Echoes of a Guest from 1972

Posted by Kai Speth, General Manager, Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi | In Hanoi, History, Hotels, Travel | On 03-05-2012
Exploring the bomb shelter

Exploring the bomb shelter

Most upscale hotels lay claim to a roll call of famous personages who’ve stayed a night, a week, a month. We have more than our fair share of famous guests here at the Metropole. For most of today’s guests, yesterday’s visitors are mere curiosities. But that wasn’t the case yesterday when one of my hotel’s former guests moved me almost to tears.

If you’ve been reading this blog since last summer, you know we’ve been working on an excavation of a bomb shelter we discovered in our garden during a renovation of the Bamboo Bar. And if you haven’t been reading this series, all the news of the shelter’s re-development is archived here.

I knew from the moment that our engineering team broke through the concrete roof of the shelter that there was a profound visitor experience for guests of the hotel waiting below. But I couldn’t tell you just how profound until I walked a group of 10 Americans through the space yesterday.

We descended the new stairway to the bunker, past layers of concrete and rebar, to the warren of rooms and corridors that the hotel’s guests retreated to when the city’s sirens blared. We haven’t gussied up this space. It’s still stark. Still dank. Still, there is the patina of 40 years’s rust on the doors and the sepia tone to concrete that looks like it could still withstand anything. Read more

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Tagging the Metropole’s Bunker

Posted by Kai Speth, General Manager, Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi | In Hanoi, Hotels, Travel | On 27-03-2012

Robert Devereaux

Bob Devereaux never fancied himself a tagger, but if Hanoi is an urban area, and the name and date he scratched into the wall of the hotel’s air raid shelter can be construed as graffiti, then a tagger he is.

When the hotel unearthed the shelter early last fall, Devereaux’s name was an intriguing discovery, etched into one wall at the bottom of a shaft leading to corridors and rooms that protected hotel guests in the 1960s and 1970s. His inscription runs to four brief lines, with BOB in all caps on top, his surname just below, day and month on the third line and 1975 at bottom.

For months, the Metropole wondered who this Bob Devereaux was and why had he inscribed his name. Was this the date the hotel sealed up the shelter? Afterall, it was 1975. The war was over. Who needs an air raid shelter?

The Internet provided few clues, but then one day, an email came in over the Metropole’s transom: “I am the person who wrote on the wall of the bunker during the time I was occupying a room at the Metropole for a year during 1975/76.” Read more

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You Haven’t been to Hanoi if You Haven’t Been to the Temple of Literature

Posted by Kai Speth, General Manager, Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi | In Hanoi, Travel | On 28-02-2012
Great Middle Gate at the Temple of Literature

Great Middle Gate at the Temple of Literature

If you’ve come to Hanoi and not visited the Temple of Literature, then you’ve missed a chance that’s tantamount to visiting Paris but missing the Eiffel Tower, visiting London and skipping the British Museum, visiting New York City and missing a Yankees game. (Okay, okay, I admit – maybe it’s just a thing with me and the Yankees.) But I am serious about  the Temple of Literature, a five-and-a-half hectare compound of temples, pavilions and courtyards devoted to the legacy of Confucianism. This is why:

Green Space. Among its other attributes, there is a tremendously attractive spatial relationship here between buildings, open space and courtyards. The progression from  the Great Portico to the Constellation of Literature Gate to the Garden of the Stelae is a bit like walking through a dream of East Asia.  Most of us retain an image of Asia that’s come from glimpses, here and there, of ink paintings. This space is as close as you can get to actually inhabiting one of those ink drawings.

Turtles. What’s not to love about the turtle, their ancient pedigree, their longevity and their example as a slow-and-steady guide to life. In the Temple of Literature, 82 stone turtles support as many stelae inscribed with the names of 1,306 doctor laureates who won the nation’s highest academic honors between 1442 and 1779. During the war with America, the Vietnamese entombed these turtle and stelea to wait out aerial bombardments.

Confucius. The temple itself is an ode to Confucianism, and to know Vietnam is to know Confucius, ‘teacher of ten-thousand generations.’ There is a statue of the man himself in the Great House of Ceremonies at back. Vietnam is changing fast – as fast as a Polaroid, as one travel writer once said. But the superstructure laid down by Confucianism where the son defers to the father, the student to the teacher, and so on, is still in evidence. There have been many concessions to modernity in Vietnam, but you’ve still got to appreciate Confucius if you are to know this country. Read more

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Most Interesting Things I’ve Learned about Hanoi

Posted by Kai Speth, General Manager, Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi | In Hanoi, Travel | On 29-01-2012
Tortoise Hill Tower in Hoan Kiem Lake

Tortoise Hill Tower in Hoan Kiem Lake

Did you know that Hoan Kiem Lake, our charming teal green oasis in the midst of the city, is actually a souvenir of the Red River? About six hundred years ago, the Red River shifted leaving this pool of water. I’ve only learned this recently, and I love the image of the lake (also known at Ho Guom) as a “souvenir.” Over the past several years, I’ve learned a lot about Hanoi. These are some of my gems:

- What may be the oldest, extant colonial French building in Hanoi is at the south end of Hoan Kiem Lake, not far from my hotel. Check out the date noted in bas-relief – 1886 – at  3 Hang Khay Street.

- Ho Chi Minh arrived in Hanoi for the first time in 1945 when he was in his mid-50s. He lived in a house at 48 Hang Ngang Street in the city’s Old Quarter.
Also in Hoan Kiem Lake, the Tortoise Tower was built by a wealthy 19th Century businessman as a burial site for his parents. But Hanoians didn’t agree that such a public spot should memorialise just one family. The businessman buried his parents elsewhere.

- Hoa Lo Prison where U.S. Senator John McCain whiled away years during the war was opened in 1899 after the colonial French razed a pottery village. Hoa Lo means pottery kilns. The Americans knew the prison as the Hanoi Hilton. Read more

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The Five C’s of Christmas at the Hotel Metropole Hanoi

Posted by Kai Speth, General Manager, Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi | In Hanoi, Hotels, Travel | On 22-12-2011
Christmas tree at the Metropole

Christmas tree at the Metropole

We’re not even halfway through the month, and the air in this grand old hotel is abuzz with Christmas fever.

It starts early in the morning when the bakers at L’Epicerie take the first log cake out of the oven, and it simmers down late at night when we give the lights on our 15-metre tree a rest.

Though the Metropole is in the year-round business of making people feel at home, when December comes along we make it a point to rekindle our efforts, on every front.

Whether it’s creating the atmosphere expats are missing, or representing the much-loved holiday for Vietnamese visitors, we try to ensure that everyone who comes through our French-style doors gets a taste of the warmth and generosity that is at the heart of the Christmas season. Read more

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