Cityscapes Blog in October

Cityscapes Blog: 12 cities, 36 bloggers – and every month new insights into our lives as city dwellers

From Goethe Institut:
With a smile, with a nod, with amazement, one reads the contributions of the 36 bloggers from 12 cities who present their own very personal view of ‘their’ city in text, image and film. The journey goes from Berlin, Prague and Istanbul, on to Southeast Asia, Bangkok, Hanoi, Saigon, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, Manila and Singapore, and finally to Sydney and Auckland. The project is called CityScapes Blog.

David Frogier de Ponlevoy, Viet Hung Nguyen and My Hang Tran are the bloggers for Hanoi.

A colorful spectrum of various cultures and backgrounds open up to the reader – you can be transported to foreign worlds, or find yourself in your own city, seeing familiar streets through the eyes of the author. At the same time you can participate, discuss, even voice your own impressions on a topic, or contradict the author.

The project, called CityScapes Blog, was launched by the Goethe-Institut Australia. Each month, the bloggers are given a new topic which they fill with life. They are topics that allow for a wide range of approaches, topics that leave room for individual creativity: for example, ‘Sex in my City’, ‘Going Local’ or ‘Green Issues’. The result is a gradually growing kaleidoscope of various impressions, opinions and images, images that together could be worthy of publishing in book form.

David Frogier de Ponlevoy, Viet Hung Nguyen and My Hang Tran are the bloggers for Hanoi. Only David is a newcomer from abroad, Viet Hung was born in Hanoi, My Hang studied here. From their personal perspectives and backgrounds, they report in different ways about the Vietnamese capital.

David’s contributions are those of a foreigner viewing another culture. He focuses on prejudices and stereotypes of the Vietnamese, and those that foreigners bring with them to Vietnam. In his June article, “Immigrants – same, same?” he forces German expats to reflect on their own attitudes towards the host country Vietnam: “It’s always the same problem with immigrants: they prefer to live in their own neighborhoods. Even after several years in a foreign country their language skills are still so poor that they can not even read official letters. […] We’re talking here about, no, not immigrants in Germany. We’re talking about the Germans in Hanoi.” And, as can be seen in the comments, not everyone laughed about his March article ‘Office sex-talk and Obsessions’, an article actually meant humorously.

Viet Hung and My Hang share other experiences with the blog readers.

My Hang takes us in May into the house of her grandfather and in July reports about the challenge of gathering the whole family in fast-moving Hanoi for a family photo.

Viet Hung’s contributions are also very personal. With his photos he allows the blog readers to look into private living rooms, to view family pictures, to see bathers in the river. He almost always photographs people in their own environments. Often the images are familiar, people like you see every day on Hanoi’s streets. But his photographs also demonstrate sensitive observation skills, they often need no further explanation. In May the following comment rightly appeared below his photo gallery: “Nice photos, I love them! I find a “small piece” of your soul in those pictures.”

The month of September is dedicated to a topic that occupies not only all of Hanoi. “Cents and Sensibilities” invites our bloggers to reflect on the importance of money in their cities and its impact on their society. “How much does happiness cost?” asks Ben Siow in Singapore. David from Hanoi tells us how many plastic bags you need to pay 100,000 €uros cash in Vietnamese Dong. And Viet Hung once again offers us very special insights: a delegation of Buddhist monks from India are picked up from Hanoi’s Noi Bai airport in a fleet of luxury limousines. The absurdity of the situation is captured in these five photos, with, as usual, few words necessary.

We can also look forward to this month! Our bloggers write about the world of fashion, expressions of (youth) culture and zeitgeist. It should be interesting …

These and numerous other contributions can be found here: http://blog.goethe.de/cityscapes/.