Small people indeed, and it was frequently impossible to judge the ages of those we saw. In a disappointing Vietnamese restaurant one evening some weeks later, was a hauntingly beautiful woman who waited on us.  Her lemon grass sauce had no trace of lemon grass flavour and when Ruth called her over to point out that fact, I was both delighted and disturbed by her proximity, not only on account of her powerful attractiveness but because, although her eyes and demeanor showed adult experience, it was hard to reconcile that perception with the taut and tiny body that contained them.  As we stood later to leave I was shocked yet again by how much I dwarfed her, and I looked back repeatedly with a mixture of desire and disbelief.  Was this person truly an adult?  This was in Saigon and if I return there I will avoid that restaurant.  By the way, she had taken Ruth's plate back to the kitchen and replaced the mystery gravy with chili sauce!

At the other extreme were the foreign tourists, especially the Americans if I am any judge of accents, who were not only Occidentally larger than the locals, but whose caloric diets and sedentary lifestyles had rendered many of them quite grossly unattractive.  Most of the French and Danes and Swiss that we met looked slim and fit while a high proportion of Yanks bulged and waddled, sometimes I observed, to the contemptuous amusement of the shopkeepers.  Is this the fate awaiting the Vietnamese as they too flock to McDonald's and KFC, and fill their internet cafes with indolent youth absorbed in violent computer games?  Recent Chinese statistics have shown that 25% of Shanghai school children are now overweight, and though a fat Vietnamese is still a rare sight the day is sadly coming, I fear.

A walk around the Old Quarter in the drizzle filled an afternoon delightfully.  There is a street of silver- and coppersmiths creating fascinating polyrhythms with their hammers, and other streets of cloth and clothing merchants, or souvenir shops one of which featured hundreds of stuffed bears - only.  This kind of organization is good for the shopper; comparison shopping is easy and the buyer's bargaining power is made the stronger through knowledge that if the price is too high one can simply go next door.  It's surprising how the price drops when you do that!  It is also a puzzle to us how so many shops selling the same things, can survive.  But survive they do, and one walks away perhaps with a great bargain, but always wondering whether in fact the price was still fair.  I have seen a price drop from 600 to 75 - the units don't matter - through astute bargaining.  Obviously the seller still made a profit, so I wonder whenever I buy, in the East or in the West, how badly I am being ripped off.  We Westerners are accustomed to seeing posted prices, but we really have no better idea if those prices are fair.

Travelling cheaply, we bought a small quantity of fresh vegetables and some spicy marinated fish in the Old Quarter market to eat later in our room.  The cost was just pennies, but all I had was a 50,000 Dong note.  The vegetable lady took it and proceeded to serve someone else, then someone else.  Ever suspicious, as travellers become, that I was being charged a special "tourist" price, and not knowing what the true price should be anyway, I asked for my change in English, politely and with a smile, as the guidebook suggests.  To become angry is to lose face.  No response.  She served the next customer.  I waited a bit and asked again, a little more emphatically.  What I did not know, and what shop keepers in Asia rarely bother to explain, even with a gesture, is that she was waiting for an assistant who had observed the transaction to bring change.  My voice was now impatient and my smile was gone.  Should I get angry, I thought, anger not being something I express easily in public?  If so, how angry? Would it accomplish anything?  Was it worth it for only $3?  I felt helplessly at ransom, a constant sensation, if only to a slight degree, when making a purchase in an unknown language (and the phrasebook didn't help).  Ruth is much more direct than I am in these situations, and I wished I had more of that quality as she stood beside me, holding her tongue admirably.  Just as the anger at the shop keeper and confusion at my own reticence were becoming intolerable, the lady handed me my change and deflated me completely.  Feeling slightly weak-kneed, I walked on under the dripline of the vendors' tents, pushing past the many other umbrellas and wondering if I had the courage to attempt another purchase.

