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.