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.