.