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You're drifting down a lazy river, trailing one hand in the smooth, glassy water, vaguely aware of a roaring sound off in the distance somewhere. You round a bend and suddenly you're crashing through a maelstrom of rocks, standing waves higher than your head, and rushing, gushing, foaming white water. No, I haven't been rafting this month in the hinterlands of Vietnam. I'm describing how my life has changed since I returned from Dau Vien village at the beginning of February.
My evening classes at Language Link have resumed, of course. And I now have two private students, Toni and Duong, who come to my apartment three times a week in the afternoon. Of course, afternoon is when I edit the news at VOV radio, so there's been some shuffling and scrambling to accommodate everybody.
The editing at VOV has spun off another job for me at a place called Thang Long Audio and Video. One of the translators at VOV creates Manglish subtitles for Vietnamese feature films and documentaries being readied at Thang Long for international distribution. My job is to edit the Manglish subtitles into something approaching English and then—get this—record the subtitles as English 'voiceovers'. I started by doing a documentary on the annual buffalo-stabbing festival of ethnic minority people in the central highlands and followed that with a short documentary about a sacred mountain near Ha Long Bay called Yen Tu, where an ancient Vietnamese king gave up his throne to become a Buddhist monk. 'Narrator voiceovers' sound fairly normal since the documentaries have no dialogue. Last week, though, I did a feature film called 'Kiss of the Death Devil' where my voiceovers were of the more annoying kind—the kind where, instead of actors' voices actually being 'dubbed' by other actors, one person reads the translation of every bit of dialogue in more or less a monotone over each actor's voice. So, for example, you hear yours truly say 'Please, dear husband, save our child' over the voice of a woman crying desperately in Vietnamese, and then, in more or less the same tone of voice you hear me say 'You fool…Why should a Death Devil sacrifice himself for the life of a human?'
This week I edited subtitles and did voiceovers for 'The Punch', a serious drama about a Vietnamese boxer whose life is disrupted by political strife and war. It might sound like fun work, but every profession has its downside. First, there's the serious labor involved in racking your brain to find a more natural way to say 'No one loves cange and stocks but also can't let him influence into the general uprising' or 'Why was it fired branchy?' And then, synching your reading with the on-screen action can be difficult for a number of very good reasons. For one thing, you have to watch the film on a monitor while reading the subtitles from a printed script on the table in front of you, because the subtitles haven't been mixed with the video yet. When one actor speaks off-screen, or speaks with his back to the camera, or when several actors speak at the same time, or when an actor inserts several long pauses into his speech, synching can go awry. A few times I finished reading a subtitle about 20 seconds before the guy on the screen finished talking. The guys at Thang Long don't seem to care much. Almost never were they willing to do a second take. And although they chided me once for rustling my pages, they seemed oblivious to workmen downstairs knocking down a brick wall with sledge hammers and making so much noise I could barely hear the sound track in my head phones.
I'm still studying Vietnamese 2 nights a week with Thu, meeting my CELTA colleagues once a week for lunch, chatting with some combination of Miss Nga, Thai Thu, Hong Ha, or Bich Van every day, corresponding by email with (and correcting the emails of) a growing number of students, taking lots of photographs, editing some articles for Mr. Dai's promotional magazine, trying to keep up with world news on CNN, and reading Don Quixote. It's surprising how much you can accomplish when you have no significant other to erode your productivity with things like nagging you to repair that leaky faucet, arguing about where wet towels should be hung, discussing which restaurant you should go to for dinner, or hugging and kissing you.
By the way, I found out why there are no geckos on the wall of my apartment. There are no geckos because my spider ate them. From time to time, I've caught a movement out of the corner of my eye which I thought might be a shy gecko darting behind the sofa. There is certainly plenty of opportunity for geckos to come and go when my terrace doors are standing open. But to date there have been no confirmed gecko sightings. Then, a few nights ago, I saw crawling up the wall in the sitting room a form too large to be a cockroach (they seldom exceed three inches in length here) and too small to be a rat (they're seldom smaller than a shoe). It turned out to be a spider reminiscent of a tarantula without his fur. It was about the size of my hand. If your hand is bigger than mine, the spider might have been the size of your hand. I thought right away about killing it so I might sleep better at night, but I had no shotgun or flame-thrower and I didn't want to take a chance on simply wounding it, so I called for backup and for the next hour stayed well clear of it (I remembered the jumping spiders at the World Hotel). They say you should never turn your back on a dangerous predator, but I did at one point, and when I turned back it had disappeared. Now I sleep with a heavy book on my night stand (Don Quixote).
Monday, February 23, 2009
Monday, February 9, 2009
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.
