Hanoi’s western suburbs are rapidly changing from rice farms and vegetable gardens to gated communities, office and apartment towers, and grotesquely rectangular retail establishments in strip developments. Before you get quite that far out, check out the Bentley dealership on the south side of Ton That Thuyet. You’d better make it snappy, though – they only had 2 in the showroom. Lavish hotels (the kind with lobbies that have huge chandeliers glistening, even in broad daylight) are springing up left and right. And then there’s the Hanoi Stock Exchange, complete with a near-life-size statue of a rampant bull coated with phony gold just inside the front door.

It’s supposed to imply something about the brokers’ pricing preferences and their material ambitions. Or maybe their collective religion. Anyhow, you’ll have to get any clarification from them.

I think one of them was down Phan Chu Trinh Street last Tuesday morning in the back seat of the biggest BMW that I have ever seen – as big as Cadillacs used to be, and chauffeur-driven to boot. I waved an amiable Hello, but he was preoccupied and didn’t notice. Maybe another time I’ll catch him when he is less intent on business. I would like to ask him a couple of things about that car – like fuel economy. Isn’t he afraid of the price of gasoline going up? And Hanoi traffic congestion – doesn’t he get a lot of parking lot dings? It must cost a pretty penny to keep all of them hammered out. And parking itself – what does it cost to take up the space of 35 motorbikes at the Big C Supercenter? Especially when he runs over there for the close-out sales. Does he get a quantity discount? I’ll let you know all this stuff the next time I see him . . .

The Hanoi Opera House sits on a traffic plaza a couple of blocks east of the Stock Exchange. The first Friday of this month I went there for a performance of “The Bamboo Princess,” sung in Japanese with Vietnamese supertitles, and accompanied by the Viet Nam National Symphony orchestra.

The bassoons featured prominently with solo and choral voices.

Curtain time was advertised as eight o’clock, so I thought that I had plenty of time to get there by a southbound moto whose driver assured me that he knew exactly where it was. However, our eastward view was obstructed by a couple of buses that kept pace with us for several blocks. The consequence was that we overshot by about four blocks to the south. When the driver discovered his error, he assured me that we would turn around and zip back to the Opera House plaza.

We turned around, but we didn’t zip very far. All of the streets for about a three-block radius around the Opera House were obstructed by official vehicles and personnel, the outermost of which were emergency medical, most of whose staff were loitering about in hazmat suits with dust masks pulled down around their throats so they could smoke cigarettes unobstructed. Next were military troops and municipal police with clubs and riot shields at the ready. Innermost were firefighters with hoses connected to pressurized tanks. A short distance past them was a metal barricade, on the other side of which was a throng of young people, maybe college age for the most part, all standing quietly in close orderly ranks listening to a man who stood about half-way up the Opera House steps speaking into a megaphone. Not a peep out of the crowd.

I bustled into my seat about ten minutes late, but the house was about half empty. I surmised that the performance was delayed by the crowd out front.

It finally got underway about twenty-five minutes before nine. During Intermission I scrammed out to the front to see the progress of the demonstration, and there was no trace of the crowd or the constabulary – just the normal vehicular traffic streaming around the plaza.

Following pictures are the reception room and the main staircase.

Also one of the cast members in the audience during Intermission:

And curtain call:

The following day I asked several locals about the theme of the demonstration. They had no idea of what I was talking about. Nor did I find a single syllable on the Internet.