Tam Dao

About a month ago I was getting rather eager to do some travelling in Viet Nam as I had done very little. Now I'm about ready for a weekend where I don't have anything planned. Alas, with Cambodia rapidly approaching, and another trip planned this weekend, it seems that I will have to wait until the middle of January before that is going to happen.

Two weeks ago I was invited to join a group of Vietnamese people who are training to climb mount Fansipan (Sounds like Fancy Pan, and I always think of fancy pants whenever somebody mentions it) to join them in a practice climb up a mountain that is two hours away from Hanoi. As I am going to Cambodia at Christmas I would be unable to join them for their climb up the tallest mountain in South East Asia, but as I am planning to go there eventually and do it I figured it would be fun to join them. Thus early on Saturday morning, I climbed on my motorbike, picked up my cohort Nathan, and meet a group of about 12 young Vietnamese people who would be doing the hike.

The drive up to the town of Tam Dao was quite spectacular, although the town itself was in many ways even more breathtaking. It's an old French retreat town up in the mountains north west of Hanoi. When the summer heat hit, the French fled here to cool off, as it is literally straight up a mountain. My little motorbike was barely able to climb the 10% grades in the lowest gear due to having two massive white guys on it. The town was not our final destination, though we had a quick cup of coffee and enjoyed the view before moving on.

After reaching the gate of the Tam Dao national park, we parked our bikes and began the two hour climb to the top. Although I didn't know it at the time, the mountain on the left was our target, and we did indeed make it all the way to the top. Initially it was fairly easy hiking, what with it being pretty much a gravel road. After about half an hour we spit off of the main road onto a smaller trail.

This smaller trail instantly ramped up the difficulty in regards to gradient. It kept getting harder and steeper all the time. Eventually after about an hour of hiking the trail was very nearly vertical. What helped and made the climb possible was all the bamboo that made up the forest. It was nearly guaranteed to be strong enough to help at any point. After two hours of exhausting climbing, we made it to the top and saw this:

A little disappointing. Being one of the first people up there, we had the opportunity to wait around and eat lunch while the stragglers made their way up to the top. Once everyone was there, the clouds broke up a bit and then got to see this:

Easily a much better view. After a quasi-potluck lunch, we made our descent down. Oddly enough, it was twice as easy to go down as up, and took just over half as long. Weird.

On the way home I shot this short video just to give you an idea of what it is like riding here in the mountains.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqw4tAwMJ4A

All in all, it was a really fun trip.

Last week I went on another MCC trip out into the provinces, this time to check out water and sanitation projects. What that entails is looking at outhouses. Not the most fun thing to do, but it was still an enjoyable trip.

One of the outhouses we visited. Still under construction

The view from the outhouse. I wouldn't mind using an outhouse if I had a view like that.

The owner and builder of the previously shown outhouse

Someone said it is an eggplant. It's odd in any case

A rainy day in rural Vietnam

The path to one of the houses we visited

I'm Back!

It's almost been a months since I've posted anything. This is not due to me not having anything interesting to talk about, far from it. I have been doing quite a bit of traveling in the past month or so.

A good place to start would be my Bat Trang, a ceramics village to the west of Hanoi. A co-worker, Anh,  invited myself and Nathan to join her and her sister in a trip to visit Bat Trang, and so one Saturday morning the four of us piled into a bus and drove for over an hour to get there. Bat Trang is only about 30 Km away, which gives you an idea of how bad the road was. Because there were so many people on the bus we had to stand, which was sort of fun, but not for as long as we had to do it. The village itself was very quiet, and the ceramics they made there were actually pretty nice looking. We opted to go to a shop where we had an opporutinity to make our own ceramics. At first we were able to make some cool stuff, but over time it seemed like our skills waned and by the end we were awful. By the end Anh managed to convince her husband to come picks us up so that we wouldn't have to take the bus back.

Freshly made pottery, awaiting decorating and glazing

In the following weeks I went out of town occasionally with my host family, first to my host-father's home village, and then to the countryside for a wedding reception. Both were interesting due to the fact that they were places where I really stood out. The reception was quite fun as it involved a big dinner, people doing karaoke and meeting lots of interesting people. It was quite the party.



