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?