The Old Quarter oozes charm for the visitor, and we had tiny cups of tea with a gracious young lady in a former wealthy merchant's house which the king and queen of Sweden had also recently visited, insisting on paying for items offered to them as gifts.  Lunch across the street at the Tamarind Cafe introduced me to the further delights of a "Vietnamese drip", the wonderful coffer that I now live for.  The Cathedral in the rain offered a good photo-op, the wet and glassy pavement providing an interesting reflection of the otherwise not-outstanding red brick building; ordinary in Europe, that is, but in Vietnam it did indeed stand out.  We did not go inside, both of us having visited Europe in the past and having become "cathedralled out".  Later the colour and magic of Buddhist temples would insinuate themselves into our perceptions, but not yet.

One evening I went in search of a non-sweet bottle of local wine.  I got directions in French to a supermarket but had no idea how to say 'dry wine' in Vietnamese.  As I recall, after trying to convey my wishes in English, French and my smattering of Chinese, I gave up.  But serendipity is ever watchful and I discovered our hotel was very close to the Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre.  The next evening we arrived in plenty of time for the 8 pm performance.  In a rare lapse, we discovered we had left our camera at the hotel.  This was doubly a faux pas since Ruth is an excellent photographer (as the accompanying pictures, most of which are hers will attest) and is never without her camera, and since it was our policy not to leave valuables such as cash or cameras in our room unattended.  I volunteered to rush back and retrieve it, returning as the audience was filing upstairs into the auditorium past the large "No Photographs During Performance" sign.  Ruth dutifully put the camera away and I sighed respectfully.  It is also our policy to conform to local customs and regulations as much as we are aware of them.  After a lengthy welcome in three languages for the mostly non-Vietnamese audience, the performance began - to a barrage of camera flashes which continued throughout the evening.  It was not the first time we were embarrassed to be foreigners.

The puppets performed in a pool of water 4 by 5 metres, controlled by people behind a loosely woven black curtain.  They stood in the water themselves, manipulating long underwater poles to which the puppets were attached, controlling their motions with great skill and dexterity while a live orchestra played.  I frequently wondered how they changed puppets so quickly and how they avoided tripping over one another.  Wonderfully painted and gilded birds and dragons dashed about while human figures planted and harvested, danced and celebrated.  My favourite was a peasant figure with one arm swinging loosely.  By rocking the puppet left and right, the loose arm swayed across the body and seemed to reach for tufts of rice held in the other, fixed, hand and swing back to "plant" them in time to the music.  The show unfolded with unfailing precision and we left very satisfied.

The orchestra too, displayed an accuracy and artistry that were the more remarkable for having to do the same thing every night of the year.  It featured bells, drums, plucked and bowed strings, flutes and some fine voices, and it introduced me to an utterly novel instrument whose name I never discovered.  It sat on a table, flat, like a Japanese koto.  It had a single string fixed on the player's right side, and attached on the left to the base of a peculiar tapered and very flexible vertical stick.  The lady plucked the string with her right hand and bent the stick left and right to alter the pitch.  That her intonation was completely accurate did not escape my notice, and that she could bend the stick so as to give not only a precise pitch, but a wonderfully expressive glissando or a perfectly controlled vibrato, bespoke many hours of devotion and practice.  Except for the plucked attack to each note the instrument sounded very much like a theremin.  The price of a ticket included a short cassette recording of this music, and true to bureaucratic tradition when I bought two tickets, Ruth standing there with me - obviously a couple - I was given two copies of the tape.  I still have them.  The lineup behind us was long, and I didn't feel like trying to explain what should have been obvious.

One sunny afternoon (yes, a few hours of warmth sometimes happened) we visited the Ho Chi Minh mausoleum.  I sat in the front seat of the taxi with the guidebook map of the city open before me.  Sometimes cabbies will take a longer route if they think you don't know where you are - a map on the lap is a kind of insurance.  I was confident that I knew just where we were, yet we arrived well before I thought we should.  This driver was more than honest, he worked miracles!  In my younger days I had had many another book on my lap as I tried to negotiate my way through the various schools of thought and propaganda that surrounded me.  Capitalism I thought I knew, after all I grew up in its seductive grip, but the unthinking consumerism that it encourages never quite convinced.  Oh, I had things, a house, 3 cars at one point, but I never really believed in them for even a quick reading of Capitalist history reveals a dreary string of ruthless factory owners facing off against equally truculent unions, creating a cycle of greed whose resulting howlingly unrealistic prices now serve to exclude the vast majority of our species from the supposed good life.- Article Continued Below -