Last weekend I was at Mai Chau, a Thai minority village to the south of Hanoi in the mountains. This was a trip that was organized by a group at the church that I attend here. To get there I had two options: first was to go by bus and the second was to go by motorbike. I am very, very glad I opted for the second choice as driving through the mountains was one of the most fun things I have ever done. There were 8 bikes in total that went and we stuck together as a group. To get to the mountains was a pain, first driving a 125cc motorbike on a highway (I was surprised by the fact that I could coax the bike to about 75 km/h), and then a section of road that made Hanoi streets look calm. It was tough trying to keep up with everyone and weave through trucks and cars. Eventually we took a side-road that took us up into mountains that looked very much like something from a Chinese landscape painting. It was gorgeous, but we were in a hurry to get to Mai Chau, so there was never a time for pictures. The road was fairly quiet and it was a lot of up and down. Eventually we got to Mai Chau itself and had a very relaxing time. It was really nice to be away from Hanoi and be in a place that was quiet and had clean air. The drive home was almost exactly the same, albeit in reverse and for half the trip I had a passenger.

Rice was just harvested, leaving the fields looking like this

Water Buffalo grazing in the harvested fields

Notice the satellite dish? I guess cable tv hasn't made it out here yet

Finally, yesterday I went out into the countryside to look at a project that MCC is involved in. The one we looked at involved providing lunches for preschool children in an effort to get more to attend. It was a nice trip for me, due to the fact that I was chosen to do administrative and tech work at the MCC office. Nathan drew the straw that involves writing stories about the people that we meet on trips like this. So I got to spend the morning taking pictures and relaxing while Nathan interviewed people.

In the coming weeks I think I will be going on a couple more MCC trips, and during Christmas and New Years I will be spending time in Cambodia, visiting some of my fellow SALTers, enjoying the beach, and visiting Ankor Wat.

Tich Cho

A topic that I've avoiding writing about has been the food here in Vietnam, as there were some gastronomic oddities that I was alerted. However, as of last weekend I have finally eaten tich cho and am willing to talk about what food here looks like. In Vietnamese, tich means meat and cho means dog. Dog meat. It was quite an experience as it is one of only three foods here in Vietnam that has superstition around it. Vietnam uses the standard Gregorian calendar in the office, but at home there is a strict adherence to the lunar calendar. In my host-family there is a calendar in the kitchen that has the Gregorian in big font and the lunar in slightly smaller font. This all relate to tich cho in that you can only eat tich cho in the last half of the lunar month, from the 16th to the 30th. To eat it any other time is bad luck. This also applies to duck and calamari. In order to eat dog we had to go to a restaurant that serves it. The way the smaller restaurants are here is that they serve one kind of food, like phu, cho, bun or banh my. We ended up eating boiled dog, fried dog, dog sausage, and my personal favourite, dog stewed in dog blood. Sounds gross, but it was actually not bad. After eating it, I came to the conclusion that dog tastes like deer.

However, not all food in Vietnam is as strange as that. The two most important things to Vietnamese cuisine is rice and fish sauce. Everything else is secondary to that. A typical meal in a household consists of rice, a couple types of meat, a vegetable (sliced cucumber is popular), and a soup. You dish out rice into a little bowl and then just grab whatever you want from the dishes in the centre of the table. Its pretty chaotic, but fun. Most things are dipped in fish sauce before being eaten, especially things like nem (spring rolls).

The breakfast that I usually eat is called phu bo. Essentially it is eating soup for breakfast. Phu are long, flat noodles and bo is beef, and it is served in a big bowl of beef broth. It's quite the meal first thing in the morning, but nowadays it feels quite cool at that time of day. Soup really warms you up.

Other foods that are common on the street are bun cha, which is rounder noodle in soup served with little grilled pieces of meat and banh cuan, which is a rice pancake and pork. 

Lastly, I ate KFC here recently and I have to say that in comparison to most Vietnamese foods, its not very salty. 

The Art of the Motorcycle

As autumn continues to be summer here (everyone insists that it should be cooling off soon), I am glad that I am have the opportunity to ride a motorcycle here in Ha Noi. While I would rather ride my bicycle everywhere, the heat, combined with the fact that it takes well over an hour to get to my Vietnamese class makes doing so unpleasant and time consuming. Thus I ride a motorbike throughout the city.

