Smoke

Tonight we had kind of a crazy experience. We had been planning to see Inception in Thanh Xuan quarter, and were hanging out in the really fancy mall the theater was in before the show. This mall was crazy—really really fancy and definitely Western-looking. Interestingly, I later learned that it was built by the Russian mafia... Anyway, all of a sudden the lights went out. Me and the students I was with kind of looked around and then eventually started walking towards the exit of the building. When we got out, we noticed that there was tons of black smoke billowing out from the side of the huge building. Over the course of the next hour or so, we watched as the smoke continued to fill the street, some people left the mall but others were still going up the elevators, and people were crossing and walking on the bridge connecting the mall building with the mall building across the street. It seemed very strange to me that: 1) no fire alarm went off, 2) people were not reacting as if this was a big deal, 3) no one took responsibility to direct people anywhere, 4) no police officers or fire fighters showed up…in fact, I saw a security guard just kind of strolling in the opposite direction of the smoke, acting no differently from anyone else. I later talked to Gerard (the EAP liason for our program and our core class professor), and he told me that these things may have related to a different sense of responsibility, this being the first time that a huge building had a fire, or that it could be that it wasn’t as serious as it seemed, because Hanoi does have a fire dept which theoretically should have arrived to deal with the situation. This was definitely a disturbing experience which made me think about what happens when there is rapid development and all the systems aren't in place to deal with safety issues, among other things. Here was this huge and fancy building without clear emergency protocol or working fire alarms.

Anyway, I will definitely keep reflecting on this experience, and I look forward to seeing how it relates to new experiences I encounter and knowledge I gain about Vietnam.