Soccer, and the Outskirts of Town

The recent talk of the town here has been the arrival of the Brazilian Olympic soccer team to play the Vietnamese national team in a friendly match in prepartion for Beijing. According to news reports, thousands of Vietnamese fanatics met the Brazilian team at the airport, prompting the Brazilians to request increased security.

Thursday's goal was to try and buy tickets for the match, which was being held at My Dinh Stadium on the western edge of Hanoi. My first stop was the Vietnam Football Federation offices, which features a soccerball-shaped guardhouse. A friendly woman there told me they were sold out and I'd have to go to the stadium to get tickets. There are still tickets available there? I asked. No, she said, black market. That sounded unappealling, but I had a bike and I hadn't been out to the western parts of town, so I figured I'd go try and find the stadium anyway.

Heading west, the first thing I came to was the To Lich River, more of a canal in a concrete channel (not unlike the L.A. River). In fact, I smelled the river long before I saw it. Looking closer, I saw what looked like raw coal floating down it. It could be a nice city amenity with a riverfront park some day, but unfortunately it's got a long way to go.

Crossing the river, I headed towards some of Hanoi's new growth areas. There are densely packed urban areas with a lot of new construction of the tall skinny kind on narrow lots common throughout the city. But there are also open fields where huge new apartment complexes are sprouting up. Here the paved road ended, and a sea of motorbikes waded through a muddy dirt track through and around the fields and the new high-rises. It's just the opposite of what you would see in new growth areas in the U.S.: new buildings popping up without being served by any infrastructure, rather than new roads and utilities stretching out into emptiness before the buildings arrive. I attempted the muddy tracks on my bike before giving up and turning back.


In the neighboring district, I happened upon a beautiful and serene little temple complex. There were a bunch of people hanging out by the entrance gate and they invited me to come in and look around. The temple itself looked a lot like the Temple of Literature, one of Hanoi's major historic sites, but I couldn't find this temple on any maps. There were ponds, courtyards, monk's quarters, pagodas, and altars, and a lot of people milling about, fishing in the ponds, sitting in the shade, etc. It was not hard to imagine this neighborhood as a small village with the temple complex at its center not so long ago, before it was swallowed up by the encroaching metropolis.


By the way, I never made it to the stadium, and ended up watching the game at a Ukrainian restaurant. I was the only customer there, so the Vietnamese waitstaff and I sat around and watched the game. They were a bit disappointed when Vietnam lost, 2-0.