 

There are times though that the road looks like this, motorcycles at a near standstill and bumper to bumper. There is no rhyme or reason to where these traffic jams occur as it they never happen in the same place twice. My hypothesis is idiot drivers in cars are doing stupid things and blocking the road, but that's just my opinion as a motorcyclist. I'm sure the people in cars hate the moto's just as much as we dislike them, but I digress. These jams are actually a potential source of injury. One day on my way to class the side of my foot was cut up pretty good when a moto got too close to mine and my massive foot, which sticks out pretty far, sliced against some metal on the other bike.
 

Despite the potential danger to myself, I find riding a lot of fun. The bridge in the first picture is the Cuong Duong bridge and is the one that I drive over everyday. I live in the suburbs on the far side of the Red River, and so I have to commute to downtown and beyond everyday. In the distance of the second picture you can see Eiffel's (The same one as the tower) Long Bien Bridge. It's in pretty bad shape and is the bridge you have to use if you are riding a bicycle. Its for cyclists, both moto and bi, and for trains. You can also see one of the biggest islands in the Red River in Ha Noi. It's used for farmland, which seems odd to me seeings though right beside it is downtown Ha Noi. It makes sense when you think about the fact that there is really no central planning in Ha Noi, you just sort of build whatever you want wherever you want.

The building in the third picture is of the Ha Noi Opera House. Apparently it is a copy and paste job of a famous opera house in Paris. I have never been inside it, but I see it all the time as it sits on the corner of one of the biggest crossroads in Ha Noi. The buildings here in Hanoi are interesting because every once in a while you run across an old French building from the colonial period, or an old Soviet-style building from the 70's and 80's, or even an old Vietnamese pagoda/temple/compound. The city has grown rapidly in the last 200 years or so, and it has engulfed many buildings and places that were formerly standing by itself. It becomes almost a game to spot these places in amongst the bland multi-story places that make up most of the buildings here in Ha Noi. 

Vietnamese classes are almost done, with only two weeks or so left. One class we were learning about road names, how to direct people to a destination, what vehicles are called, etc. when we got to a page on road control signs like stop signs, one way and wrong way. I jokingly told the teacher that we didn't need to know this because nobody in Vietnam followed the signs. She agreed with me and we moved on. I still don't know what the signs are and it really doesn't matter. I regularly go the wrong way on a one way street to get to  school.

My birthday was a week and a bit ago on the 2nd and was really interesting. Prior to the day I was taken by my supervisor at The Gioi to go get a birthday gift. He took me to a shirt shop and got two new dress shirts for my birthday. I thought that this was an anomaly, but on my birthday I received another new dress shirt. Apparently that's what you get for your birthday, along with flowers. Another Vietnamese tradition is going out for Buffet to celebrate. It was a big, long meal that left me full for days, but it was really fun. My youngest host brother also has the same birthday as myself, except that he is five years younger, and so a bunch of his friends were there as well. 

Home away from home

Welcome to my host family's house! When you walk in through the front doors this is the greeting area. The house is fairly ordinary around here in terms of design: Narrow houses with multiple floors. The kitchen and social place on the main floor and bedrooms and such on the other levels. The door you see is the end of the house

My host family, like a grand majority of Vietnamese, follow the Confucian tradition of ancestor worship. This is my families altar on the top floor. It also doubles as a storage room. 

 

 The top floor (my host-family's house has four floors) is also where most Vietnamese houses have their laundry facilities. My family has a washer, making laundry quite easy.

 

 The view from the fourth floor. This entire area is filled with people who work for Vietnam Airlines, making it a bit of a upper-middle class suburb of Ha Noi. My host-family has four people in it: My host-father, Shun, host-mother Bay, and two host brother, Hai and Nam. All of them except for Nam work as air traffic controllers. 

 

 This is my room. Nothing too amazing, but I do have cable tv, decent enough Internet, and air conditioning. I can't really say that I'm suffering too bad in terms of accommodation. 

The view from my window makes it seem like Hanoi has a lot of green space. However, what you are looking at is the Military Airport in Hanoi. I've only heard a plane once, so either they're really sneaky or I'm just plain deaf. The bars you see are fairly common. Vietnamese people are absolutely paranoid about security. Almost all windows have bars, and there are multiple locks just to get into a house. My place has four separate locks, though most of the time only two are engaged. The outermost gate is always locked, even when everyone is at home.

 

Hanoi may not have a lot of green space, but there are tons of lakes throughout the city. This is a fairly average sized one.