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.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Deeply in Tet
I don't think I left my apartment on Lunar New Year's Day. I had been led by a number of knowledgeable(-sounding) people to expect a ghost town out there. Besides, the weather was cold and I had all that stockpiled food. Thanh had brought me a beautiful peach blossom branch, Nga had given me a nice little kumquat tree, and Thu had come a long way across town to give me a heavy bag containing Vietnamese fruits, a bottle of Da Lat wine, and some traditional Tet food she had cooked herself. Plus, 'Babe' was on the movie channel. Remember, too, I had been drinking wine and vodka until 3:00am the night before.
The second day of Tet arrived and I recalled an invitation to eat lunch at Imran's house. Imran is my CELTA colleague from Bangladesh, the only CELTA colleague who didn't leave Hanoi for Tet. He lives with his wife Amy and baby daughter Hannah in a beautiful big house near the Red River (Song Hong), the river in whose flood plain Hanoi is built. After a delicious lunch and the most extended conversation in English I've enjoyed in several months, we took ourselves for a walk along the river, which is at low water this time of year. It was a mild day, almost sunny, and when we walked down into the dry portion of the river bed, to my surprise the city seemed to disappear. The area between Imran's neighborhood and the river is still being farmed, with small plots given over to vegetables for the market—or kumquat trees. It has a pleasantly rural feeling and I envied Imran's easy access to running trails flanked by miniature fields and tiny orchards instead of exhaust-spewing buses and herds of tourists.
Speaking of herds, there were three or four water buffalo that had been tethered at intervals along the river bank by some farmer taking a few hours off to enjoy his Tet. One buffalo was bawling in a distressed fashion. When we got closer we saw that his rope, strung through his nostrils in the usual fashion, had gotten wrapped around a low bush and he was kneeling with his nose a foot from the bush, unable to stand up or get himself free. After a short struggle, during which he looked as nervous as I felt, I was able to untangle his rope so he could move again. The first thing he did was resume eating grass and walking slowly around and around the troublesome bush. I saw it was only a short-lived freedom I had given him, but it still must count as a good deed worth some good karma points, I figure, this new year being the Year of the Water Buffalo and all.
On the third day of Tet I was once again an honored dinner guest at the house of the father of my teacher Thu. Most Vietnamese follow the custom (now gaining popularity among Americans) of removing their shoes/sandals at the front door and slipping on house slippers/sandals so that street schmutz doesn't get tracked onto the dining room table/floormat. I'm experienced enough now to have brought my own house sandals to Thu's, but not experienced enough to remove them before sitting down to dinner. Make a note: if you sit cross-legged on a floor for any length of time, you don't want to have on your feet anything harder than a pair of socks.
At this point I have a sad confession to make. Much as I'd like to say I'm in Anthony Bourdain's league when it comes to dauntless appreciation of new foods, the truth is that even after decades of steady eating, my palate, stomach and gag reflex are still pretty much those of your average sheltered, white, American, middle-class kid raised on PB&J sandwiches, potato chips, and Kool-Aid. Although I did my best for about 30 minutes to chew, swallow, and even savor every delicacy placed in my bowl by my generous hosts, in the end the ugly American in me won out. After eating several crunchy black pork colons and two items that looked (and tasted) like strips of gristle tied in a granny knot around an Irishman's knuckle, I finally admitted out loud to my gracious hosts that I didn't really care for those dishes, just so I wouldn't have to eat any more of them.
I pedaled my bicycle back home through a light rain and light traffic. Tet has brought a brief respite from the motorized chaos of the past few weeks. The predictions I'd heard of a total shutdown in city commerce, though, were exaggerated. I've discovered that many of my favorite restaurants stayed open every day of Tet, as did many other businesses that cater to visiting tourists. Even on my street—Toy Street—which has few eateries or souvenirs shops, about 20-30% of the shops continued to open every day. I hope this isn't an indication that Vietnamese family traditions, which have survived centuries of war and decades of communism, are now starting to erode under the pressures of market capitalism.
The second day of Tet arrived and I recalled an invitation to eat lunch at Imran's house. Imran is my CELTA colleague from Bangladesh, the only CELTA colleague who didn't leave Hanoi for Tet. He lives with his wife Amy and baby daughter Hannah in a beautiful big house near the Red River (Song Hong), the river in whose flood plain Hanoi is built. After a delicious lunch and the most extended conversation in English I've enjoyed in several months, we took ourselves for a walk along the river, which is at low water this time of year. It was a mild day, almost sunny, and when we walked down into the dry portion of the river bed, to my surprise the city seemed to disappear. The area between Imran's neighborhood and the river is still being farmed, with small plots given over to vegetables for the market—or kumquat trees. It has a pleasantly rural feeling and I envied Imran's easy access to running trails flanked by miniature fields and tiny orchards instead of exhaust-spewing buses and herds of tourists.
