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