Translation Fun

Just this afternoon I've been given the honour of grading some translations so that The Gioi has a record of who is good and who is bad. I thought that I would share with you the opening sentence from each of them, just to give you a taste of what I'm up against.

Like many nations in the world, 54 ethnics group of Vietnam have existed the primitive beliefs.

54 ethic groups of Vietnam, like many others in the world, had ever held primitive beliefs which say that every object has a soul.

Like other ethnic groups in the world, the 54 ethnic groups of Vietnam used to follow many primitive religions.

Like other races in the world, 54 Vietnamese ethic groups also have their own primitive belief .

Like many other nations in the world, Vietnamese 54 ethnic groups have ever had the primitive religious beliefs.

Like other ones in the world, 54 ethnic groups of Vietnam have also appeared folk religious beliefs.

Like many other peoples in the world, 54 Vietnam’s ethnic groups did have their primitive beliefs.

Like many other ethic groups in the world, 54 Vietnamese ethnic groups also had primitive religions.

Like many other peoples in the world, 54 Vietnamese ethnic groups did hold primitive religious beliefs.

Like many nations in the world, 54 Vietnamese ethnic groups used to have primitive faiths.

Like many other peoples over the world, primitive beliefs existed in 54 ethnic groups of Vietnam.

Like many other nations in the world, there used to exist primitive beliefs in 54 nations of Vietnam.

As many other ethnic groups in the world, 54 ethnic groups of Vietnam also have had primitive religions.

Like many ethnic groups in the world, Vietnam 54 ethnic groups practiced folk beliefs.

Some good, some bad it seems.

The Soundless Fury

Drinking iced coffee at night on the 13th floor of a hotel overlooking downtown Ha Noi. The city never seems to sleep and the lights of cars and motorcycles bustle and move swiftly across bridges and down streets in this city. The sky is a formless grey, reflecting the thousands of lights the populate Ha Noi. It is only now that I realize just how loud the ambient noise is in the city. Overtop the Old Quarter of the city lightning flashes with astounding frequency, but appears to be stationary. It flashes in the clouds and seems to travel horizontally. I think to myself that this facinating storm that is only a couple kilometers away should be crashing and banging in the background and ruining the conversation that is going on at the table, but there is a peculiar silence in the air. At this altitude one cannot hear the street noise that is seemingly omnipresent in this city, whether one is in the suburbs or in the heart of the city. This is not the first time I have seen and not heard storms here, so it seems that the noise of the ciy cancels out the violent thunderstorms.

The Gioi Oddities

"The general offensive and uprising was also considered a strategic general drill..."

Could someone please explain to me what a strategic general drill is?

Everyone's a VIP to Someone

Happy Independance Day! If you are not as fortunate as I to be in Vietnam and are instead some place else I suppose you can still celebrate, though you may be wondering why you are celebrating. As far as I can tell September 2 is the anniversary of the day that Vietnam gained it's independance from France. People here celebrate by staying home and doing very little. I spent some time this afternoon in the touristy "Old District" and was underwhelmed by the number of people milling about. The streets were quite dead compared to what I have gotten used to.

Some wonderful Soviet architecture gracing the historic "Old District"

On Tuesday I began learning how to speak Vietnamese. Ever since I learned that I was going to Vietnam I have been recieving condolences from those with linguistic knowledge. They all claimed that Vietnamese is a notoriously hard language to learn. While it may have a Romanised alphabet (as opposed to Chinese characters) which aids in learning how to read, Vietnamese has six distinct tonal possibilties for all of the twelve vowel sounds. What this means is that a single word can have six meanings with the exact same spelling (not counting the tonal markings above vowels). Complicating this further is that the tones are both difficult to pronounce, and hear. During my lesson on Wednesday I was asked to write down what tone was being used as the teacher rattled off the same word, but in different tones. It was incredibly difficult to differentiate between several of them.

It's come to my attention that people are graphically oriented and like lots of pictures. While I am not one of those people, I have manages to cobble together a few of the meagre pictures that I have taken thus far. What follows are just a few of the things that I have seen recently.

My fellow SALTer and co-worker at The Gioi, Nathan Morrow

The view from my balcony

A gaggle of school children on a trip to visit Uncle Ho's former house

A One Pillar Pagoda

More Rain

There's a steady rain outside my window right now, flooding the streets and making it miserable to travel anywhere. Today was supposed to be the day that we go explore the old quarter of the city and check out the colonial architecture that abounds there. However, I am stuck inside the MCC office with nothing to do except write here and listen to the patter of water droplets outside the window... and the steady sounds of horns off in the distance.