Speaking of herds, there were three or four water buffalo that had been tethered at intervals along the river bank by some farmer taking a few hours off to enjoy his Tet. One buffalo was bawling in a distressed fashion. When we got closer we saw that his rope, strung through his nostrils in the usual fashion, had gotten wrapped around a low bush and he was kneeling with his nose a foot from the bush, unable to stand up or get himself free. After a short struggle, during which he looked as nervous as I felt, I was able to untangle his rope so he could move again. The first thing he did was resume eating grass and walking slowly around and around the troublesome bush. I saw it was only a short-lived freedom I had given him, but it still must count as a good deed worth some good karma points, I figure, this new year being the Year of the Water Buffalo and all.
On the third day of Tet I was once again an honored dinner guest at the house of the father of my teacher Thu. Most Vietnamese follow the custom (now gaining popularity among Americans) of removing their shoes/sandals at the front door and slipping on house slippers/sandals so that street schmutz doesn't get tracked onto the dining room table/floormat. I'm experienced enough now to have brought my own house sandals to Thu's, but not experienced enough to remove them before sitting down to dinner. Make a note: if you sit cross-legged on a floor for any length of time, you don't want to have on your feet anything harder than a pair of socks.
At this point I have a sad confession to make. Much as I'd like to say I'm in Anthony Bourdain's league when it comes to dauntless appreciation of new foods, the truth is that even after decades of steady eating, my palate, stomach and gag reflex are still pretty much those of your average sheltered, white, American, middle-class kid raised on PB&J sandwiches, potato chips, and Kool-Aid. Although I did my best for about 30 minutes to chew, swallow, and even savor every delicacy placed in my bowl by my generous hosts, in the end the ugly American in me won out. After eating several crunchy black pork colons and two items that looked (and tasted) like strips of gristle tied in a granny knot around an Irishman's knuckle, I finally admitted out loud to my gracious hosts that I didn't really care for those dishes, just so I wouldn't have to eat any more of them.
I pedaled my bicycle back home through a light rain and light traffic. Tet has brought a brief respite from the motorized chaos of the past few weeks. The predictions I'd heard of a total shutdown in city commerce, though, were exaggerated. I've discovered that many of my favorite restaurants stayed open every day of Tet, as did many other businesses that cater to visiting tourists. Even on my street—Toy Street—which has few eateries or souvenirs shops, about 20-30% of the shops continued to open every day. I hope this isn't an indication that Vietnamese family traditions, which have survived centuries of war and decades of communism, are now starting to erode under the pressures of market capitalism.
Tet 'N Us
For weeks, all of Hanoi has been in the sway of the biggest holiday of the year—Tet—which, like Christmas, is a time to decorate the home with traditional symbols (fruit-laden kumquat trees and budding peach tree branches), gather family together (some Vietnamese travel thousands of miles to rejoin relatives), exchange exuberant greetings (chuc mung nam moi!), enjoy excessive meals of seasonal dishes and delicacies (more about this later), observe devotional rituals (burn incense and offer prayers to various gods and departed ancestors), give gifts (small sums of money or something to eat, rather than consumer electronics or sports equipment), and put work on hold while you party with friends.
My colleagues were nearly unanimous in insisting I ought to leave Hanoi for Tet on the grounds that everything—schools, restaurants, shops, everything— would be shut down during this very family-oriented time, and I would die of boredom if not starvation before the city got back to normal. Following their own advice, they took off for places like Thailand and Malaysia, leaving me on my own to stock my pantry and brace for the ordeal.
The press of people jamming the streets in the runup to Tet seemed to melt away on the final day or so, a result no doubt of millions of office workers shifting into party mode and staying home from the office. My students, who are mostly office workers themselves, made a collective decision to cancel our final class before Tet in order to get a headstart on the holiday, but gave me fair warning so I could stay home, too. Then, halfway through our next to last class, they made a collective decision to cut out early, but insisted on dragging me across the street to a big restaurant in order to get a headstart on the holiday beer drinking. I don't remember everything that happened in that restaurant, but it seems to me that by the end of the evening they had all finally learned to speak English. Either that or I had learned to speak Vietnamese.
Lunar New Year's Eve found me dining alone at my favorite Italian restaurant. Or rather, dining after a fashion with two Aussie blokes at the next table who had just received a wrong pizza when I came in. They were sending it back as I sat down, but, seizing the moment, I offered to take the pizza myself, thereby solving a small problem for the restaurant, lightening the moment for the gentlemen, and eliminating a 15-minute wait for my dinner. The Aussies were sufficiently pleased by my gesture to keep up a friendly conversation with me for the next 45 minutes as we ate, and the beautiful young woman who manages the place rewarded me with a complimentary glass of wine and a complimentary tiramisu. The Aussies have since left town, but that evening may still have been the start of a beautiful friendship. I've returned to eat pizza several times since and Thai Thu, if she's reading this, will know that my visits are motivated by her company, her cooking, and least of all by the complimentary glasses of wine she continues to offer me.
