Hanoi Hilton

We were buying a salami and a baguette in a modern supermarket, when I realized why I liked the city. How pleasant to find oneself in a place without attractions. In Hanoi, there's no Splendid Tower Built By A Rich But Entirely Forgettable Personage. There's no Bulky Monument To Commemorate An Otherwise Uninteresting Historical Event. Not even some Extinct Religion's Temple To A Now-Unworshipped God. The curse of traveling is the oversold destination, and Hanoi has none of it.

Here we can enjoy an unembellished city. There is nothing particular to see and nothing important to do. It was raining today, but we donned hooded jackets and found ourselves again in South East Asia. The smell of spices and peppers, the beeping of thousands of horns, the chaotic traffic swirling about you like gnats as you cross a street, the apartment blocks wrapped in power lines and covered in creeping mildew—we were happy.

To provide some context for our visit, we decided to find the Hanoi Hilton. It was a prison built by the French, for whom it housed thousands of Vietnamese prisoners that no one cared about. After the French decamped, the Vietnamese Communists then housed about 25 of my own countrymen there, about whom many people cared a great deal. One of those prisoners is now running for president.

Today, 90% of the prison has been leveled to make way for an office tower and shopping mall—welcome to the New Vietnam. There Nicole and I sipped a coffee and shopped in a modern supermarket, purchasing, quite by accident, some French cheese, a Vietnamese baguette, and an American sausage. I'd like to point out that this historically ironic meal went quite well with a Thai beer.

Then we went over to the prison. Only about a quarter of it now remains as a museum, which excoriates the French and Americans. History is always written by the victors, of course. Do you want a description of the place? Thick walls, imposing gates, miserable concrete cells, the entirety of John McCain's flight suit, and a scale model of a guillotine. Prisons are not much fun though, so we left just before we got to the exhibit on Comrades Propagandizing the Revolution—fascinating though it most certainly was—and walked home in a driving rain.

Tomorrow, we will have more to report.