the Busking diaries - Hanoi

So, here I’m, in front of “Hoan Kiem'' lake, in Hanoi, playing my bamboo xylophone set, this is, as you can see, besides the xylophone there are also some cymbals, some bowls, some bells, some pots and pans, and also a drony electronics sound, a sample whose pitch and the speed I can change in a remote control I have here, here on my side. And so, as I play people bring me smiles, half-smiles, haunt, wonder, coins, bills, and from time to time, they even bring me candy, and then, at some point, after having been playing here during some hours already, a guy carrying a series of home-made baskets approaches me, and there he stays, in front of mr, observing me, and then, as I make some kind of pause, he even have the guts to ask, in a very shattered sort of french/english grammatik, what kind of xylophone is that/this after all, from where I brought it, and what is my nationality… And so, after some introductions, I manage to explain to the short man that this is not one xylophone, but actually, two xylophone pieces grouped together, one opposite the other, and so, while he inspect the construction of the instruments, I manage to say that I’m bringing it from Bali, Indonesia, where I have been some months ago, “and I have been playing with it all do way from Indonesia until here, this is, I have played it in Singapore, in Malaysia, in Thailand, in Laos and now here… and so, in the meanwhile, he decides to show me what he brings inside his wicker baskets, this is, under the pile of conifer hats made of palm leaves there is also: small pieces of ceramic, some jewelry, lacquerware items, golden chopsticks, and also some small musical instruments, like, for example, some bamboo flutes, some shakers, some reco-reco frogs, the Qeej - a free reed gourd mouth organ, the hulusi, also known as the cucurbit flute, another free reed flute with three bamboo pipes that pass through a Calabash gourd, and finally, the Đàn bầu - a one string chordophone that when electrified sounds like a theremin - one of my favorite musical instruments from the east-asian instruments. And then, with one hand he points at my xylophones and with the other the point at his back, to the middle of the city, saying “home-home bamboo tin-tin-tin home-home bamboo tin-tin-tin”, and so, as I can understand, he seems to say that he also have bamboo instruments at his home… and then, as I start packing, he wants to inspect my instrument, and I'm ok with that, I let him advance, and while he inspect it, without asking, I pick one cucurbit flute from his basket and I try it, and so, all in a sudden, he also picks up some mallets from my side, and there he goes, doing long rolls on the keys of my instrument… and then, the people passing by are already coming to a halt, they want to see what we are doing… and in a while, it's already night, and off we go to buy drinks, and then, I accept his invitation to accompany him at his home, coz he have invited me two dozen times already, and so, here we go now, both mounting his bicycle, baskets attached to the sides of the rear window, my instruments on the back carrier, and while pedaling, he pulls his body forward, in a way to give me space, and so, as we go through the gardens on the side of the Hoàn Kiếm lake, we pass in front of a monument he calls, “Tuh-ung Dai-Quyet-tu”, something like that, a sentence meaning "determining to die so that the country can live” he explains, ““a mark of the heroic victory of the capital's army and its people, that fought for sixty days and nights to hold back the capital from the French enemy!” he says, and then there we go, through the old quarter, he calls “Pho Co Ah Noi”, or something like that, and then we are passing in front of the Thang Long Water Puppet Theater, and then in front of the La Sinfonía Majesty Hotel and Spa, and then we reach the Nguyen Hu Huân street, and we are passing in front of the Cafe Giảng now, and then we go through the Tran Nhat Duat avenue, something like that, “Nhat Duat was the general that commanded the Đại Việt army to defeated the navy of the Mongols… long time ago”, he also manage to explain me, and then, after passing a serie of rusty porches with some kind of very silent indoor gardens, palm trees under awnings, and broken motorcycles under the palm trees, we go through a serie of roundabouts leading to the famouse Long Bien bridge, a bridge constructed during the french occupation, he also tells me, and I can see, there is a train line in the middle of this bridge, a train line based upon a series of iron beams apparenting an Eiffel tower, on the horizontal, and so, we go through a narrow way on the side of this train line, a lane where only motorcycles can go through, no cars here. And so, “this is a big river coming from China” my driver tells me, and I know, what he means is that this is the world famous Red River. And then, as we advance, zigzagging through the bridge, I can see down there, some islands under this bridge, and so, at some point, in the middle of the bridge, we do right and get through a ramp that take us down, onto one of that islands, and here we go, already wandering through some kind of palm trees forest, now getting close to a small agglomeration of barracks, scaffolding and piles of trash, it looks, and then, as we dismost, I’m already being presented to some of guys gathering around a small table lit by a dim lamp, smoking big cigarettes, and it happens that, none of them show great contentment with my coming, even so, “there are about a dozen individuals living here”, my host tells me, “more the visitors arriving through the river, from time to time, sometimes, looking to establish trade, other times, looking for a place to hide…” And so, as the night goes on, I get to understand that the main activities exercised here, in addition to the trafficking of illegal substances, are activities involving the construction of knick-knackery, say, statues, sieves, baskets, different kinds of boxes, paintings on silk cloth, and other stuff we have already seen inside the baskets that my host brough with, when he came to me on the shores of the Hoàn Kiếm Lake. And so, as the night goes on, we look at the sky, in silence, while smoking some kind of pot through some sort of water pipes, and then, at some point, it looks that I'm hearing the sound of the he Đàn bầu, that one string chordophone that sounds like a theremin, this is, apparently someone is playing it in the middle of the forest, and so, after a while hearing it, I decided to stand up and look for the place from where the sound is coming, and so, I go through a serie of pathways in the middle of high grass, and somehow, I managed to arrive at a some kind of porch, really in front of the river stream, and so, now I can see, a skinny guy with a long long goatee playing the Đàn bầu here, in the stairs of this porch, and so, he doesn't even look at me as I sit on his side, now facing the lights on the other side of the river.