Shortly before midnight I went home, grabbed my camera, and struggled through the crowd streaming down to Hoan Kiem Lake for the big fireworks display. The photos I took that night have been displayed on this blog page for over a week now. When the fireworks ended I headed home, stopping in at Nga's travel agency which was open at midnight so she could carry out a good luck ritual. Many businesses do this at the Lunar New Year. They fill a tray with offerings to the gods—vodka, beer, cigarettes, snacks, a whole cooked chicken with a rose in its beak. Then they pray and burn some fake money in a can. After midnight, they invite a lucky person to be the first person to cross their threshold in the new year, thus insuring good luck for the business throughout the year. Then they eat the luck-imbued chicken and snacks, smoke the lucky cigarettes (they should buy Lucky Strikes), and drink the lucky booze. I was only the second person of the year through Nga's doorway, but I was on hand to drink a third of a bottle of lucky vodka before staggering home around 3:00am to enjoy my first lucky drunken slumber of the lunar year.
I woke up late on Lunar New Year's Day with no ill effects from the vodka, having had the presence of mind to take several Ibuprofen the night before (experience can sometimes be as valuable as luck) and spent a relaxing day watching movies and sampling my large stockpile of Tet food.
My colleagues were nearly unanimous in insisting I ought to leave Hanoi for Tet on the grounds that everything—schools, restaurants, shops, everything— would be shut down during this very family-oriented time, and I would die of boredom if not starvation before the city got back to normal. Following their own advice, they took off for places like Thailand and Malaysia, leaving me on my own to stock my pantry and brace for the ordeal.
The press of people jamming the streets in the runup to Tet seemed to melt away on the final day or so, a result no doubt of millions of office workers shifting into party mode and staying home from the office. My students, who are mostly office workers themselves, made a collective decision to cancel our final class before Tet in order to get a headstart on the holiday, but gave me fair warning so I could stay home, too. Then, halfway through our next to last class, they made a collective decision to cut out early, but insisted on dragging me across the street to a big restaurant in order to get a headstart on the holiday beer drinking. I don't remember everything that happened in that restaurant, but it seems to me that by the end of the evening they had all finally learned to speak English. Either that or I had learned to speak Vietnamese.
Lunar New Year's Eve found me dining alone at my favorite Italian restaurant. Or rather, dining after a fashion with two Aussie blokes at the next table who had just received a wrong pizza when I came in. They were sending it back as I sat down, but, seizing the moment, I offered to take the pizza myself, thereby solving a small problem for the restaurant, lightening the moment for the gentlemen, and eliminating a 15-minute wait for my dinner. The Aussies were sufficiently pleased by my gesture to keep up a friendly conversation with me for the next 45 minutes as we ate, and the beautiful young woman who manages the place rewarded me with a complimentary glass of wine and a complimentary tiramisu. The Aussies have since left town, but that evening may still have been the start of a beautiful friendship. I've returned to eat pizza several times since and Thai Thu, if she's reading this, will know that my visits are motivated by her company, her cooking, and least of all by the complimentary glasses of wine she continues to offer me.
Shortly before midnight I went home, grabbed my camera, and struggled through the crowd streaming down to Hoan Kiem Lake for the big fireworks display. The photos I took that night have been displayed on this blog page for over a week now. When the fireworks ended I headed home, stopping in at Nga's travel agency which was open at midnight so she could carry out a good luck ritual. Many businesses do this at the Lunar New Year. They fill a tray with offerings to the gods—vodka, beer, cigarettes, snacks, a whole cooked chicken with a rose in its beak. Then they pray and burn some fake money in a can. After midnight, they invite a lucky person to be the first person to cross their threshold in the new year, thus insuring good luck for the business throughout the year. Then they eat the luck-imbued chicken and snacks, smoke the lucky cigarettes (they should buy Lucky Strikes), and drink the lucky booze. I was only the second person of the year through Nga's doorway, but I was on hand to drink a third of a bottle of lucky vodka before staggering home around 3:00am to enjoy my first lucky drunken slumber of the lunar year.
I woke up late on Lunar New Year's Day with no ill effects from the vodka, having had the presence of mind to take several Ibuprofen the night before (experience can sometimes be as valuable as luck) and spent a relaxing day watching movies and sampling my large stockpile of Tet food.
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