Springtime in Hanoi

It's February now and Hanoi is already back to shirtsleeve temperatures. Winter has finished, apparently, before it ever really got started. I did end up buying a winter coat here—Goretex with a fleece lining—and actually put it on a few times, but mostly I've been wearing the coat's removable liner as a light jacket. In three months I've had the heater on in my apartment a total of five times…so much for the brutal Hanoi winter I was warned about.

Did I mention that the Lunar New Year marks the first day of spring in Vietnam? Well, it does, so it will be interesting to see if my students exhibit any sign of spring fever when our class resumes tomorrow. Their teacher definitely has a fever…and a cough…and sniffles. It doesn't seem fair so soon after I weathered that hideous bout of flu at Christmas, but one of my colleagues broke his leg last week and another was critically injured in a xe om accident in Nha Trang, so I'll count my blessings.

I had planned during my time off from school to enroll in a one-day Vietnamese cooking class sponsored by a nearby restaurant. For about the price of a Round Table Pizza, you get to accompany the teacher (the restaurant's chef) to a street market to select and buy ingredients for a three-course meal, then you return to the restaurant where the teacher talks you through preparation and cooking, and then you sit down with teacher and fellow students to share—and, we hope, enjoy—the food you've made.

I went in early one morning and learned that the only students signed up that day had called to say they couldn't make it. I said I'd rather come back another time than be the only student, but the chef persuaded me to at least go with him to the market to get a few things for the restaurant. I watched him shop and took a few photos of eels, snake-head fish, chicken-head gristle birds, and piles of weird (but not nameless, according to Chef Viet) stuff being sold as food—food for humans, I mean. Really.

The next day I was sitting in Nga's very lucky travel agency telling her about all this, when in walked Mr. Dai, the owner of the travel company under whose logo Nga operates. Dai is a young entrepreneur who in eight years has progressed from being a hotel doorman to being the owner of two hotels, a restaurant, several tour operations, and a handful of travel agencies. We chatted for a bit and he invited me to come with him to meet his family and take in a festival in his home village of Dau Vien, about 45 minutes north of Hanoi. Apparently many Vietnamese villages commemorate the arrival of spring with a festival that attracts tourists as well as former residents who come back every year for a reunion with family and friends. Dai only needed to ask once.

The next morning I climbed into a tour bus with Dai's wife and kids and half a dozen members of his staff and we headed over the river and through some suburbs to where the scenery started to take on a more rural aspect. Turning off the main road, we were very quickly surrounded by rice farms. The land here was like a waffle, with rice growing in the low hollows separated by a grid of raised unpaved berms, which our bus negotiated cautiously, sometimes jousting with kids on bicycles or farmers driving odd-looking tractors.

Dau Vien I've been told is a very poor village: tiny farms, poor soil, no industry. I saw an ancient school there. I saw a simple little pagoda. I saw an outdoor stage set up for a show…a motorized carousel…a football terrain…some street vendors selling drinks, snacks, and cheap toys for the kids. But I saw no shops, no gas station, not even a fire station. Come to think of it, I've never seen a fire station in Hanoi, either, which seems odd considering there are frequent power outages and every time the power goes off, you can see open flame lamps and candles appear in every shop doorway and apartment window. I wished I'd brought my camera. Oh wait, I did bring my camera! I'll post some of the photos just as soon as I post this short account.

I started by taking picture of some the cute kids in the crowd. The boys responded to this attention like hungry sharks to chum. I certainly felt like their chum, the way they followed me around, mugging for my camera, interposing themselves between me and anything I aimed the camera at, and working themselves into a gleeful frenzy. The village was picturesque, full of ponds and pigs and ducks amid a labyrinth of narrow walled lanes barely wide enough to accommodate an automobile. The rainbow of costumed women dancing in and out of the pagoda to the beat of drums and gongs played by four monks was a great photo op. But it was really the kids that impressed me most. They may have had TVs at home, but almost certainly no books, video games, or Internet access. The festival air must have made them feel as if a circus had come to town—and I was their elephant.

Dai's family home was a simple affair—essentially, one big room and one small one, with a veranda, a bathroom very reminiscent of a gas station rest room in Elko, Nevada, and a big yard full of trees and chickens. The kitchen sink was a large plastic tub under a 2-foot-high outdoor spigot and the kitchen stove was a stack of bricks piled against the exterior wall of the bathroom. On this stove, Dai's mother cooked dinner for about 20 people, including yours truly.

I won't go into detail about dinner, but I'll tell you this much: I had a fantastic time, and I'll give you my best tip for enjoying yourself the next time you attend a Vietnamese celebration dinner for which the cooks have prepared their most special dishes. Keep your own bowl filled with those items you like best(or that like you best) so that nobody else has room to stick in an item like a pig uturus they feel sure you'd enjoy.

The dinner was eaten on the floor in the main room, of course. In two corners of this room were two big beds. After dinner, the women and children gathered on one bed to gossip and nap. The men divided into two strata. One strata gathered on the other bed to play a card game with strange-looking narrow cards. The srata with pockets full of money remained on the floor and began a fast-paced gambling game so simple I saw at once there could be no skill involved beyond dealing off the bottom of the deck. This is one reason I sat out. Another is that 100,000 dong notes ($6 bills) started flying back and forth at a dizzying rate. Too rich even for this American's blood. The third reason is that I wanted to wander around the village and take a few more pictures.

Within 30 minutes I had received—and accepted—no less than two invitations to have tea and snacks with strangers in their modest but very charming rural homes. One family had no English beyond "Hello. How are you?" The other family contained a young engineering student who could converse in English enough to gossip with me about the first family. This conversation took place, naturally, on the floor, with the young man's parents hanging on every word but showing no sign of understanding any of it. I excused myself when the student's younger brother climbed into bed just behind me and his grandmother climbed into a second bed about three feet closer to the front door. I suppose even at festival time country folk still get up with their chickens.