arrival

While I'm being driven through the streets of Hanoi in a strapless taxi staring with dirt and smelly of smoke and through the smudged window pane (oil, butter?) Trying to look outside, I have slight doubts as to whether this traffic zone was a happy choice. Nietzsche was a hiker, he wrote wonderfully seductive sentences about traveling on foot. However, the appeal of hiking never took hold of me. I don't like to ride mountains first up and then down again. In most cases, the hiker does not even look up at all the colorful, billowing treetops and the azure blue sky, but at the ground. To the stones and root traps that even the most unusual vagabond doesn't want to stumble across. It is even worse to hike in company or on well-visited hiking trails. Always looking at the previous hiker's butt, these slow eggs frustrate me after just a few minutes. Walking in company creates evil and misanthropic thoughts that are directed against the faster and fitter before us. I also wouldn't like to be in front of me if I knew that someone like me was walking behind me with such thoughts.

Hiking to viewpoints on beautiful summer days reminds me of ant colonies running into a high-altitude cul-de-sac — what are they looking for up there? There is nothing to eat — take a look around — “Oh that's nice, but it was worth it, isn't it? “— to then scurry down the path again, after the woman in front again, then to a hostel and the next day to another hill. A pretty pointless undertaking seen from an assumed bird's eye view, which I don't want to recommend in the long run.

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Rolling language family

voyages I like it though. Rolling travel on wheels, more precisely on a bicycle. In doing so, I am committed to a relatively new German tradition. You see bicycle travelers abroad — usually other European countries — usually two puffing, sweaty figures in cycling dress, with squeaky orange bicycle bags, water bottle on the middle bar and cell phone on the handlebars. Then you can be sure that these are Germans. If not, then it is a Swiss, something like an ideal German, less often you can also find an Austrian, Belgian or Luxembourger riding a bicycle, but I have never met anyone from Liechtenstein before. Nevertheless, I am inclined to believe that there must be something in the language that tempts constant, tenacious and certainly also somewhat monotonous movement. The German-speaking Waldschrat has left his pine forest, put on his padded cycling shorts and conquered the asphalt.

Now you will have to admit that you will also have to cycle up mountains now and then, move rather slowly just like when hiking and, if you travel as a couple, there will be a woman in front again or something. Yes, I admit that and I prefer the mountains on bike trips from below and from afar, so I can enjoy them wonderfully. But once you have forcibly worked your way up the old climb, then at least you can heat it down afterwards and let your thoughts fly freely.

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Flowing traffic

Perhaps, as I think in a taxi honking over a red light, I should have listened more to Nietzsche and tried hiking again, because Hanoian traffic doesn't exactly tempt you to contribute to excess. And whether I will actually be able to get out of the city of eight million inhabitants alive by bicycle seems to me no longer a question that I absolutely want answered. Traffic lights are used more for decorative purposes; the horn's acoustic signal is far more important: “Attention here I come”. After all, traffic in the city center is slow, because everything that moves, regardless of whether pedestrians (usually tourists), cyclists (usually poorer dealers), scooter drivers (the most dominant and largest crowd), car drivers (privileged but unfortunately not agile enough to prevail against the gap drivers), moves on the street. There are also sidewalks in Hanoi, but they are used for parking and when they are not parked, they are occupied by the shops behind them as additional sales and seating space. If you want to cross a street, stick to the following rule: Walk slowly and evenly into flowing traffic, don't stop and don't turn around, traffic will simply continue to flow around you and let you live (probably).

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Transport individualists and ghost drivers

For Nietzsche, Asia is governed by the rules of an ant state in which everyone knows their role and position, which is full of willing, synchronized labor slaves. Nietzsche did not differentiate between China and Vietnam and other Asian countries. He prefers to write about China and “Chinese”, which means mediocrity, lack of individuality as well as modesty and other, in his opinion, reprehensible virtues.¹ Let us not dwell on the fact that Nietzsche was by no means a philosopher of political correctness. He wouldn't be today and if you imagine that there was a mood that met this term even back then, Nietzsche missed the socially appropriate and decent tone of voice even during his lifetime. For him, some aphorisms suggest, Asia begins in Russia and then Asia does not stop for a long time. There aren't many differences. Asia is a metaphor and not a reality. Were Nietzsche to visit today's Hanoi, the reality would surprise him. The country, which sees itself as a communist — and even when it comes to communism and anarchism, Nietzsche thinks of harmonization — consists of transport individualists. Everyone is different, everyone makes their own decisions. It is difficult for a European to be able to endure so much individualism. Shouldn't you at least complain about the “ghost drivers” in traffic and loudly reprimand them, the ones who simply drive in the opposite direction with their fully loaded vehicle or scooter because they want to turn left right away? But how are you supposed to grumble, how to complain when the horn, that full-tonous instrument of rebuke, has been robbed of its original purpose and reduced to a mere descriptive reference?

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“This today, that tomorrow”

The set of professions that Vietnamese can choose from is also individualistic. In the morning he is a plumber in a scooter workshop, in the evening he is a cook. She works as a hairdresser, but only for a few hours, because her shop is also well equipped to do the job of a locksmith. Foot massage in the back room, tea shop in the entrance area, no problem. Diversity rather than unity is all the more true in culinary terms. There are endless stands of “mini restaurants” shooting out of the ground in the evening. Plastic chairs and tables are placed on the street from some business premises in the back rooms of workshops, clothing stores, shoe stores. gas cookers, pots, food and ingredients as well. Smoke and steam from various exotic dishes are rising everywhere. What forms, permits, notices, certificates and special permits would you have to obtain in good old Europe to be both a workshop and a restaurant? One of them is complicated enough. Because in a country that wants to turn its normal population into employees, the “small business owner” is not welcome. I wonder who pays taxes here? And if so, for what? What the state is missing out on in this way is something that people in our latitudes do not want to tolerate in order to feed themselves.

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Imagination from the first floor

All private buildings could also be seen as a balancing act between dream fulfillment and permanent temporary arrangements. Although there is typical architecture, narrow, long, tall buildings, which, from a collectivistic point of view, could be arranged well and gladly in rank and file, but which constantly want to punch out of balance through their artistic individual design: There the wrought-iron balcony, here a Virgin Mary set in a bay window, the imitation marble over it, the cinnamon-colored pillars. In front of the carefully and imaginatively designed façade, the garage on the ground floor is unbeatable in terms of versatility and ugliness, the consistent proof that “form follows function” in no way leads to an appealing aesthetic. Pragmatism on earth, imagination from the first floor to the top floor. Nietzsche might have liked the Vietnamese vertical?

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Bridges made of confection

I must admit that there is always a problem when it comes to dialogue with the deceased. How can you be sure that he is not talking to himself? Where do our interpretations end and where do the projections begin? I would have liked to ask a specialist. And Vietnam would probably have been a suitable country for that. Because maintaining contact with deceased ancestors through altars and offerings is omnipresent. If the bridge between the kingdoms of the hereafter and this world is built from fruit, canned tea and sweets, perhaps with so much delightful materiality, the hereafter cannot degenerate into a peel, pale and unbelievable illusion?! The merchant's boy kneels in awe before the altar, prays or negotiates. He then removes the dragon fruit from the altar and gives it to me as a gift from the dead. I simply did not dare to ask.

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Link to part 2 (Cambodia)

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The pictures for this article are photographs by the author.

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footnotes

1: See for example: M206, FW 24, FW 377, JGB 267, GM I, 12.