On Tuesday I was issued my MCC bicycle (The official mode of transport for SALTers in Vietnam, at least until we learn how to ride a motorcycle) and have since rode it around, mostly to the office and back. Riding here is truly an experience unlike any other. It is firmly engrained in my mind that a bicycle is a sort of second class citizen on the road and is relegated to the right lane. Mentally, riding a bike involves watching out for cars and hoping that they aren't too busy grooving to music or talking on their bluetooth to notice you. Here in Hanoi, bikes are treated a little different. They are not very common (Though ostensibly they were incredibly populous a few years ago) but they are in many ways a true king of the road. With traffic that travels around 40 k/h a bicycle can keep up with much of the slow moving motorcycles and cars. Thus here one rides as if they were a motorcycle, swerving in and out of traffic. It's a little intimidating at first, but once you get a feel for the rhythm of the traffic it's actually quite fun. The best part is that while there are medians on all the major streets, one can simply just hop them and go the other direction rather than waiting until a traffic circle.

With all the rain that's happening there is quite a bit of standing water. Nathan and I went to go check out the school where we will be learning Vietnamese and were faced several times with situations where the water was a eight inches deep on the the street and no way to go around. Eventually one is forced to take off their shoes and just suck it up.

Bananas In Pyjamas

It seems like forever since I was accepted into SALT and assigned to Vietnam, almost as long as the flight over felt, but at long last I am here and sweating profusely. In fact, I arrived three days ago in the evening. Orientation wrapped up on Wednesday, to the joy of most everyone there, and Nathan (The other SALTer with whom I will be working with) and I began our travels the following morning. We drove to Harrisburg, and then flew to Chicago. We had a small wait and then we hopped on a plane to Seoul. I have done long flights before, most notably from Vancouver to Hong Kong, and it honestly didn't feel like that long a trip even though thirteen hours had passed. Seoul was an interesting airport not for the building itself, but what sort of shops were there. The food court had a wide variety of asian cuisine, but also had  KFC. There were smoking lounges (a sight that I had not seen for quite some time) and a restaurant that sold German beer and BBQ squid. Seoul also had free wifi, something that more airports should have.

My Balcony

After Seoul we flew to Ha Noi and breezed through customs. It was far more stressful and time consuming to get into the States than Vietnam. We were picked up by Derek Hostetler, the MCC rep for Vietnam and taken to his home. While it was dark and I was quite tired, I watched the passing cityscape pass by and was amazed by how upscale it was. My mental image of a city in a developing country is the one that I spent the most time in, namely Accra Ghana. Ha Noi is in many respects totally different, from the architecture and layout, to the attitude of the people towards foreigners, to the types of vehicles that grace the streets.

The following day was a day for dealing with jet lag, and thus nothing really happend.

The next day the Hostetler family took Nathan and I to their church. The Vietnamese government keeps a relatively tight leash on the Church and so there are few churches in the country. The reasoning behind this, as I have understood it, is not that Christianity in itself is bad, but rather that colonial powers frequently used different religions and denominations as a way to create infighting in the country. Thus there is a strict divide between the state and ALL religions. Derek mentioned at one point that there are few church buildings and that most churches are held in the homes of the congregation. The church that we went to was held in a conference room in a hotel and is composed of foreigners, mostly NGO workers.

 At last we come to today, the day when things actually start. We left in the morning for the MCC office to begin orientation and after meeting the staff we took off with two of them to visit the Temple of Literature. Founded in the eleventh century, it is Vietnam's first university and was devoted to the study of Confucius.

Scholarly Turtles

One of the Courtyards at the Temple

Prior to coming I had heard that the traffic in Hanoi was insane, what with motorcycles going all different directions simultainiously, and while I can't deny that, there is a sort of organized chaos here. While defensive driving is a completely foreign concept here, one instead utilizes their horn to the fullest, constantly reminding people that they are there and to watch out for them. In addition, the speeds that vehicles travel at here in the city are really slow, usually below 40 kph. I am looking forward to hitting the streets at some point.




If you are curious as to what the title was talking about, there is an overabundance of BIP dolls here, which makes no sense to me.