Who Needs A Suburban: Part IV

I heard an avid traveller once say that “the world is like a puzzle and you have to travel to figure it out.” When roaming the streets of Hanoi many years ago I asked myself, “Who needs a suburban?” And now I know, after revisiting the bustling city, apparently everybody.

During our first trip to Hanoi, my family and I were flabbergasted by the odd things people carted around on their mopeds, but today, standing in the very same streets as we once stood, expecting to see dinky mopeds hauling magnificently crazy things like various farm animals, refrigerators, and even entire potted trees fastened down by a withering piece of measly rope, we were, frankly, disappointed.

Instead we gazed in awe for an entirely different reason; that reason being a glut of gas guzzling cars (including a fair share of suburbans) that criminally concealed all of the good, wacky stuff that should be on mopeds behind their tinted windows, and trite trunks. (To be entirely fair, there are still mopeds hauling around crazy stuff, just not as many as before.) This is probably because when anyone needs to transport the three pigs they just recently slaughtered, instead of firing up the old moped and hoping for the best, they simply call in a favor from the friend with the four by four.

Now although this does hinder my enjoyment, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing and actually happens in almost every Asian country. Each country starts off big, bustling, and third worldish; so dense with progression that you can smell it. Progression, for those of you who don’t know, smells a lot like exhaust. Mopeds, especially thousands upon thousands of them crammed into every square inch of a metropolitan city, equals a plethora of pollution. This means that for every suburban driving around out there, two or three less mopeds are polluting it up. So I guess, our enjoyment of watching insane people speed by with a tremendous tree tied to the back is indirectly taking a bullet for Mother Earth. I knew tourists were good for something other than the economy!

I think that many cultures now a days are losing their individuality, their tradition, their weird, quirky nuances that bewilder outsiders and make them feel like there truly visiting a different place than home. Tanzania for example, started off a country, a piece of land like the rest, except entirely different from anything else; full of culture rich African tribes with their different beliefs, inventions, and traditions. However, in our modern day and age, where almost everybody lusts for industrial modernization, and often lose sight of what makes them, well, them, some invigorating Tanzanian traditions are being replaced by western ones. Now that everything is so connected and constantly communicating, revolutionary inventions spread like wildfire and you see kids in Africa with iPhones!

Think about it. Several centuries ago civilizations lived in complete isolation from one another, and while one country would invent the bow and arrow to hunt long distance targets, another would invent the blow dart gun, and another would invent the boomerang. All three had a similar problem, but due to the lack of contact with one another, each had no choice but to innovate their own solution.
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I’m just wondering: what if Hanoi never ever knew about the car and never absorbed it into their society? Then they would of needed a fast, efficient, and personalized mode of transportation and would be forced to innovate. For all we know they may have solved the problem by inventing the first viable hovercraft! (Of course if they invented the hovercraft in this way, it wouldn’t really benefit us because they wouldn’t be able to communicate with us in the first place). The point is that with all of this instantaneous communication and rapid absorbtion of each other’s inventions, will we all be thinking the same thing, our ideas limited by lack of different perspective? Maybe I’m just paranoid, and perhaps being able to communicate faster and easier with one another will lead to more collaboration, and thus, more powerful solutions!

All I know is that I hope every country doesn’t strive for similarity, because it’s really difficult to solve a puzzle where every piece is shaped exactly the same.

 

Traffic lights are still rare so there is definitely entertainment on the street corner!

*****

Note: If you would like to read my old posts “Who Needs A Suburban?” “Who Needs A Suburban Continued” and “Who Needs A Suburban Part 3” from 2009, click away!